eLeapPower's integrated inverter system promises to lower costs for EV adoption

eLeapPower introduced an integrated inverter solution specifically for the Class 4-6 commercial vehicle market that takes separate onboard charger and inverter systems and combines them into a single unit, eliminating the need for separate onboard charging equipment and 400/800 volt converter.  

In addition to eliminating components, the integrated technology is expected to save OEMs $2,000 per unit and reduce weight by almost 50 pounds and offers 17 liters of space savings.

eLeapPower, a Canadian engineering startup company specializing in charging systems intregation, began testing the project with Chinese-owned Chery in 2019 in the company’s line of commercial vans. The project is now in the integration and validation phase, which is expected to be complete in early 2024. It also is in the development phase with a North American motor partner and commercial OEM. eLeapPower expects to go to market with its new solution in late 2025. 

“We're still working on what that final design is going to look like from the outside, but we've been working with a couple different OEMs to make sure this product is specified according to the needs of the industry, what power level they want, what they want in the batteries, what the typical use cases are and how they want to package where they're going to place it on the vehicle,” said Jonathan Dooley, eLeapPower’s technical product manager.

The integrated inverter uses 800V architecture is compatible with 400V auxiliary components and doesn’t require expensive semiconductors. The system enables low-cost charging directly from renewable power sources and DC microgrids and offers fully integrated, bidirectional charging for both AC and DC. It also reduces the total number of cables, connectors and other components to help lower cost, weight and complexity. 

eLeapPower began product development for the commercial vehicle market citing lower barriers to entry, less competition in commercial applications, and fleet emphasis on total cost of ownership. eLeapPower believes the system will be scalable to the passenger car market in the future.

Wireless charging

eLeapPower also announced it is in development on wireless charging technology that integrates with the vehicle’s plug-in charging system to lower wireless charging costs by roughly 30%. Once again, the company is targeting the North American Class 4-6 commercial vehicle market. “Last-mile delivery vehicles are a really good use case,” said Dooley.

One limitation of plug-in electric vehicle charging at a depot for step van applications is trucks are often parked close together while loading, making it difficult to integrate plug-in charging from the side of the vehicle. eLeapPower’s solution uses a charging pad installed in the floor that transfers power between coils when the truck is parked with a 90- to 250-mm air gap.

“This also opens the door for easier retrofit solutions versus the current state that requires significant integration work by expensive specialists,” said Russell Pullan, eLeapPower CEO. “Fleet operators will reduce vehicle downtime because charging at their depots will be more accessible either as a retrofit or OEM installation.” 

eLeapPower Unveils Cost-Saving Solutions for Global Electric Vehicle Industry

eLeapPower, a Canadian-based growth-stage startup, has introduced pioneering technologies aimed at transforming the North American medium-duty electric commercial truck market. The company specializes in electric powertrain and charging solutions that offer significant reductions in cost, complexity, and weight while also unveiling new methods for wireless vehicle charging.

Why It Matters

As the global electric vehicle (EV) market continues to expand, reducing the total cost of ownership is vital for commercial fleet operators and manufacturers. eLeapPower’s solutions not only cater to commercial vehicles but are also scalable for passenger cars, thereby having the potential to create a broad impact across the automotive industry.

Key Points

• Integrated Inverter System: eLeapPower’s patented technology integrates multiple power electronic components into a single system, eliminating the need for separate onboard charging units.

  • The system supports both 400V and 800V architectures and bypasses the need for expensive, supply-limited 1200V SiC semiconductors.

  • The integrated inverter allows for low-cost charging from renewable power sources and provides fully integrated bidirectional charging for both AC and DC.

  • Initial pricing studies indicate savings of over $2,000 per commercial medium-duty EV truck, along with weight and volume reductions of around 20-25kg and 15-20L, respectively.

• Wireless Charging System: Designed to meet the unique requirements of the North American and European last-mile delivery market, the system is expected to reduce wireless charger costs by approximately 30%.

  • eLeapPower’s wireless charging system integrates with existing power electronic units, offering more accessible retrofit or OEM installation options for fleet owners.

Bottom Line

eLeapPower’s innovations represent a substantial leap forward in terms of cost-efficiency and functional integration for the electric vehicle market. The company is already in the development phase with Chery Automobile Co. Ltd. and other North American partners, which underscores the technology’s applicability and promise for broader adoption. These advancements could significantly reduce production costs, vehicle downtime, and integration complexities, thus making electric vehicles a more accessible and attractive option for both commercial and passenger use.

ELeapPower Brings Integrated Inverter to Medium-Duty BEVsSystem Is Designed to Reduce Weight, Maximize Space and Save Production Costs on Electric Vehicles

MUNICH — Canadian startup eLeapPower said it is bringing its integrated power electronics to the medium-duty battery-electric truck market in North America.

