Bosch & Mitsubishi join battery swapping project in China
Bosch, Mitsubishi and Blue Park have joined forces to offer fleet operators a ‘Battery as a Service’ business model based on a battery exchange platform from Blue Park. The cooperation is initially focused on China, but is intended to be global in the long term.
To this end, the three partners signed a memorandum of understanding earlier this month. According to the agreement, Blue Park will contribute the battery swap platform as a central element of the cooperation. Bosch contributes its battery-in-the-cloud technology, Mitsubishi the commercialisation capability, according to the statement.
The demand for electrified vehicles is growing, but the initial investment costs, the “downtime” during charging and the “insecurity of the battery” are factors that prevent the electrification of commercial fleets, Mitsubishi writes. The partners want to counter this with their ‘Battery as a Service’ (BaaS) offer.
Bosch’s Battery-in-the-Cloud continuously monitors and analyses the battery. This is intended to optimise both the service life of the battery and the TCO of the EV fleet. The partners want to apply this technology to the battery replacement platform – and thus reduce the factors that allegedly stand in the way of switching to EV fleets.
How much lower the initial investment will be in the BaaS offering is not clear from the announcement. It only states in general terms: “By providing this neutral and professional third-party battery asset management service, Bosch and Mitsubishi Corporation expect that this will drive the electrification of commercial electric vehicle fleets, lead to the use of used batteries in the second life market and reduce the total cost of ownership of the fleet.”
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