Beeway https://beeway.eu/en/vehicules/ is a modular electric vehicle designed in France, aims to contribute to decarbonizing the country’s transportation sector. The vehicle is electric, equipped with a 200 horsepower motor and a converter made in Basque country. The focus on modularity is highlighted, allowing users to customize the vehicle’s energy system by adding one, two, or three batteries for varying ranges, addressing the issue of unnecessary battery weight for shorter trips
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The vehicle is designed for professionals, particularly targeting the European market, where there are approximately 4.5 million diesel vehicles over 10 years old. The chassis-cabin design emphasizes modularity, allowing for easy customization based on specific professional needs. The vehicle’s energy system, with modular batteries, can not only power the mobility but also external equipment at the back of the vehicle.
A modular equipment showcase includes a basic trailer part that can be configured according to needs, showcasing the adaptability of the vehicle. The payload capacity ranges from one to 1.7 tons, with potential for extension or shortening of the vehicle length based on specific requirements.
A notable feature is the potential integration of hydrogen capability instead of multiple batteries, adding a future-proof element to the design. The modularity extends to the vehicle’s construction, enabling easy replacement of damaged parts without requiring a complete chassis change.
The vehicle features a transparent approach, displaying the modular rolling cage, and the body is made of lightweight and recyclable thermoplastic. The thermoplastic material allows for easy recycling and potential use of biosource plastic in the future.
The vehicle’s electric heating system eliminates the need for diesel, and various features like air conditioning, electric mirrors, and ABS contribute to its comprehensive design. Bway aims for transparency in information, displaying data required for homologation.
Regarding charging capabilities, the vehicle has both AC and DC chargers, with the ability to fast charge up to 150 kW. The company expects to complete homologation by the end of the year, emphasizing a quick process due to their ongoing work and substantial documentation.
The production process involves a one-piece flow system, with a focus on customization and adaptability. The company mentions the potential for automation in the welding of the rolling cage. They envision the possibility of establishing manufacturing facilities in different regions based on demand, providing flexibility in production.
The target price for Bway is set to be competitive in the market, aiming to offer an affordable solution for professionals. The company, embracing a small and agile approach, hopes to fulfill specific needs through customization and modularity. The vehicle’s potential entry into the US market is acknowledged, with considerations for adapting to different homologation systems globally.
The interview shifts to the powertrain, showcasing a partnership with Power Electronics (e-Motors) in France. The powertrain includes an electric motor, an inverter, and a reducer with an integrated differential. The focus on efficiency, functional safety, and the ability to provide a longer range through improved motor and inverter efficiency is highlighted. E-Power Labs, the company behind the powertrain, specializes in serving lower production volumes and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) like Bway.
The discussion concludes with the potential scalability of production quantities and support for integrating drive units in various applications. The company emphasizes its commitment to functional safety, showcasing their testing capabilities and support for customers in integrating drive units. The interview suggests that the modular and adaptable nature of Bway extends to its powertrain, ensuring compatibility and flexibility for various applications.
