As EV platforms push from 400 V to 800 V and beyond 1,000 V, engineers are facing a growing gap between charging capability and what can be safely tested in real-world conditions.
This whitepaper unpacks the concept of “validation anxiety” and the risks tied to reliability, lifecycle performance, and grid interaction.
It also walks through the new requirements for testing chargers, batteries, and full system integration at MW scale. Download it to understand where current test systems fall short and how to prepare for the next wave of ultra-fast charging.
Komatsu-owned battery maker American Battery Solutions (ABS) has introduced Aventor, a high-voltage battery platform developed for high-utilization commercial, industrial and specialty applications.
Assembled in the US with domestically sourced cells, Aventor is designed to support OEM programs that comply with Build America, Buy America (BABA) requirements. Built on an 800 V architecture, Aventor stores 113 kWh and delivers 358 kW of peak discharge power. Energy density is 300 Wh/L, and specific energy is up to 200 Wh/kg.
A common architecture supports two form factors. The standard Chassis-Integrated Pack, which measures 2,090 x 634 x 285 mm, can be installed between the frame rails or in other constrained horizontal locations such as the roof. The Hyper-Rugged Cube Pack’s enclosure and load path are designed for harsher mechanical environments that see the highest levels of vibration, shock and utilization, and for multiple installation orientations.
The wire-free battery management system is designed to reduce system complexity and improve reliability. Voltage and temperature measurement at every series element, together with a microprocessor and onboard data storage at every cell group, provides granular monitoring and diagnostics. The system also includes cybersecurity protections, over-the-air update capability, active isolation monitoring, vent-gas detection and anti-propagation technology.
Aventor is designed to align with functional-safety, regulatory and certification requirements including ASIL-C under ISO 26262, FMVSS 305a, UL 2580 and ECE R100. It is built and validated for up to 10 years of heavy-duty design life. ABS says the standard enclosure is dust-tight and certified to IP67 for immersion and IP69K for high-pressure washdown.
Customer samples are planned for 2027, and production is planned to start in the first quarter of 2028. Initial production capacity will be 6,000 battery packs annually, or approximately 0.7 GWh.
“For high-utilization applications where charging time directly affects productivity, the platform supports fast charging from 10% to 80% in 42 minutes or less,” said Jeffrey Donaldson, SVP Engineering at ABS.
“We set out to develop a battery platform that leads on energy density without any compromises in the safety, durability or performance these applications demand,” said Subhash Dhar, founder and CEO of ABS.
MultiVent gives pack designers an alternative to combining dual-stage vents, separate evacuation valves and desiccants. Gore says every additional component adds validation requirements, sealing complexity and potential paths for moisture intrusion, which can lead to corrosion, sensor faults and warranty costs.
The vent builds on technology Gore acquired from Vernay Laboratories in 2026 and combines a Gore membrane with Vernay’s valve technology.
MultiVent mounts through a single opening in the pack wall and uses two valves and a Gore microporous membrane. In normal operation, one valve opens at defined pressures and, combined with the membrane, allows the pack to breathe while blocking water, dust and debris. Airflow is 1,200 L/h at 100 mbar, which Gore says is up to six times that of alternative venting options and reduces the number of vents a pack needs.
In Gore laboratory testing at 22° C and 50% relative humidity, moisture ingress measured less than 20 mg per day, which Gore says is under one-tenth that of many commercially available dual vents.
For thermal-runaway evacuation, the larger valve opens at 50 mbar, provides an evacuation flow of 50 L/s at 180 mbar and then reseals the housing. Gore says MultiVent performs consistently after standard automotive aging tests and can resist typical thermal-runaway temperatures.
“For years, battery pack designers have been forced to balance airflow, moisture control and safety using separate components,” said David Slupe, Gore’s Strategic Marketing Leader for Batteries. “We think those challenges are connected. GORE MultiVent gives engineers a way to address them together with a simpler architecture.”
