The Tesla Cybertruck does with no 12-volt lead-acid accent battery, shifting to a 48-volt electrical system. For a mass-produced automobile, it is an trade first, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is taking up the position of 48-volt evangelist.
John Hayes, CEO of autonomous-driving software program firm Ghost Autonomy, lately posted on X (previously Twitter) that Musk despatched a “48V structure doc to different CEOs” that was talked about in one of many earliest (Tesla-placed) evaluations of the Cybertruck.
Now it is clear that not less than one in all them—the CEO of a really massive automaker—has taken word.
They weren’t joking. We obtained the doc in the present day, dated Dec. fifth. Thanks, @ElonMusk. Nice for the trade! https://t.co/DkLaHA84CY
— Jim Farley (@jimfarley98) December 7, 2023
Ford CEO Jim Farley posted that Ford obtained the doc in query Dec. 5, calling it “nice for the trade,” and hinting that Ford was additionally engaged on 48-volt architectures for next-generation EVs.
“Nice to learn the doc and understand that our next-gen crew has been on an analogous path,” Farley wrote. “Let’s work collectively to assist the provision base transfer into the 48V future as nicely.”
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Some automakers have launched 48-volt techniques in automobiles, however confoundingly, they’ve stored the 12-volt circuit for different objects as a result of these objects have remained cheaper that approach in mass-production—though the wiring for 12-volt techniques finally ends up being a lot heavier.
Lots of the automobiles with partial 48-volt techniques did some nice issues with the tech—together with gentle hybrid techniques, like Ram’s eTorque system, and electrical turbochargers, but they wanted an additional DC/DC converter for the 12-volt circuit.
Bosch, amongst suppliers, supplied a 48-volt system as the premise of what the corporate known as a “hybrid for everybody,” however that system additionally did not embrace (and even encourage) purging 12-volt {hardware}.
The 2021 Tesla Mannequin S and Mannequin X took a step towards eliminating this {hardware} by dropping the lead-acid accent battery. Hyundai did one thing comparable with its 2020 hybrids, changing the lead-acid battery with a lithium-ion accent battery—one nonetheless at 12 volts, nevertheless.