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So we’re here with a B way hi hi please introduce yourself okay I’m Phim Shak kovski uh business development director from bway so bway it’s a vehicle uh we design in France in Lon uh well Lon is quite famous I think here so what we are making U we are making
Uh we we want to make a vehicle which is available uh uh to help to decarbonize uh all the country and so first we want we make it electrical so we have uh just over there a motor a 200 horsepower motor with a converter made from uh EO
Our lives in Basco in in Pay Bas I can do a video interview with them after right so as a partner you have to do something here what does it enable to do yeah because it’s very specialized and there is a power electronic inside so they make a beautiful integration with
The motor coming from otor so where it is located in the vehicle so we need to go at the bottom and we can see here just uh at the really bottom we have the motor with the converter on top so what we have here we have all the electronic to for the
Interconnection we have also developed uh onboard computer which is used to control all the all all the device of the vehicle soon we will have also a fuse box which is coming from our design office so we try to make uh many things uh at home what is the design the idea
Of this this market so the Des the idea of the market yeah it’s basically we so okay we need to decarbonize is 4.5 million vehicle like this in Europe and using this vehicle it’s uh now they are diesels they are 10 years old so we wanted to put something on the
Market to help a professional so we don’t want to make uh a full configuration which would compete with the mass manufacturer but we want to do something more uh specific so we designed the chassis cabin and for us uh the modularity is crucial because we want we don’t want
The people to to carry uh tons of battery if they don’t need so much autonomy so the way we design the the energy system on the vehicle it we have have modular battery so so we can put one two or three batteries and this battery will give you
More or or less range depending on your requirement so roughly One battery it’s 150 km so if you put two batteries you go to 300 and if you put three batteries we have something like 400 kilm range so the energy for the battery can be used for the for the
Mobility or is the customer prefare it can be used to power uh an equipment at the back of the vehicle so it can be a what is this so this here what we have on the show it’s a it’s a basic uh equipment so we we have
Um uh uh sorry I don’t the trailer part yeah so here it’s just to open and to carry uh things we have a box so it’s modular kind of like you can configure it the way you want yeah we can configure it the way you want you need
So you can remove all of this equipment and at Autumn you can put an oven to to to get all the leaves uh coming from the trees at Spring you don’t need any to to get the the leaves you will you would you won’t use anymore the vacuum
Cleaner but maybe you will need to spray some water on some flowers so in that case you remove the vacuum cleaner you put the a tunk uh with a pressurized equipment to spray uh the flower how much can it uh transport how is the weight the weight it depend on
The configuration but roughly we have one to to 1.7 uh uh payload on that truck 1.7 ton yeah one it can goes up to 17 ton it depends of the number of battery and one interesed thing also it’s uh we make a modular vehicle so
Tomorrow it can be uh it can be longer it can be shorter if you need to to roam in a in a narrow streets then we can make it shorter for you it will be easier to to move also for some application we need to make it to make
It longer so we can make it longer and why can we do this is because we we have a uh constructed vehicle with a bolt ches so what is the difference compared to a standard vehicle it’s here everything is bolon we can see we have all these uh bolts everywhere so this is
To make the Assembly of the vehicle and then it can be uh change it can be adapted also one interesting fix if you get uh I don’t know an incident on the road and somebody bump you on on on the chassis then you just change the
Part which is damage you don’t need uh to change the whole chassis or not to say the vehicle compared to car does it add weight to have modularity no not not really not really we don’t have uh so much extra weight actually you could save weight because
You can just customize exactly to the configuration you need so you might actually save 200 kilos compared to something that you don’t need yeah this is one thing we want to do we want to make the vehicle as efficient as possible so you carry the battery you need not not more
Batteries you carry uh the length you need not a uh a too big vehicle also one thing during the if it appears that the battery are are too short for your operational requirement you need to go farer you need to to make extra work with a new customer it the
Vehicle is no more capable because it’s too short in range it doesn’t matter keep the vehicle and we can hi extra batteries we can see that it’s very easy to fix a battery we have one here and here it’s very simple we just Bolt the battery put extra cabling and the things it’s
Done so this is what we can do what is not on the display today also is the hydrogen capability so instead of having so many batteries we can put what one fuel cell uh between the frames of the chassis and in in the compartment here we can put the reservoir for the
Hydrogen is it possible to do a hybrid battery and hydrogen it’s always hybrid because hydrogen has does not have enough Dynamic when you when you push uh to get an acceleration it might takes uh 20 or 30 seconds to get the full power so it’s not satisfying so we always put a
