Volkswagen Develops Complete Drive System for Electric Cars
Strategic Research Institute
Published on :
27 Feb, 2023, 3:30 am
Volkswagen Group Technology has provided an outlook of upcoming electric car innovations in the areas of batteries, charging and electronic components. The focus was on the electric drive system of the future. For this purpose, Volkswagen is taking care of all the central components itself and, in addition to batteries and electric motors, is now developing pulse inverters and thermal management systems internally. The Volkswagen drive system coming from one source offers significant efficiency and cost advantages: Up to 20% more efficiency is possible through the optimal combination of individual components alone.
The pulse inverter is the brain of the electric drive train and is largely responsible for efficiency and performance. For the first pulse inverter to be “designed by Volkswagen”, the developers of these core components redesigned the hardware and software from the ground up. Thanks to the modular toolkit principle, this can be implemented in everything from entry-level engines to sports cars with an output of over 500 kW and more in future. The technology is currently being developed for series production maturity and can already be used with the next MEB generation.
When it comes to thermal management systems, Volkswagen is working on entirely new solutions. While today a large number of individual modules and long hose connections are used, in future these will be replaced with an extremely compact, integrated thermal module. This will control the entire air conditioning, including for the high-voltage battery, and thus will have a major impact on the vehicle’s range and fast-charging capability. The new all-in-one module is also significantly lighter, more robust and more efficient than current systems.
In addition to efficiency, the main focus of the development of all central electric drive components is scalability – because high economies of scale reduce costs.