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Xing Mobility Is Leveraging Its Modular Batteries For Electric Vehicle Retrofits

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Published on October 1st, 2018 |

by Kyle Field

Xing Mobility Is Leveraging Its Modular Batteries For Electric Vehicle Retrofits

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October 1st, 2018 by Kyle Field

As the curtain is pulled back, the inner workings are exposed. What once was a lobby, suitable for the average passer by to see is no longer, as the gears and wires, batteries and motors that bring the machines inside to life are exposed. In an instant, it became clear that Xing Mobility (think “ZING”) is anything but a battery company. Xing invited CleanTechnica to its headquarters in Taipei, Taiwan, to chat with its top brass and to take a peak behind the curtain.

Fueled by innovation
Xing is a company that brings things to life. A company that energizes, powers, and tames the wild beast. In this case, in the back corner of the workshop that would be more at home in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein than in an automotive factory, lies the stripped bones of the beast that lives in a perpetual state of evolution.

She’s called ‘Miss R’ and is the third in a line of a revolutionary racing vehicles that started off, of all things, with an internal combustion engine. That’s not a topic we frequent around these parts but as it turns out, the original dino-powered race vehicle was quickly followed by her much faster electrified progeny.

Xing Mobility was founded as a racing company. Not long thereafter, Azizi Tucker came on board fresh off of a stint at none other than Tesla Motors, and as you might expect, he joined Xing with a bias towards electrified powertrains. His passion for electrified powertrains led to the second generation of its race car being fueled with electrons and propelled by a set of electric motors.

Change is the only constant
At Xing, change is the only constant. As it built up its second generation vehicle, the company designed a battery pack that was flexible, as it had to be to keep up with the ever-evolving designs at Xing. Change was the price of entry, as it’s in their blood. The same can be said of the powertrain, as Xing upgraded its design from an internal combustion-powered car to one powered by a much smaller and much more efficient electric motor.

The conversion filled the veins of the team at Xing Mobility with a passion for improvement which paired well with the skillful young engineers they staffed up with as Xing grew. In the mad scientist’s lab that is the Xing Mobility headquarters, it is clear that this passion continues to fuel them today. In one corner of the lab, a Xing engineer preps a battery pack for its own destruction as Xing continues to validate the safety of its industry-leading immersion cooling battery tech.

The core of Xing’s business model is indeed its battery modules, but Xing is not a battery company. It is a full service emobility company that has been hard at work defining the building blocks of electric vehicles. Imagine you’re a tractor company and you want to build electric tractors, but the company you normally buy motors and transmissions from doesn’t have any options for you, so you call up the team at Xing.

Xing Mobility is the realization of a dream that CEO Royce YC Hong and CTO Azizi Tucker shared. They met at a TEDx Taipei conference and their mutual angst to do, to create, to start seemed to have a carry-on effect that grew and grew until before they knew it, they were partnering to bring their dreams to life through Xing Mobility.

Sitting big and bold at the center of the Xing Mobility logo is an oversized X. They believe that the X is the crossroads. That’s where things meet up, where things are encountered. Where people meet and where symbiotic ideas are joined together. Xing is an intersection, a crossing. It’s the place where they are bringing together an impressive team of engineers that share a passion for building the next generation of electric vehicles.

Xing Mobility electric delivery van retrofit prototype. Image credit: Kyle Field

More than that, the company is creating, testing and making production ready all of the disparate parts of an electric powertrain. Xing knows electric powertrains. That’s what it does. The team specializes in solving problems, especially when those problems are related to powertrains, electric motors, battery control units, vehicle control units, and all the little bits and bytes that bring the total system to life.

Modular Batteries = Endless Configurations
At the core of its system is its battery modules which, as the name implies, are truly modular. It’s not just that they can bolt together, but that they were designed to be bolted together. It’s much like Lego in the sense that they were designed to literally stack on top of each other or to be bolted onto each other to form a battery pack.

The multi-layered, variable configuration battery packs that Xing builds utilize a revolutionary immersion cooling technology that takes a unique non-conductive fire resistant liquid developed by the chemistry geeks over at 3M to replace the aging Halon fire systems. The new solution, called Novec, is also great at dissipating heat and acts as a fire retardant.

Flexible Components
On top of the modular battery pack, Xing has built a set of electric vehicle components including its own homegrown torque vectoring gearbox that dynamically optimizes the power output to all wheels in the vehicle, which maximizes the amount of power expended that is actually translated into forward motion.

Xing has also built up competency in electric motors, battery management systems, cabling, and all of the other components that are required to retrofit or build up the powertrain of an electric vehicle from the ground up.

