Swappable Batteries Motorcycle Consortium expands to 21 members
Last year we reported that Yamaha, Honda, Pierer Group and Piaggio were entering battery consortium, for a universal swappable battery system, in a move to create an industry standard (link).
The member list has now expanded to include: AVL, Ciklo, Fivebikes, Forsee Power, Hioki, Honda, Hyba, JAMA, Kawasaki, KTM, KYMCO, Niu, Piaggio, Polaris, Roki, Samsung, Sinbon, Sumitomo Electric, Suzuki, Swobbee, Vitesco, VeNetWork (Atex, Fantic, Motori Minarelli), Yamaha.
The SBMC convened in July with a set of technical specifications agreed upon, and work on prototyping and standardisation kicking off. The SBMC also became a formal liaison member of the voluntary European standards: CEN, CENELEC and ETSI.
The consortium’s goals are:
- Develop common technical specifications of the swappable battery systems
- Confirm common usage of the battery systems
- Make, and promote, the Consortium’s common specifications as a standard within European and International standardization bodies
- Expand the use of the Consortium’s common specification to global level
Details are scarce at this stage, however the SBMC states, “The SBMC is on track to achieve its goals as planned, and can now count on the best available expertise in the world to do so.”
Honda also recently delivered their Honda Power Pack Exchanger in Japan, which is a charging and swapping battery wall, that allows consumers to easily access fully charged batteries, with businesses able to run the battery exchanger via cloud services, for payment and monitoring. It’s unclear how existing technology like the Honda Exchanger may be incorporated into the SBMC.
