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CloseADI AND YUTONG: PUMPING THE BRAKES ON COMMERCIAL VEHICLE EMISSIONS
Imagine a world without commercial trucks. How would produce get from the farm to the grocery store, or medication from manufacturers to hospitals? Who would transport heavy machinery to work sites, and how would bulky or hazardous materials be removed? Commercial freight vehicles (also known as big rigs, tractor trailers, 18-wheelers, etc.) help to enable the modern economy.
However, along with other large-format vehicles such as buses, they also produce an estimated one-third of transportation emissions worldwide.1 A single tractor-trailer can emit over 200 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year.2 That’s almost 40 times more than the average passenger car, which generates an estimated 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.3
Yutong, a leading large-format commercial vehicle company, has partnered with Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) to advance its goal of decarbonizing this transportation segment. 30 years of development have built Yutong into the world’s largest electric bus manufacturer, and the company has turned its sights to other types of commercial vehicles. This includes its new electric tractor-trailer that employs ADI’s wireless battery management system (wBMS) technology.
AT A GLANCE
GOAL
To take commercial transport decarbonization, production-line efficiencies, and EV fleet management to the next level—not only by transitioning to electric powertrain but also by deploying ADI’s wBMS as the first scalable wireless BMS platform for large-format vehicles without compromising on performance.
COMPANY
Yutong is an international automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of buses, coaches, trucks, construction machinery, and other commercial vehicles.
CHALLENGE
Commercial vehicles require scale, resilience to extreme environments, and connectivity between battery packs, which far exceed the demands of smaller passenger vehicles, adding to the challenge of deploying a wireless battery management solution.
SOLUTION
ADI’s wBMS solutions will help Yutong’s large-format electric vehicles (EV) achieve target performance levels in the face of extreme operating conditions.
ELECTRIFICATION: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR LARGE-FORMAT COMMERCIAL VEHICLES
Freight trucks represent only a small fraction of the world’s vehicles, yet they contribute an estimated 39% of the transportation sector’s greenhouse gas emissions.4 A typical semitrailer truck averages 6.5 miles per gallon and travels around 120,000 miles each year.2
As national and international initiatives push the world toward a more energy-efficient future, the commercial transportation sector must evolve. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as scaling up the same strategies that worked for passenger EVs.
Not only do larger vehicles require larger batteries; those batteries are spread out across a larger battery pack frame, demanding greater reach from communication links between them. Commercial vehicles also need to operate reliably in more demanding conditions. Wired BMS paved the way for electrification in this segment, but wiring comes with many limitations. Yutong knew there was a better answer.
By partnering with ADI, Yutong is bringing wBMS technology to bear in large format mobility applications, turning over an exciting new page in the evolution of commercial vehicle electrification.
WIRELESS BMS: THE ALTERNATE ROUTE
By eliminating the wiring harness between the dispersed battery packs in a semi-trailer truck, ADI’s wBMS can support a high level of modularity. This empowers Yutong to scale its EV fleet and improve production line efficiency. Due to higher variance in commercial vehicle production lines, these robotic manufacturing capabilities would not have been possible for a wired system.
Going wireless also helps Yutong achieve design flexibility in EV battery packs since packs can be positioned across multiple locations in the vehicle. Furthermore, it reduces the weight that would have been associated with wiring, improving the range of Yutong’s heavy-duty EV fleets.
ADI worked closely with Yutong to address wireless connectivity challenges across far-spread battery packs, providing foundational hardware, software, and custom reference designs that Yutong is adapting for their use case with hands-on support from the ADI India and ADI Philippines teams.
WATCH: Battery pack assembly, with and without a wire harness. Watch the side-by-side comparison to see how ADI’s wBMS technology can help streamline battery manufacturing and service!
UNDER THE HOOD OF wBMS
wBMS is a system-level solution that encompasses precision sensing hardware, software drivers, and tools that ADI helped Yutong scale for large-format applications. Going wireless offers Yutong several advantages, which also serve to benefit OEMs and end customers (in this case, fleet owners).
Operational resiliency
Wires are vulnerable to wear and tear from mechanical stress, thermal extremes, dust, and vibrations—all conditions that a heavy-duty vehicle can expect to encounter regularly. wBMS allows Yutong to reliably connect and monitor high-energy batteries even in the toughest environments.
Manufacturing flexibility
wBMS mitigates the challenges of significant retooling requirements in commercial EV production lines. Increased modularity and flexibility could help OEMs achieve new manufacturing efficiencies and faster time to market, giving OEMs the freedom to scale EV fleets faster through robotic manufacturing.
Simplified servicing
Yutong is leveraging innovative wBMS-enabled battery pack designs with increased modularity to facilitate quicker, easier maintenance and refitting of batteries throughout the vehicle’s life cycle. This could help fleet owners reduce vehicle down-time.
Intelligent insights
wBMS leverages precision sensors to drive insights at both the cell and system levels. Fleet owners can use these insights to better manage asset downtime and operational expenditures, for example by scheduling predictive maintenance at optimal times.
These four advantages unlock a new set of best practices that can help fleet owners get the most out of their large-format batteries before potentially recycling them to second-life applications.
THE DRIVE FOR SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT
Commercial vehicle emissions are a big problem, and solving it requires big innovation. ADI’s collaboration with Yutong points toward a future in which commercial-grade EVs might be able to achieve target performance levels in the face of extreme operational challenges, whether long hours on a city bus route or intense vibrations and dust at a construction site. And with Yutong, ADI saw the introduction of its wBMS technology in the evolving realm of commercial vehicle electrification.
With nearly three-quarters of U.S. shipments arriving via heavy-duty freight vehicles,4 it’s clear that semi-trucks are going everywhere but away. The ADI-Yutong collaboration demonstrates there is an alternate, smarter route for large-format vehicle electrification. By expanding electrification applications across more vehicle formats, ADI and Yutong are helping to move the transportation sector one mile closer to meeting global climate change mitigation benchmarks.
References
1 "Distribution of Carbon Dioxide Emissions Produced by the Transportation Sector Worldwide in 2022, by Sub Sector.” Statista, September 2023.
2 "What is the Carbon Footprint of a Truck?” FreightWaves, April 2021.
3 "Greenhouse Gas Emissions from a Typical Passenger Vehicle.” United States Environmental Protection Agency, August 2023.
4 Laura Michelle Davis. “Trucking in America: Hidden Truths About the Industry Transporting Our Stuff.” CNET, December 2021
5 "Fast Facts: U.S. Transportation Sector Greenhouse Gas Emissions 1990–2022.” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, May 2024.