The company’s integrated inverter system is designed to reduce weight, maximize space and save production costs on electric vehicles by integrating multiple functions and eliminating the need for a separate onboard charger.

This integrated inverter currently is in development with an unnamed North American manufacturer of Classes 4-6 electric commercial trucks, the company said at a Sept. 6 briefing with industry press during the IAA 2023 mobility show.

The product is expected to yield more than $2,000 in savings per vehicle for medium-duty truck makers, eLeapPower said.

Jonathan Dooley, engineer and product manager at eLeapPower, said this fundamentally integrated unit provides direct cost savings along with other benefits for original equipment manufacturers.

The system requires less cabling, removes one manufacturing process from the production line and means one fewer part under warranty, he said.

“You’re using one set of components to do two functions rather than two sets of components to do two functions,” Dooley said.

The company also has a development contract with Chinese carmaker Chery Automotive to provide an integrated inverter for a light-duty electric van, with integration and validation expected to be complete by the first quarter of 2024.

Apart from its integrated inverter, eLeapPower also is developing an integrated wireless charging system for electric vehicles that can cut typical wireless charger costs by about 30%.

This product reduces costs and complexity by integrating the wireless charging function with the vehicle’s plug-in charging function.

This integrated wireless charging system is well suited to delivery fleet operations, the company said.

While eLeapPower is currently targeting the electric commercial vehicle market, the company said its technologies are also applicable to electric passenger cars.

The Toronto-based company has raised more than $36 million Canadian dollars in funding to date.

The push for e-powertrain progress

Upstarts and heavy-hitter suppliers alike are fast-tracking advances in existing e-propulsion technology — as well as radical new solutions.

Electric powertrain development continues at a fervent pace as OEMs, suppliers and startups try to optimize current technology while forging ahead into new areas. Although battery engineering and development enjoys almost daily industry discussion, traction motor and power electronics remain the investment focus of many established and startup suppliers, as efficiencies gained in these systems can significantly reduce an EV’s required amount of expensive battery capacity.

It’s a rapidly expanding market, seemingly with plenty of room for myriad new players and fresh ideas. Take Vitasco Technologies, the powertrain supplier spun from Continental in 2019, which put a stake in the ground to say all future development would be in support of electrification. As a result, it generated $888 million in revenue in 2021 and Thomas Stierle, head of the Electrification Solutions division, said the company expects revenue to increase to $10 billion to $12 billion by 2030.

The Schaeffler Group’s North American executives said at a corporate technology showcase in fall 2022 that although the company intends to divide its near-term investments at a roughly 50/50 ratio between internal-combustion and electrification development, Schaeffler acknowledges the future is electric and is driving hard on designs to squeeze more efficiency from traction motors and their associated systems. “Electricity is the right choice,” said Patrick Lindemann, president, e-mobility and chassis systems. “There is no doubt.” Getting there means companies are stretching current technology and introducing new motor and power-electronics designs. Drive motors and electronics already are efficient, but there’s massive investment underway for innovations to get even more from the limited onboard power EVs can carry. A selection of recent developments:

Infinitum: Continuing the drive for smaller and lighter motors
Infinitum achieves what it says is a 50% smaller and lighter axial-flux motor by pulling all the iron out of the core and the copper windings from the stator, replacing it all with a printed circuit board (PCB) stator with etched copper conductors. Ben Schuler, founder and CEO of the seven-year-old Austin-based company, said the company’s design eliminates all the core losses — such as from torque ripple, cogging, stator hysteresis and eddy current — from the stator, resulting in “drastically higher efficiency.” It’s smaller, quieter, and more efficient, with higher efficiency over the whole operating curve of the motor,” he said, adding that in a traditional motor, that core loss always is there and it gets worse at higher RPMs. Infinitum, which initially sought to tackle inefficient HVAC motors, is concentrating on industrial markets, which Schuler says can help the company grow because of the relatively quick development cycles (compared to automotive’s typical years- or decades-long cycles) that lead to immediate revenue. He also said it’s a big opportunity to help save energy, as 50% of the world’s power goes to driving electric motors.

The company produced 5,000 motors in 2022 and is projected to deliver 50,000 this year and 150,000 in 2024. Those are for industrial HVAC units, compressors and material-handling applications. Current partners include Rockwell, Caterpillar and Chevron. At CES 2023 in January, Infinitum announced its latest step forward. Its Air-Core motor, paired with the PCB stator, is a liquid-cooling system that channels coolant directly to the motor’s heat source. “We inject the coolant into a hollow shaft and release it over the entire area of the stator. That lets us get four to five times the power density of a traditional radial-flux motor,” Schuler asserted. Most other cooling methods on radial and axial-flux motors only get coolant into a jacket around the motor. Once Infinitum’s system gets coolant to the center of the stator, centrifugal force pushes the liquid to an outer jacket, where it drains into a sump to be recirculated. The result is a motor with 150 kW (201 hp) continuous and 300 kW (402 hp) peak power that runs with 95% efficiency at 7500 RPM.

