Pepper Motion announces serial electric truck conversion
The EV conversion specialist Pepper Motion (formerly e-troFit) has concretised its plans to serve new electric commercial vehicles in the future. The first variants are to go into series production as early as spring 2022.
When e-troFit was renamed Pepper Motion, the company had already announced that “new vehicles in the commercial vehicle sector under our own Pepper Motion brand” were also strategically planned for the future. The plans now presented do not go quite that far.
According to Pepper, it is instead about freely scalable electrification kits for new vehicles, specifically for trucks over 7.5 tonnes. According to Pepper, the kit, which is being sold as ‘etrofit’ in reference to the former company name, contains all the components needed for a conversion or a new vehicle body – i.e. from the battery, electrical machine, ancillary components, control unit with system software developed in accordance with ISO26262 for functional safety, to the interface to the existing or new vehicle.
Depending on the intended use, the battery can be scaled up from 120 kWh “to 240, 360 or even over 700 kWh net”. Pepper sees the company’s own system architecture software for the drive system as a major differentiator from other solutions.
The first ‘etrofit’ kits for the Mercedes models Actros and Atego are to be offered in spring 2022, and corresponding solutions for Nue vehicles from MAn and Iveco are also to be available from 2023. “In principle, it is possible to electrify any vehicle model,” says Robert Reisenauer, Head of Sales and Marketing at Pepper Motion. “As soon as customers want to convert a model in relevant quantities that we haven’t done before, we estimate a development time of twelve months until the project is ready for series production.” If products are available in series, they can be delivered within five months from the time of order.
Pepper’s target is 1,000 kits installed by 2024. The kit is also to be made available as a Tier 1 solution to chassis builders and OEMs so that they can integrate it into new developments or existing model series and thus implement emission-free new vehicles without high development costs. According to Pepper, it expects to sell more than 20,000 units in the truck sector by 2030, including more than 6,000 units as Tier 1 kits for vehicle manufacturers in various European markets.
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