To validate its approach, Xing is, in addition to working with numerous partners on in-flight projects, retrofitting a delivery van of its own. The process is being performed to get more intimate, hands-on experience with retrofits to allow them to more rapidly deploy retrofit kits for specific platforms. Delivery vehicles, with their low mileage per day, low average speeds in urban environments, and high impact on urban air quality make for great targets to retrofit to electric.

Retrofitting internal combustion vehicles with electric vehicle battery and powertrain kits is a much more resource efficient method of converting fleets and privately owned vehicles to electric. Xing is working to capitalize on this simple fact with an early push into the retrofit space, leveraging its mastery of modular batteries and durable, high performing electric vehicle propulsion systems.

A Veritable Electric Vehicle Laboratory
In the single day I spent at Xing Mobility’s office and workshop in Taipei, Taiwan, the company was working on electrifying a concrete moving vehicle for the construction industry, an autonomous personal electric vehicle, new PCBs for its battery management system, an upgrade to its infamous electric supercar Miss R, and a variety of other projects.

From this long list of projects in progress, you might expect that it employs a team of dozens or hundreds of engineers, but the reality is that they are only a handful of highly motivated, highly trained engineers, pushing the envelope for what electric vehicles might be. What they can be. Xing Mobility has established itself as a force to be reckoned with in the electric vehicle retrofit space and is leveraging Taiwan’s impressively diverse and localized supply chain to get there.

The Future
What immediately became clear when talking with Royce and Azizi about Xing Mobility is that Xing is not just a showy battery company, nor is it an electric supercar company. They aspire to do much more with the technologies they have built today as they continue to build competency in electric vehicle retrofits, one project at a time.

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About the Author

Kyle Field I'm a tech geek passionately in search of actionable ways to reduce the negative impact my life has on the planet, save money and reduce stress. Live intentionally, make conscious decisions, love more, act responsibly, play. The more you know, the less you need. TSLA investor. Tesla referral code: http://ts.la/kyle623

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Economies Of Scale — From The Tesla Gigafactory To A Chain Of Terrafactories

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Published on September 30th, 2018 |

by Chanan Bos

Economies Of Scale — From The Tesla Gigafactory To A Chain Of Terrafactories

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September 30th, 2018 by Chanan Bos

Economies of scale: a proportionate saving in costs gained by an increased volume of production.

The reason Tesla names its Nevada battery production factory the Gigafactory was to help people understand that only when operating at a larger economy of scale does EV battery production truly become profitable.

Tesla’s mission is “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Now, I don’t want to predict whether Tesla will have to do all of the heavy lifting to completely transition the earth to sustainable energy or if it only needs to get the ball rolling and make the blueprints. My goal is simply to help people understand where we are now and what it is going to take to move the world to sustainable clean energy through battery power. The real world is much more complex, but this simplified math should give a good general image of the situation.

Battery Uses
First off, let me start by explaining that there are 4 main uses for batteries.

Up until recently, the most common uses for batteries were all kinds of consumer electronics. A single AA battery has an energy capacity of approximately 3.75 watt-hours. But for the sake of round numbers, let’s say that a single AA battery has 4 Wh or 0.004 kWh of capacity.

The second most common use for batteries is electric vehicles. EV batteries come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from 16 kWh all the way to 100 kWh. As a couple of examples, a Volkswagen e-up! has about 18.7 kWh of battery capacity and a Tesla P100D has 100 kWh.

The size of a home battery storage unit ranges from 2 kWh to 17.1 kWh per unit. According to Tesla, most households need or will need about 27 kWh, which is why its 13.5 kWh Powerwalls are sold starting with 2 units.

The last and newest battery usage that recently became popular is industrial/utility-scale battery storage. The Tesla Powerpack has a capacity of 210 kWh per Powerpack. The current largest battery installation in the world is in South Australia. It has 129,000 kWh, which is about 614 Powerpacks.

Some Fun with Statistics
According to one statistic, in 2017, there were almost 71 million passenger cars sold worldwide. Now, let’s assume all of the following to be true:

All 71 million cars are electric.
Every car has a 70 kWh battery pack (this is average for cars with what is now considered an adequate range).

The Tesla Gigafactory 1 is the largest battery factory in the world. As of the end of July 2018, the Gigafactory had a production rate equivalent to ~20 GWh/yr. By the end of 2018, Tesla planned to be at a production run rate of 35 GWh per year. Once the construction of the Gigafactory is complete, it is supposed to have a total capacity of 105 GWh of battery cells and 150 GWh of total battery pack output per year (which includes EV batteries, Powerwalls, and Powerpacks).