Battery in front of the motor just to give a dynamic to the vehicle and when you break it’s the same the fuel cell continues to produce energy so we use this energy if we break to feed the battery and to charge the battery and also potentially it’s future proof you
Can just uh swap to Future technology yes and keep the same car or newer batteries come out 5 years later yeah you swap to new batteries yes this is one Al one thing also which is very particular to bua is that all these battery so I speak about changing the
Battery but we can move the battery here to a new technology so tomorrow we can have uh I don’t know solid ion solid lithiumion we can have sodium battery it’s possible we can we can merge we can convert a vehicle do you mind going inside the car and explain what you have
There inside okay so I go the way language language design language need to per so we have speak spoken about technology but we had got uh the worker every day so we got a comfortable seat three seats so here we have three seats we we can make also only two seats it
Depends on the customer some are working uh with the front so we have a bright screen uh showing usual information what is the system you have running yeah so for the system it’s just a proprietary system for the vehicle so we display uh all the information which is required by homologation yeah yeah
With the arm arm s so uh I don’t know the technical details we have air conditioning also uh uh we have electric mirror uh we have a ABS antiblocking system so we also what important things on this vehicle so the heating system is electric so you don’t need to put diesel
Uh to make some heat in the vehicle what are you showing by being transparent down there yeah so what we can see here uh it’s another battery module we can see the direction so it’s fully assisted uh and then the orange cable are the high power cable powering the engine and the
Converter one thing also I did not mention we try to optimize the vehicle so we have a frame which is made of aluminum and why did we choose aluminum it’s because it’s a light uh it’s a light metal so we we are saving weight and also it’s easily uh
Recyclable it mean that at the end of the life of the of the vehicle we can Dismount this rolling cage and put it back in production for some other part uh the body of the vehicle is made of uh thermoplastic So currently it’s uh it’s an ABS
Plastic also one good thing is it’s light so we don’t have so much weight another thing is that this can be easily recycled it can go back into the production and tomorrow we are working with uh also some Partners which are developing bios Source plastic
So it means we won’t use anymore the a plastic coming from from Petrol or two synthetic uh uh method but it will come from uh from nature it will be a biot plastic is there some more stuff in the front you didn’t talk about yeah like what we can say
More when I see when I see all these things here you talking about the electronics in there so here we have the electronic so B this is basically the brain of the vehicle the top part only yeah yeah the top part only and what’s under it so what’s under it’s a
Control it’s it’s it’s to connect and for some protection and here in the middle we have an interconnection of up to three batteries one power to the engine and on the other side but we don’t put it on display here for security reason we have the power uh
All all the connection for the charging so in terms of the charging we have inside that box we have also an AC charger able to go up to 22 KW and and also we have a DC charger able to go to 150 KW fast charging yeah for the fast charging so
You see the fast charging has to be uh used uh quite exceptionally when you make a long trip but not for uh daily daily usage because you might have an an edging of the battery but we provides the capability in case there is a special operation one day okay they can
They can use it how far is it from mass production how far is it so this one so so now we are making uh what we call industrialization it makes we we optimize all the design so it can be easily produced we we make uh V assembly in our
Factory in Lon and we are so for production we are ready to make it very quickly and the second aspect uh it’s the homologation or the type approval for this to put it on the road and to be allowed uh to to to how fast
It can be done uh by end of the year the homologation so quick yeah yeah so you’ve been working on it already for a while yes yes yes today we we need about 150 documents I mean written documents uh to produce to the authority making loation we already make 120 documents
The testing is the same we we started already full testing of the vehicle and part of them are used for uh type approval so uh would it make sense to have passengers in the back uh no because for this we need a special homologation M1 so for the time
Being we do not plan to make a a special module for you could have 20 people there in the back yeah yeah we won’t make it so it’s bigger than a cyber truck do you consider this a competitor to cyber truck the Cyber trck it’s a it’s a bit it’s already fully packaged
There’s not so much you can do on the design one good things it’s we are making our own vehicle so it means we can make it exactly as you want it’s uh we are like like Artisans we can make a Ser of 10 or 20 vehicle especially for
Un need and customization is one key point of this we are modular we can adapt the technology we can adapt the customer so we hope uh we can fulfill a lot of needs doing like this so just U sorry to mention the Cyber truck again but they sell for
