Fleet operators need charging infrastructure that can keep pace with changing schedules, growing vehicle counts, and demanding operating environments. Join Lincoln Electric to explore how the Velion® line of DC fast chargers help fleets achieve reliable, flexible charging through dynamic power sharing and energy optimization. With the ability to charge up to four vehicles simultaneously, the Velion adapts to real-world fleet operations while maximizing charger utilization. We’ll discuss how intelligent charging works in practice, the benefits of rugged, fleet-focused design, and the importance of features such as BABA compliance and NEMA certification. Learn why reliability starts with smarter infrastructure.
Key takeaways from this webinar include:
Learn how dynamic power sharing helps maximize charging efficiency across your fleet.
Discover how to charge up to four vehicles at once while supporting changing operational demands.
Understand how intelligent energy optimization can improve fleet readiness and charger utilization.
See how a rugged, compliant charging solution can help support reliable, long-term fleet operations.
Off-road vehicle manufacturer Fering has chosen axial flux motors and inverters from Turntide Technologies for the parallel hybrid drivetrain in its vehicle platform, which Turntide says is built for long range, off-road capability and flexible deployment across multiple sectors. Turntide supplied an axial flux traction motor, a second motor for power generation, and the inverters that control them.
Turntide’s AF300S is rated at 73 kW of continuous power and 193.9 Nm of continuous torque, rising to 324 kW and 452.3 Nm in 20-second bursts, has a maximum speed of 8,000 rpm and operates at up to 850 VDC. Cooling takes place via an indirect liquid loop running water and ethylene glycol.
An axial flux machine runs its flux along the shaft axis rather than radially outward, so rotor and stator sit as parallel discs. The AF300S is 110 mm long and 333.8 mm in diameter and weighs 28.4 kg dry, a disc rather than the longer cylinder of a radial flux motor of similar output. That was Fering’s constraint, Turntide says: the propulsion system had to fit the vehicle’s existing architecture without compromising performance or capability.
Fering evaluated several axial flux motor suppliers during development, according to Turntide, and chose it for the performance and reliability of the motors and the support of its engineering team. Turntide’s application engineering group worked alongside Fering through vehicle integration and testing.
The two companies will now perform further drivetrain work, including development of a future electrified drive unit, and support for vehicle demonstrations and industry events.
“Fering’s vehicle platform is a good example of how hybridization can extend electrification into demanding vehicle applications,” said Brad Bell, Turntide’s Chief Commercial Officer.
What do Florida sheriffs have to do with EV charging? Nothing, as far as we know, except that there is a public procurement resource called the Florida Sheriffs Association Cooperative Purchasing Program, which allows public agencies in Florida to simplify procurements by providing a pool of pre-qualified vendors.
Standard procurement programs of this kind enable state and local agencies, municipalities, school districts and other eligible purchasers to choose charging hardware that best fits each application while standardizing on a single vendor, without requiring a separate RFP.
The product lineup available through Verdek under the program includes: Level 2 chargers from Autel and ChargePoint; DC fast chargers from ABB, Autel, ChargePoint, Samsung, Tesla and Tritium; portable charging from Charge Rigs and Lincoln Electric; and charger management software from ampUp.
The list of available chargers now includes the Tesla V4 Supercharger.
“Being able to renew this contract—and expand it to include Tesla—is a significant milestone for Verdek and for the agencies we serve across Florida,” said Guy Mannino, CEO of Verdek. “Public safety agencies, municipalities and school districts are all under pressure to modernize their fleets, and this renewal gives them a wider set of proven charging technologies to choose from, all through one streamlined, pre-competed contract.”
“We are pleased to welcome Verdek as an awarded vendor on this contract,” said Megan Taber, Director of the FSA Cooperative Purchasing Program. “Through our competitive solicitation process, we strive to provide public agencies with high-quality procurement solutions that promote competition, value and choice.”
Increased battery density is the endgame of all cutting-edge battery design, improvements cannot come at the expense of safety or cost limitations. The question then becomes how to push the envelope in a safe and cost-effective way. Monitoring the state-of-health of cells is at the top of the list of considerations.
Accurately measuring ambient factors like temperature and voltage provides critical data to the BMS. For years, this could be done through discreet wiring, though this method was inefficient, and the quality was lacking. In today’s designs, flexible printed circuit boards (FPCs) are replacing discrete wiring. These FPC-based systems are the newest generation of cell contacting systems. They simultaneously bring down the cost of pack manufacturing and improve reliability in manufacturing and data harnessing.