Schuler wanted to be clear: “We’re not the first to develop a PCB stator, but we are the first to productize it in an effective way for a market.” The company, which holds 32 patents with 44 patents pending, believes it is the first to deploy a PCB stator and liquid cooling in the same package. The Air-Core motor uses silicon-carbide MOSFETs to enable switching at a higher speed. “That allows us to overcome the lack of inductance and operate the stator effectively,” he said. The motor also can receive over-the-air updates. The size of the motor, or whether to use multiple smaller motors instead of one larger one, is driven by the application. “There are practically no limits on the technology from the technical perspective,” Schuler said. “We are an axial-flux machine, so we tend to be a larger diameter and a shorter length.” In some industrial applications, it’s far better to have ten 10-hp motors than a fan driven by a single 100-hp motor. He said that having multiples does allow redundancy, helpful in many applications such as eVTOLs.

The Air-Core motor is designed for a circular life cycle. The copper laminate panels are etched using off-the-shelf FR4 glass epoxy as insulation. This results in ten times the reliability of a standard stator, the company said. Why? “All of our copper laminate and insulation has an equal coefficient of thermal expansion. As it heats and cools over and over, it does that at the same rate. That means no mechanical interference is ever created, which means it will never fail,” Schuler said.

As for the ramp-up to the mobility market, which Schuler says could benefit even more than the HVAC market from the Aircore Mobility Motor’s efficiency, the company is willing to license the technology and already has a handful of agreements with OEMs in the commercial trucking, eVTOL and other markets, for which they expect to deliver units in the second and third quarters this year.

Schaeffler: Systems efficiencies
At Schaeffler, historically a provider of stampings and advanced bearings, e-motor development is coming fast and hard. The company is applying its expertise to traction motors that eke more from established materials or achieve more efficiency via a higher degree of systems integration.

Jeff Hemphill, CTO of the Americas, said last fall that Schaeffler is looking to make permanent-magnet motors more efficient by misaligning the magnets, for example. And it also is directing attention to externally excited motors with no magnets. Magnet-less induction motors typically are less efficient, but Schaeffler’s engineers claim externally excited motors can be developed with efficiencies “on par” with a permanent-magnet motor.

The company’s most-recently revealed idea is the “4in1 e-axle, an integration of traction motor, transmission, power electronics – and in an incremental efficiency gain over its 3in1 e-axle – thermal management. And a collaborative move to SiC power electronics delivers more than 99% efficiency, the company claims.

Schaeffler’s new 4-in-1 e-axle can incorporate a shifting mechanism for a 2-speed transmission, which some believe is a worthwhile addition for the larger, higher inertia-weight vehicles favored in the U.S. market. There also is provision for a decoupling unit

The company isn’t eying only EVs – like many, it believes hybrids will play an important transitional role and is working on improvements for the IC and electric aspects of hybrid architectures. Schaeffler is particularly focused on hardware and electronics to introduce “much higher voltages” for HEVs, said Markus Steinberger, director e-mobility R&D.

ZF: An entire powertrain
ZF enhances motor power density, system flexibility In November 2022, ZF revealed an all-new electric powertrain with many benefits, but like other contemporary developments is focused on accommodating either 400V or 800V architectures. The flexibility comes from the controller chip and via inverters with individual power switches. The company asserted that this architecture results in fewer components than today’s power modules. The system baselines at 100 kW (134 hp) per axle and can generate as much as 300 kW.

An aspect of ZF’s new e-drive system that’s sure to intrigue competitors is the new technique for braided wiring to increase power density of its systems. “Hairpin wiring, the state of the art today, was introduced five to seven years ago, [and] requires hundreds of laser welding points,” said Roland Hintringer, head of e-motor product lines. He said ZF’s braided wiring is formed and braided in one step, saving time and requiring less space, with a winding head of 15 mm versus 28 mm for hairpin winding. “It only requires 24 welding spots,” he said, adding that the new technique also reduces the raw material used by 10%.

Meanwhile, ZF joins Infinitum in the liquid-cooled stator movement. In addition to the water-cooled motor housing, cooling oil is pumped not only around the stator housing, but also through slots in the braided windings themselves. Hintringer said the result is an 85% increase in peak performance, a 50% increase in power and use of only 1% of the rare earth materials compared to current technology.

eLeap Power: A charger-deleting inverter
eLeap Power also pitched at CES 2023 with a proposition that has unquestionable appeal: The Canadian company says its inverter technology eliminates the need for an onboard charger and voltage converter by leveraging the already existing windings of the drive motor. The result, eLeap said, delivers many benefits:

• 800v charging speeds but compatibility with 400v systems.

