This dynamic, where Tesla "announces" something that the rest of the industry has been doing for a while anyway, and a bunch of star-struck enthusiasts and stock manipulators tout it as an example of Tesla' "super smart innovation", is getting tiresome.
That's a complete misunderstanding of what Tesla did. Having a component in the car that is 48V and having the whole car being on a 48V PoE architecture are totally different things. The sad part is that these company actually have the beginning of a 48V system but never actually pushed threw and did it all.
This is like when SpaceX landed a first stage and everybody was like 'DC-X did it SpaceX did nothing new'.
There is a reason lots of people, including experts are exited of what Tesla did here.
Of course Tesla has taken it further which is interesting and could be useful - but it's not quite true that the whole car is on 48V, they've already said that ~20% of the common / supplier-provided components are still 12V. For pure EVs, sticking with higher voltage makes a lot of sense and Tesla was perfectly suited to lead the charge here since they have built so much of their supply chain from scratch and can spec everything to be 48V where other EV manufacturers mostly just reused components from their ICE cars.
Previous 48V systems were only partial for good reason as well - traditional manufacturers have been using "mild hybrid" 48V systems since ~2001. Many of the electrical components on ICE vehicles are parasitic engine loads since they need power than can be provided with 12V, so e.g. the water pump and AC compressor have separate belts that always are 'robbing' the engine power regardless if they're needed or not. Adding that 48V system allows for the engine to be freed from the draw that those components require and adding some light regenerative braking is sufficient to keep the batteries supplying that system charged.
That these 48v systems aren't universal should provide some color on how successful / important the manufacturers had found them to be.
Jup happens all the time. Tesla also made the CyberTruck a drive by wire system, now fans are claiming it has the unique ability to have variable steering angles based on speed which is "far ahead of any other manufacturer"
Except that BMW 5-series and 7-series from 2010 onward have had this option... They've done it in a smarter way using a plantery gear system to keep a physical steering wheel connection as a backup instead of going the cheap and less safe drive by wire way that Tesla put on the CyberTruck.
There is still a large benefit to this. Because Tesla is seen as a leader in the EV space it prods others to follow them. In some cases like this it gives people in the supply chain or internally at other automakers justification to make changes they've been prevented from making in the past.
All sorts of people have all sorts of random ideas that never go anywhere until an industry "golden child" says it's the way forward. Without that effect the change can take much longer to happen.
That is a link to a press release. As best as I can tell from other sources, they started shipping some high end, low volume models the next year that added a separate 48V curcuit in addition to the 12V. Color me impressed...
Or was there a pathological lock-in between suppliers and manufacturers that prevented even the most obvious innovations from happening if they required any amount of coordination?
24V is common in trucks, and yet never made it to regular cars because there was never sufficient reason.
Using a higher voltage is not an innovation (it's an obvious change, and we've gone from 6V to 12V to, in some cases, 24V already) - rather it's just a slight efficiency improvement in largely non-critical systems, with not a lot of incentive to take on the cost of transition.
In a a personal ICE vehicle, the only real significant power was to the starter motor and from the generator, and the distance there was short so the copper didn't really matter and thus no one cared for 24V - unlike industry where you might have significant aux systems. With EVs, you have heat pumps and brake boosters on the auxillary power, so you now have a stronger driver for conversion.
Even within 12V, you'd get a larger weight reduction from not carrying an aux battery, and just feeding through a converter from the HV system.
The 12v battery performs the very significant safety feature of allowing the HV battery to be disconnected when the car isn’t ready to move. You’d need to have a converter in the HV battery to avoid that down side, and then you have a new downside of a fault could cause your 12v line to be HV instead.
Fair point, but I imagine disconnecting is mainly to avoid live HV wiring throughout the vehicle, and thus reducing risk of catastrophic shorts or arcing.
If the aux supply is near or in the battery, leaving that connected would while the rest of HV is interrupted would probably not cause any notable increase in risk.
At the same time, vehicle fires have been caused by a shorted auxillary battery (I have personally experienced an entire industrial building burn down because the 12V battery in a parked ICE car shorted and went up in flames), so I imagine only having one battery to worry about is a risk reduction.