Wireless charging is not just about convenience. For electric buses, it can enable operators to prolong battery life, to achieve the same range with a smaller battery pack, and to charge the same number of vehicles with fewer charging stations, as a Momentum Dynamics exec (among others) explained to Charged.
The electrification of bus fleets is advancing swiftly in Europe, particularly in Switzerland, where a startup called Winduction, a spin-off from the respected technical university ETH Zurich, is taking a novel approach to inductive charging.
“We believe that electric buses can be operated much more cheaply if they are charged wirelessly and regularly during operation,” says ETH graduate and Winduction CEO Laurin Schwitter.
Most inductive charging systems transfer electricity from a coil in the ground to a second coil on the vehicle’s undercarriage—but there’s one weakness in this approach. The distance between the road and the undercarriage is relatively large, and varies from one vehicle model to another. This distance is important, as the efficiency of energy transfer decreases with increasing separation.
The three founders of Winduction believe they’ve found a better way. “In any vehicle, the only thing that’s always in contact with the ground are the wheels,” says Winduction CTO Sylvain Fricker.
The company’s system includes a set of induction coils housed in a ground plate set into the road surface, as in a typical setup. The second group of coils, however, is integrated into a specially developed bus tire.
“We minimize the transmission distance between the road and undercarriage by placing coils inside the wheel,” says Fricker. “From the ground into the vehicle, the Winduction system achieves an efficiency of over 90 percent. As our technology is also effective during short charging stops, the buses can make do with smaller batteries, making them significantly cheaper to buy and operate.”
However, putting inductive coils into tires presented its own challenge—conventional bus tires contain steel belts, which would react with the magnetic field and convert a large part of the power into heat.
“For our system to function, we work with partners to develop a completely new steel-free tire,” says CEO Schwitter.
Winduction demonstrated its system on the bus line between Zurich Airport and the city’s Oerlikon quarter. “Our calculations show substantial savings compared with depot charging. How large they are depends on the route. A feasibility study with transport operators is currently quantifying this,” Schwitter explains.
Using Winduction’s system, operations on the route between Zurich Airport and Oerlikon should require charging plates only at 2 of 24 stops, at which the buses would charge for a total of 3 hours over the course of 16. For comparison, the electric buses used on this line currently charge simultaneously for 5 hours in the garage overnight, and need much more power to do so than they would with Winduction’s system.
Winduction is currently building real-world testing infrastructure in Winterthur, including a test lab and a test bus stop.
“In a subsequent stage of development, we want to bring all the components together in a form that’s geared towards the industry,” says Schwitter. “Our aim is to build a fully converted electric bus as quickly as possible that can also be used outside of our own private test area.”
The founders plan to carry out the first pilot in 2028. Discussions are currently underway with several Swiss transport operators.
Vietnamese mobility brand Green SM has launched an all-electric taxi service in Los Angeles—the company’s first entry into North America and its ninth global market. The company’s Los Angeles fleet consists entirely of VinFast EVs, featuring VinFast VF 8 models.
Customers in LA can book rides through the Green SM app, by calling the company’s hotline or by hailing a vehicle on the street.
Following the launch, Green SM will gradually build its local team, recruiting and training local drivers.
Founded in Vietnam in 2023, Green SM currently operates in Vietnam, Laos, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Kazakhstan, Denmark and the Netherlands.
“The United States represents an important milestone in Green SM’s growth journey,” said Ms. Hoang Thanh Hang, CEO of Green SM in the US. “We aim to build trust with customers, drivers and local communities, one journey at a time. Our experience across international markets has shown us that the future of electric mobility is not defined by an all-electric fleet alone. It also depends on service quality, well-trained and reliable drivers, and genuine care in every customer interaction.”
Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) has released test data showing that its fast-charging G CELLS completed 1,000 six-minute charge and discharge cycles with no performance reduction as of October 7, 2026.
Indiana’s Battery Innovation Center built the 1.5 Ah pouch cells and collected the data. GMG developed, manufactured and supplied the graphene materials in the cells from its Brisbane Battery Development Centre.