Now, obviously, this has been oversimplified. Passenger cars are not the only vehicles on the roads. Nonetheless, if you wanted to meet the world’s 2018 demand for cars purely with EVs, with every Gigafactory not producing any Powerwalls or any other products, you would need 34 factories that are almost 8 times larger than the largest battery factory in existence today. In other words, if you build the factories the size that the current Gigafactory is today, you would need 249 of them.

A lot of people currently believe that the worldwide battery shortage will be met within the next 2 years. That is beyond ludicrous. To meet the worldwide battery demand for EVs alone, we need a chain of Terrafactories, not Gigafactories.

Powerwalls & EVs in the United States
Unfortunately, there is very little information on housing and electricity usage per household per country across the world. Thus, it’s extremely difficult to calculate how many Gigafactories we would need to supply the entire world with Powerwalls. (There are also numerous other factors that must be considered to determine how many home storage batteries are needed.) So, instead, let’s try to calculate how many Gigafactories we would need to provide the entire United States with Powerwalls so that, in combination with solar or wind, all households could become self-sufficient. (There are reasons why this is not the logical solution — not every home needs to be equipped with an energy storage unit, and handling storage on the utility scale is largely more efficient. But it seems useful to include in this thought + math experiment.)

There are 126 million households in the US. On average, most households need at least 2 Powerwalls. One Powerwall has a usable capacity of 13.5 kWh. However, in reality, the battery probably has at least 15 kWh. This is to make sure that you can’t charge it to the maximum and always have a minimum reserve. This way the battery will have a longer lifespan. So, in total, we need two 15 kWh Powerwalls (30 kWh per household). That is a total of 3,780 GWh for the entire United States. Let’s assume that a Powerwall needs to be replaced every 10 to 30 years depending on how you use it. Let’s calculate how many Gigafactories we need in order to manufacture 3,780 GWh of energy storage every 10, 20, or 30 years.

We know that Gigafactory 1 will devote 45 GWh to Powerwalls and Powerpacks and 105 GWh to battery packs for cars, so let’s make 2 separate calculations for the potential 10, 20, or 30 year product lifespan.

Now, let’s redo the previous calculation about cars but only for the United States. In 2017, there were 71 million cars sold worldwide, and there were 11.3 million sold in the United States. That means we need 791 GWh.

Now, if energy and car demands don’t rise from 2017 levels and if Powerwalls last at least a little over 10 years, then 8 Gigafactories should be enough to cover all passenger car and residential Powerwalls needed in the United States.

In Conclusion
At this point, I feel inclined to point out that I don’t care how quickly the Chinese, the Germans, Tesla, or anyone else can build large factories — they are not in competition as much as they are in cooperation on the macro scale. There is a shortage of lithium-ion batteries and there is absolutely no way that we can build enough batteries for our needs quickly, not in the next 2 years, not in the next 20 years.

We are going to need much larger and more favorable economies of scale and a cost per kWh that is a lot lower than the $100 per kWh world record that Tesla has just achieved. In addition to that, factories need to become even more space efficient. Tesla’s improvement from 35 GWh to 150 GWh is a notable achievement in that direction, but even they can and will do better eventually. I just hope that other brands will learn from them.

We are not going to need Gigafactories, we are going to need Terrafactories or even Petafactories that are built everywhere around the world and not just by Tesla — by everyone. This is the only way that we will be able to meet the constantly increasing global demand for batteries. Companies should be on their knees begging Tesla for its technology and Gigafactory blueprints if they want to stay relevant in the industry.

Stay tuned for part 2, where we will look at past, current, and planned battery factories — what products they produce and for whom.

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About the Author

Chanan Bos Chanan grew up in a multicultural, multi-lingual environment that often gives him a unique perspective on a variety of topics. He is always in thought about big picture topics like AI, quantum physics, philosophy, Universal Basic Income, climate change, sci-fi concepts like the singularity, misinformation, and the list goes on. Currently, he is studying creative media & technology but already has diplomas in environmental sciences as well as business & management. His goal is to discourage linear thinking, bias, and confirmation bias whilst encouraging out-of-the-box thinking and helping people understand exponential progress. Chanan is very worried about his future and the future of humanity. That is why he has a tremendous admiration for Elon Musk and his companies, foremost because of their missions, philosophy, and intent to help humanity and its future. He sees Tesla as one of the few companies that can help us save ourselves from climate change.

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UPDATE: SEC Files Suit Against Elon Musk

The SEC has sued Elon Musk personally, alleging fraud. One result could be that Elon is banned from serving as an officer or director of any publicly traded company — including his own.