Since car manufacturing, and design, wasn't held back at all by something like auxiliary current, the reason more likely was people not wanting to waste energy to improve on something that is working just fine for everyone.
Well according to Tesla it wasn't working just fine for everyone - they have been able to massively simplify their internal wiring.
Classic example of legacy automakers happy to maintain the status-quo because it is easiest, while the new kid on the block is pointing out that things don't have to be the way they are just because they are that way.
Its the same with aluminum casting. The car makers used the technology once in a while in some specific parts, Tesla was like 'why not make half the car out of one casting'.
Tesla worked closely with a supplier, did lots of its own research and development and continue to work with a supplier to make the technology better over time.
This was considered stupid at first. This is now very widely copied. First automakers from China copied it. And now others are copying it as well. Even Toyota (who everybody believes are some kind of gods of manufacturing) are copying this now.
If you have been doing something one way for long enough, going into a radically different direction is hard. Your whole workforce knows about welding steel sheets together, and nobody knows anything about casting. Your whole workforce knows about V12 and the ecosystem for that.
Its hard to fundamentally change how you do things when you are producing millions of vehicles a year.
>> S&P Global Mobility forecasts 15% to 20% of traditional body-in-white (BIW) stampings in 2030 may be at risk from these gigacastings. Underbody components typically comprise about 50% of a vehicle's BIW shell, and this soft underbelly is the target of gigacasting's focus.
Obviously not a technical journal, nor did I double check anything.
What the numbers say 15-20% might be replaced by gigastampings (sidenote: I ak surprised Elon didn't rename Twitter to Giga-X). Which, ok, is a thing. But nowhere near the revolution people seem to believe. First, it has to happen. Second, others have to consider it better, read overall cheaper, and continue doing it. Then we can properly judge. Until then, it might as well be in the category of Teslas fully automated factories that ended with Elon doing pyjama parties with his workers on the shopfloor and ad-hoc tents.
And Toyota, as per the linked article, is not copying it, they are "eyeing" it. And believe itbor not, manufacturers are eyeing new production tech all the time.
And Toyotas reputation in car manufacturing is well earned.
I'm more an aerospace guy, but I am fully aware of the time scale around production technology changes. Thing is so, 2030 is an estimate, not a commitment. And I didn't find anything about actual investments or announcememts from OEMs around that.
Also, 20% of castings still means a lot of welding before a car body is made.
One thing regarding Toyotas production system so: it is all about management and processes and not about the actual machinery. And it share a lot of principles ranging as far back as Venice's Arsenal in the 16/17th century and, especially, WW2 mass manifavturing of, e.g., planes.
Anothet major difference: TPS is a proven methodology for longer than Tesla, let alone any production tech coming out of Tesla, exists as a company.
Legacy automakers have no need for a 48v system. Most vehicles have an ICEs and they will for the next decade(s) as EV and PHEV adoption rises. 12 years is the average age for cars in the EU/US.
Why would they upgrade a system when they don’t need to? Tesla can be a front runner and companies like Bosch will start creating 48v parts as EVs become more popular for legacy auto to use.
I mean there have always been a market for 48V components. The problem is that the market is much smaller so as a customer, you’re paying a lot more and it’s hard to justify raising the price of your car because you decided to go 48V.
Depends on the region.
56V AC and 72V DC here. -48V has been the standard voltage in telecoms for +100years, so 48V systems and parts are not that exotic.
Your motors and actuators operate directly on 48V (in fact, most actuators would prefer a higher voltage like 96V). That's really significant.
Microelectronics is effectively a "don't care" since everything is behind a regulator or a PHY.
Yeah, 48V tolerant switching regulators are going to be a bit more expensive until the volume gets rolling, but that problem solves itself while ethernet and CAN PHY chips are already 48V tolerant.
Nothing "directly" runs on 12V either. All electronics will have stepdown converters in both the 12V and 48V use case. Motors, solenoids and incandescent bulbs can be made to work with either voltage (the same way we do for 24V systems in heavy goods vehicles here in Europe).
Lights and motors can easily take 48V.
It's only the digital devices that require switching supplies, and that's still much better that 200-300V rectified mains power.
It simply has never been worth it before to retool things in practice.
It's also electrically a lot more noisy. The limit of what is considered low volt is like 60v or something.