The quality of data is essential in order to safely maximize energy density. This white paper from Churod Electronics details the hows and whys of FPC-based Cell Contacting Systems and how this cost-effective, yet reliable tool is a key to modern battery pack efficiency.
Pure Lithium says it has cycled its Advanced Anode lithium metal battery more than 9,315 times at 100% depth of discharge, and that the cells are still cycling in its laboratory. The company reported negligible capacity fade over the run.
The cells were charged and discharged at 1C, a rate that fully charges or drains a battery in an hour. Pure Lithium estimates commercial lithium-ion cycle life at 250 to 2,000 cycles, depending on the application.
Larger swings early in the cycling data came from a lack of temperature control and power failures at the company’s original Boston laboratory, according to Pure Lithium.
In January 2025, the company reported more than 2,200 cycles under the same 1C rate and 100% depth of discharge while holding above 80% of capacity, from an anode it had designed to reach 1,000 cycles.
Pure Lithium says replacing the graphite anode in a conventional lithium-ion cell with lithium metal can double a cell’s energy density and cut weight and cost. Cycle life has been the main barrier to commercializing the chemistry. Pure Lithium says no other lithium metal battery in development has matched its result under equivalent testing conditions.
Emilie Bodoin, Pure Lithium’s founder, Chairman and CEO, says cycle life is the single largest determinant of the levelized cost of energy storage (LCOS), and puts the potential reduction from the company’s cycle life at 75%. This performance, she says, opens applications that have been out of reach of lithium metal battery companies, including grid-scale energy storage, data centers and electric vehicles.
“Our achievement of more than 9,315 cycles tells us the lithium metal battery is finally ready to serve these markets,” said Bodoin.
Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe sat down with more than a dozen auto reporters for a lengthy Q&A session during the R2 launch drive event. What follows are his comments on a few topics, each of which bears on the R2’s prospects. They have been edited for clarity and length.
On zonal architecture and the VW deal
RJ Scaringe: Outside of Tesla and Rivian, Western manufacturers do not have software-defined architectures. They have not moved into even zonal ECU consolidation. When you start to think beyond software-defined vehicles, into AI-defined vehicles, there’s a very significant gap I think the vast majority of Western manufacturers have a real challenge with.
Outside of Tesla and Rivian, Western manufacturers do not have software-defined architectures. They have not moved into even zonal ECU consolidation.
It was precisely that which led to the very large partnership we have with Volkswagen. It’s a $5.8-billion deal that essentially takes our zonal ECUs and associated base-level OS, and deploys that across a wide variety of form factors, price points, and of course brands within the Volkswagen portfolio. We’ve been pretty open on saying we think of that as the first of what we hope are many deals like that.
On Chinese carmakers’ technology
Scaringe: We’re very bullish on our technology, so I look at the Chinese makers from two angles. One is from a technical point of view, for similar reasons to why Rivian as a company is built very differently. If you designed a car company today, the talent profiles, the location of where you build, the teams, would all look very different than if you had designed a car company going back half a century, maybe more. You would end up with a very different topology of electronics and software—and that’s a big structural advantage, relative to the classic Tier One-dependent distributed systems that have 75 to 125 ECUs in a car.
There are only a couple of companies in China that actually have done that. A lot of them have just copied what’s in the West. A handful—call it maybe five companies—are very technically advanced. I am personally super-familiar with the architecture of Xiaopeng and others, which are among the most advanced in China. I can happily say that our architecture is more advanced, and there are a lot of concepts that we’ve been able to take from a first-principles standpoint that are actually ahead of the Chinese cars. That really makes us extremely bullish on how we see things in the future in the United States, because of the same trend that is happening in China—cars are becoming more and more electric.
On Chinese carmakers’ cost structures
The Chinese cost of labor is about one seventh what it is the US, and the cost of capital is free, or better than free, meaning zero-percent-interest loans from the government—or in many cases, grants.
Scaringe: All the Chinese companies have a second element, which is a very low cost structure. For that, there’s no magic fairy dust. The Chinese cost of labor is about one seventh what it is the US, and the cost of capital is free, or better than free, meaning zero-percent-interest loans from the government—or in many cases, grants from the government to build plants. We don’t have that. In the West, there’s not free capital to build production capacity. So the compounding effects of that across the tiered supply chain, all the way up to the OEM, have resulted in cost structures for the Chinese that are just unattainable with Western labor and capital cost structures. And that’s why I think you’ll see tariffs in many countries, to try to bring some equilibrium to that.