$120,000 right now what’s your Target price yeah yeah so the price will be at the market price because we we have some way to optimize the cost but uh we can say that we restart from the the 50k up to after it can go up to 150k for the most equipped version with
Everything if this is a huge success you can ramp up scale up make many many very quickly yes yes because the way it is manufactur it’s uh we are not making uh Shan manufacturing it’s uh we have some work position at some place in the factory and all the equipments are coming to
That uh place so the operator is working on a basic uh tooling and then when he finish he give it to the neighbor which which will make it uh at at the next step of the production method is that an assembly line or a one piece flow one
Piece flow one piece flow like four that’s interesting yeah yeah do you have any automation for the production automation automation uh only for the welding of the rolling cage interesting so you could add more you could add more automation when you Mass produce we we see if there is one
Particular model or design which is uh which will represent 90% And we sell thousands of vehicle like this so what are you the step of in in any manufacturing you do first stamping welding painting and final assembly you follow these steps or you have a different approach yeah what we do we
Have a supply chain and we buy the equipment uh from contractors and we make the final assembly and some contractors are making so you buy the chassis from somebody else no no the chassis are designed in house yeah yeah in house the chassis is in and the chassis we buy the so what’s
In interesting also it’s uh if a particular region uh is willing to get a lot of vehicle it’s very easy for us to build a factory instead of having that’s the principle of that you can have you can have Manufacturing in any place that you want to so you do the
Chassis then you do the the motor and then you do the cabin what is the steps of the manufacturing yeah so so different steps so we have uh one step for the doors because in the doors there is a lot of uh technology and there is a lot of work
To be done so we have workplace for the doors we have uh one workplace for the front for all the electronic the motor the power turn the Direction all of this and then we have uh the final embly where we bring the parts and we put them
All together okay and who does the pain you do the pain or the the pain is done in Outsource painting painting ah it’s a painting no no it’s a plastic uh it’s wrapping vinyl wrapping that’s very that’s very intelligent then you don’t got to deal with the emissions yeah yeah
We don’t have to make emission of painting the California artera does the same thing it’s a new train to instead of painting to do wrapping yeah how about the one thing to finish on this one thing also if there is a scratch if there is a scratch on on the body it’s always
Happen bicycle or motor bike or whatsoever then it doesn’t matter it remain wide so obviously it will be slightly damaged but it remain wide I mean it won’t be uh a full different colors how about the performance uh how fast can it go 0 to 0 to 100 so we have
An engine able to go to up to 200 horsepower so we can make uh 110 uh kilm per hour speed and we can climb a slope of 25% all right and you can uh have a trailer in the back also yes yes this uh the the chassis we design allow also Towing of
Uh Towing of a trailer at the back and we can go uh for the whole uh train we we size it to go up to 4.4 tons for the whole uh how about the US market the Chinese market so so US market for us
It’s uh for the time being it’s a bit uh The Next Step because we need to to reprocess the homologation we have a different system of type approval so we have a type approval for Europe but the US is different in China well the CH there is
Already a lot of vehicle in China the Middle East might be an option also because it could be uh it could be uh also a market because there are special needs which cannot be satisfied by all vehicles so since we are able to customize a lot uh maybe there opportunity how about transporting
A house behind like a camper yes this is one option maybe a Transformer C camper that becomes bigger when you park and with solar panels on the top it’s possible whatever is within 1.7 F people can be uh yeah yeah yeah so we already started to discuss uh with some
Uh I mean uh for the camping car and they need a longer chassis but as I say we can make it they need some power for entertainment on board the the comper we can we can open the interface of power and we need to provide autonomy for the people to travel
So I like a modular camper you push a bottom there three three rooms it’s just gigantic yeah yeah okay why not it’s up to the comping uh the one making the the van all right so maybe can you introduce your your colleague who talks about the
The engineer so maybe yeah if you want to know more about the power TR we have here I’m happy to present you uh R and uh because here we are make a special partnership with power lab and a lab is a Basco company from Spain making
Electronics so I give you have the mic I give the mic all right all right so please uh please introduce yeah definitely so we are in powerls my name is uh J I’m technical responsible of the company and we are supplying the 31 e AEL to
Poan and this is the result of a joint cooperation with a large Automotive tier one which is e-motors with as small company as we are which is e powerls located in in Spain so this part here yeah so what we can see here here in
This area this is the the let’s say the reducer with an integrated differential so these plastic parts are emulating the the dry shafts then if we move move to the left side here you can see this is the electric motor which is the product developed and produced in in France by