• Eliminating the onboard charger reduces vehicle weight by 30-40 kg (66-88 lb.), increasing range.

• Near-universal compatibility with all current EV powertrain architectures. It’s also cost-effective in that it can accomodate 800v architecture while using less-expensive, lower-voltage switching components available today.

• Is fully bidirectional in AC and DC. This allows direct charging of the vehicle battery from renewable resources such as wind and solar, while allowing the vehicle to “give back to the grid” at peak demand times.

• The inverter uses either a split-battery or dual-battery system that results in better reliability. If a part of the system fails, the vehicle remains usable.

Journalists considering eLeap’s innovation may have been skeptical, but Chery Automotive isn’t; eLeap Power is under contract to deliver 15,000 integrated inverters for use in delivery vans made by the Chinese manufacturer.

“Overall, our system is a heck of a lot smarter and more powerful,” said eLeap CEO Russell Pullan. “What they see in our technology is that it allows their vehicle to charge faster, go further with each charge, save costs for manufacturing and end users, and it’s greener.” The heart of the eLeap system is in the way it harnesses the magnetic fields and windings, combined with software, in a motor to “create a very fast flow of electricity to charge the battery.” He said contemporary onboard charger is a major bottleneck and that by eliminating it, charging can be up to three times faster. Project Manager Jonathan Dooley said that in addition to removing the onboard charger, vehicles such as the Lucid Air that are use a 400v/800v boost converter can also eliminate that hardware. “Another one of the ways we’re able to achieve a big cost advantage is that we’re using the motor in the charging operation. So inductors and transformers that would normally be there aren’t necessary,” he said. Pullan put to rest potential concerns about additional wear on the motor. “Charging is motionless, with no rotation of the motor and no vibration.” Dooley acknowledged that others have tried this technology but could not overcome problems. Indeed: SAE Media asked engineers at suppliers and OEMs about eLeap’s technology, and while most did not want to comment on the record, they did say, essentially, “if they’ve figured that out, more power to them.”

Beginning with Chery will speak to another of the benefits about which Pullan is enthusiastic. “If you’re a fleet-logistics company, there are savings per vehicle. We have savings on the OEM costs, but potential savings on infrastructure also. If you have a DC grid in your depot, you don’t need any fast chargers. They’re gone! That saves space. Cherry’s end users, one third of their depot space is taken up by fast chargers. In downtown Chicago or Shenzhen China, that’s [a big cost].”

Even the IP of eLeap’s system is unique, containing more than 50 pieces. Pullan said the core IP, developed with the University of Toronto Electric Vehicle Center, was granted by the U.S. Patent Office with no questions because it is suis generis, a mixture of software, hardware and system architecture not derived from any existing patents.

Dream of a flying car comes to an end. AeroMobil fails to acquire new financing and closes down

The flying car designed by Slovaks and presented on October 29, 2014 at the Pioneer Festival in Vienna had been a sensation. Its Slovak fathers, Juraj Vaculík and Štefan Klein, had believed that it could be the first step to “changing passenger transport on a global scale”. This never happened. Almost nine years later the company management, after failing to acquire fresh money to continue with R&D, resolved to file for bankruptcy.
“The last negotiations with investors…were not successful,” said the company as cited by the TASR newswire.

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For several years, the company unsuccessfully negotiated with several investors to raise capital, including all major manufacturers from the automotive and aerospace industries. AeroMobil attributes its failure to acquiring new investments to the negative mood in the venture capital market, its availability falling by more than 80 percent since April last year; also the markets' distrust of different concepts, such as electric flying devices with vertical take-off and landing. Since its establishment in 2010, AeroMobil acquired about €25 million in investments from all over the world.

Nevertheless, according to AeroMobil management, the flying vehicle project remains achievable, because internal development was not limited by anything except the availability of capital.

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“During 12 years, AeroMobil has created and produced three generations of flying prototypes, registered 14 patents, produced digital data enabling the manufacturing of the vehicle, a global brand with high media value, and a viable vision that inspired manufacturers around the world to think about a new way of door-to-door aerial mobility,” the company stated.

Štefan Klein, who left the company in 2016 following diverging visions between him and remaining management concerning the company's further development, regrets the end of AeroMobil.

“With a company that possessed innovation, courage and an erudite team in its DNA strands, I'm very sorry and not happy at all,” said Klein, who is working on a new flying car project, AirCar, as cited by the žive.sk website. “I have a lot of respect for Patrick Hessel and Juraj Vaculík. There are not many people in Slovakia who invest their private resources of millions of euros into new visions.”