On future owner expectations
Scaringe: What I think is going to happen over the next five years: Consumers increasingly are just going to expect things to know stuff. For instance, you’ll be frustrated when, if a service technician calls and says, “I’d like to have your car serviced,” and you’re like, “Wait, I’m in Europe, how do you not know that? That’s so frustrating that you don’t know that.”
All the other services in your life are going to start to know all these rich, contextual things. So, in 2030, if a service tech asks, “Is the car making a clicking noise?” you’ll respond, “Why are you asking me that? Why don’t you ask the car?” We think that that’s going to become much more part of the expectation. It won’t be a binary step change—it’ll just be this gradual growing expectation. I think you’re going to have your car know everything, how it’s been used, and a good idea of how you’re going to use it. To the degree you want it to know those things, anyway, and to the degree you open up access to your calendar. But I think that’s just going to become more and more the way things work.
On the lack of “compelling” electric vehicles
Scaringe: I really disagree with the idea that customers don’t want EVs. And I have an existence proof that supports my hypothesis: I think we have an extreme lack of choice in highly compelling products. And when I say highly compelling, I don’t mean mediocre. I don’t mean good enough. I mean something that you’re actually really excited to get into.
“I think we have an extreme lack of choice in highly compelling products.
The existence proof is there’s a car that launched in 2016, and a sibling car that launched in 2019, the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y, that are selling around half a million a year. They represent close to 60% of the EV market share in the US. And they’re great cars. They’re highly compelling. That’s a big enough number, they’re selling enough volume, that this is not just Tesla fanboys. This is regular people—families, college students, retirees, regular people, Uber drivers—everybody is buying these, and it’s not as if they’ve just launched—they’ve been on the market for a while. So the existence proof we see is that there’s really one example of a highly compelling set of vehicles: the Model 3 and Model Y. Great tech, great dynamics, nice packaging, the right price point, great range.
So it’s not at all surprising that, if you’re running a large car company, and you’ve just spent $20 billion launching a bunch of mediocre products that haven’t done particularly well in the market, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, well, we just whiffed it. We just launched a bunch of products that are dogs.” Of course, you’re gonna say, “The market doesn’t want EVs.” You can sort of see why they would. We think the market is very hungry for EVs. I should say it differently: We think the market is very hungry for great cars, and the fact that they’re EVs is secondary.
Three months after launching its off-grid, solar-powered EV charging network on South Africa’s N3 highway corridor, Zero Carbon Charge (aka CHARGE) has confirmed plans to double charging capacity at both the company’s CHARGE hubs in response to growing demand.
CHARGE generates solar energy on-site, delivering off-grid charging for both passenger and commercial EVs in South Africa.
The upgrade will increase total charging capacity at each hub from 360 kW to 720 kW. Solar capacity at each site will grow from 280 kWp to 470 kWp, while battery storage will increase from 645 kWh to 1.4 MWh.
Load management automatically allocates available power among vehicles. When sufficient capacity is available, the system can direct up to 600 kW to a single connector. The upgrade will also future-proof the network for the next generation of 800-volt vehicles entering the market and lay the groundwork for CHARGE’s move towards megawatt-level charging.
Combined, the two upgraded CHARGE Hubs will have the potential to generate approximately 1.6 GWh of renewable energy annually.
“When we launched these hubs in May, we built them to accommodate today’s vehicles while leaving room to grow,” said Joubert Roux, CHARGE co-founder and Chair. “Within three months, demand from customers driving both passenger and commercial vehicles has made it clear that we need to bring that growth forward. This expansion also reflects what is happening in South Africa’s EV market. The latest NAAMSA figures show electrified vehicles now account for 6% of new light vehicle sales.”
“These sites will save 800 000 litres of fuel directly, most of it imported. That is the advantage of off-grid, renewable-powered infrastructure,” Roux added.
The company calls the latest upgrade a boost for CHARGE’s commercial freight partners on the N3 corridor.
“High-speed, green charging capacity is what transforms electric freight from a pilot project into a competitive edge,” said Michael Maas, CEO and Co-founder, Zimi. “This N3 upgrade ensures our clients’ electric trucks and vehicles stay fully charged and on schedule, proving that zero-emission transport on South Africa’s busiest freight route is now a reality.”
“The N3 has shown us what happens when the infrastructure is ready before the demand fully arrives,” says Roux. “We expect exactly the same story to play out on the N1 – and we’re already planning for it.”