By e- Motors and then on top of it what you can find is one inverter so this inverter what does is um is connected in this area to the battery so this means that we are converting the DC current from the battery into AC current so here
We have some power switches that uh um with uh specific software and so on then we connect to the three phes of the electric machine which are covered by by this plate and then we are able to control efficiently the the electric motor depending on the um requirements
And demands that the driver is always always uh sending with the pedal always of course uh fulfilling safety and uh efficiency what is the challenge of converting is DC to AC right correct uh what is the challenge and how do you make it better than other people or well
Um all the co-founders and the team come in or working E power Labs we have a past in large automotive industry so the combination with e Motors is just a symbiosis because uh we are small agile but we are at the same technological uh level so in this sense the challenge are
Different ones so of course the first one is efficiency so we need to ensure a good efficiency Lev level uh to the electric motor and as well uh to the inverter because if we are more efficient here we can either extend the range of the battery or we can reduce the
Capacity for the battery so this means that this is an another value indeed we have developed a new functionality which combining different switching techniques we manage to increase even more the efficiency of the entire uh power train yeah because if you increase the efficiency the whole car goes further
Correct that’s it or you can do a cheaper car because you are removing part of the battery which means that uh it’s affordable to to different uh or it could be stronger can carry more stuff uh not more stuff but you can carry it further so the power of the motor and
Inverter is something and then the the range is uh proportional to the well to the entire system efficiency and if making the controled inverter and the motor more efficient this means that you can have a longer range what is the background of your your company yeah so
What stuff you do we are E power lab so we are a company founded in 2020 so we are coming from the automotive industry in my case I spent seven years working either in Germany or Austria and or ambition is to uh bring the set ofthe art in terms of electric motor
Controllers from large Automotive to low OEM so when working in this industry we were seeing that uh everyone was moving towards electrification big ones like Bosch uh vitesco and so on they are focusing on serving the large and our ambition is to bring the same technology but to uh
Lower production volumes and such oems like here we have bway what is this ARX Tri cor yeah so one of the most important part in the inverter and in any product which is um mounted in a vehicle is the functional safety so each every product must be functional
Safe so that you can meet the the the safety level that is required so you don’t produce no hazards and and damages to the material and to the people not only to the people inside the car but as well all people and and material which is surrounding the the vehicle so with
This microcontroller which is very powerful is a state-ofthe-art in automotive we have enough power computing power and mechanisms that enables us to reach the highest safety standard so highest safety uh so there’s a partnership going on here how how how do you make the best uh EV engine and who’s making that that
Part mhm who’s the partner here so in this case the motor that you see here you can see the logo is uh e Motors in this case so if you zoom in there so imotor is a manufacturer from the motor and then the gear box in this case is
From from stantis so we are receiving the set we are making the assembly and we are serving with this product to to the End customer so we are taking responsibility of making the final assembly making then flight testing and providing a full proven component the what if this becomes a huge success it
Can be large quantities also it doesn’t have to be only smaller quantities right correct so in this case or in the current scenario um otor has a wide um bandwidth let’s say to produce Motors and there won’t be an issue in increasing the production to to cover
Many thousand units per year so when I when I at the Cyber Tru they’re talking about one motor dual motor three motor does it make sense to have more Motors in a car like this this depends purely on the vehicle system that you want to
Design so if you want to make an allad car then at least you need uh well you can do it with a motor with transfer case but normally you can put in the rear one axle in the front another one but as this vehicle has been designed to
Make uh well this and you could support that yes yes yes so we have we have the the knowledge and we also support the customers in integrating proper the drive units not only this set but also we sell inverters um as a standalone product which means that we
Can pair it with different Motors and as we have as well our own test benches which are state-of-the-art test benches from the brand a we have we can offer turn key solutions to the customers so at the end of the day the customer can take over the system M into the vehicle
Make some final twixs in the vehicle and up running for it’s exciting time the development the latest developments in the EV industry yes I mean electrification is reaching many different markets and sectors not only large Automotive companies but we are customers we have customers in um motorcycles in Marine
Industry and northroad segment so there are some applications which are more prone to make the electrification but other ones they are more reluctant to make the the Swift P but well we believe it’s coming