G CELLS are graphene aluminum-ion cells that use no lithium or rare earth materials. GMG is developing the technology under a joint development agreement with Rio Tinto.
The cells were charged and discharged at a 7 C rate. GMG says the cycle count is double that in its previous update, which covered cells cycled at 10 C. A lithium titanate oxide (LTO) cell charged and discharged in the same six minutes, at 10 C, fell to 80% of its original capacity within 82 cycles. That level is typically treated as a cell’s end of life. A second G CELL, also charged and discharged in six minutes at 10 C, showed a 10% performance reduction after 393 cycles.
Specific energy reached 58 Wh/kg at a six-minute (10 C) charge, a 48% increase over the 39 Wh/kg in GMG’s previous update. The G CELLS also showed 94% energy efficiency at the six-minute charge and discharge rate, compared with 64% for the LTO cell.
“Energy that isn’t lost as heat is what makes fast charging practical at the system level,” said Bob Galyen, a GMG Director and former Chief Technology Officer of CATL.
“Fast charging is one of the biggest barriers to broader electric vehicle and energy storage adoption,” said Craig Nicol, Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of GMG. “These results show G CELLS lasting around ten times longer than a comparable LTO cell charged and discharged in the same time. Our focus now is on continuing to improve energy density and 10C cycle life, and on scaling to larger cell formats.”
Would you charge your EV at a charging station owned by an oil giant? Well, lots of people do, every day. Of the six or seven behemoths collectively known as Big Oil, three—Shell, Total and BP—operate EV charging networks.
Shell Recharge claims to operate some 85,000 public charging points in several countries, including the US. TotalEnergies boasts a network of over 60,000 charging points in Europe. bp pulse operates thousands of public chargers in the US and Europe and—dig this—has a section on its web site that encourages people to buy EVs.
A few years ago, the companies were on a CPO buying spree. For example, Shell acquired Dutch charging station operator NewMotion In 2017, and the US firm Greenlots in 2019. (Read our 2026 feature, How the biggest US EV charging networks got their starts for more details.)
What could their motivation be? Did the oil giants mean to strangle the developing EV charging industry by buying up charging companies and shutting them down, or perhaps by ensuring that charging an EV costs more than fueling a legacy vehicle?
Well, if that’s what they meant to do, they haven’t accomplished it. By all accounts, the oil-owned charging stations work just fine, and pricing is comparable to that of other offerings. Furthermore, new charging stations are being installed at such a clip, and by so many different players, that it’s hard to imagine the oilers or anyone else cornering the market.
The opposite possibility—that Big Oil knows its days are numbered, and plans to phase out oil in favor of electrons—seems equally unbelievable. The last time we checked, these dinos were still planning production and exploration projects, and still lavishing billions of bucks on politicians around the world to speed the drilling.
But believe it or not, a gradual shift may be beginning. The three oil giants that are into EV charging (not coincidentally, these are the three that have European roots) are actually electric utilities as well.
A 2025 article in Medium explains that these three “energy companies” are no longer just oil producers, and argues that their involvement in the electric utility business is “not the clean-tech hype cycle we saw in 2020 [but] a disciplined, capital-driven reinvention led by profitability, not PR.”
Shell is building “an integrated power business that covers generation, trading, PPAs and retail.” Through Shell Energy, the firm supplies power directly to corporations and households. TotalEnergies aims to control 100–120 TWh of annual power generation by 2030. bp pulse was operating over 40,000 charge points in 2025, and aiming to have 100,000 by 2030. Medium reported that bp was selling some 1 TWh of power annually through its EV charging biz.
In the energy giants’ world, that’s small potatoes, but the volume could grow very quickly—and that potential provides a plausible (if paradoxical) pecuniary motivation for these multinationals to make a serious go of their EV charging ventures.
We haven’t heard that ExxonMobil or Chevron have dabbled in the EV charging game. But as Medium reports, Shell, Total and bp are “no longer fossil dinosaurs. They are hybrid utilities—with deep commodity expertise, global origination networks, and access to low-cost capital.”
