Intelligent battery fleets are powered by advanced tech and data-driven systems. They can contribute to the organization’s success in several ways.
The whole point of intelligent battery fleets is to lengthen the battery’s life and reduce its service downtimes. This lowers battery replacement costs and ensures you don’t need to replace your battery as often.
Well, don’t go anywhere because, in this article, we’ll learn more about the top reasons intelligent battery fleets will drive up your business success.
7 Reasons intelligent battery fleets contribute to your business success
Optimizing energy consumption is critical if you want to succeed financially in the long term. There are many factors that we’ll discuss when it comes to energy consumption and how intelligent battery systems can effectively manage it.
1. Fuel management
Fuel management systems for fleets are an excellent way to reduce long-term business costs and make the most of your trip. Inefficient fuel usage will only lead to a reduction in fuel reliability and make you refuel more often.
Fuel management systems increase data accuracy by collecting it remotely and allowing you to track your gallons/liters used and costs over time. Costs are displayed in real time and show fuel performance based on your vehicle type, location, and engine performance.
While electric vehicles don’t use fuel, the way data is measured is the same. Recharging your battery often will increase costs and maintenance. Fuel management systems allow you to see in which scenarios the EV is losing its charge the most, and keep in mind that a battery will lose its charge faster due to worn parts such as fuses, cables, and connectors. It’s best to always clean them and replace them when necessary.
2. Cost-efficiency
Electric vehicles (EVs) have become popular recently and are a highly popular option for fleet management. Some challenges they face involve battery degradation and increased long-term replacement costs.
Battery degradation involves a gradual loss of capacity over time, significantly impacting its performance. Battery degradation increases replacement costs and means you’ll need to replace your battery soon. Batteries with more than 20% capacity loss will usually start to perform slowly.
There are several reasons that can degrade a battery, and the most common ones are:
- Age
- Heat
- Charging and discharging habits
- Extremely cold environments
To control battery degradation and increase cost-efficiency, intelligent battery systems will monitor battery health and performance over time. You can use different types of tools and methods, such as:
- On-board diagnostics: measures the health status of the battery. They are allowing you to see if it needs replacement or not. When batteries drop below 80%, they will usually require replacement.
- Telematics: This allows you to remotely analyze the data you’ve collected from your EV fleet.
- Testing: This is an excellent way to assess the battery’s functionality and condition. This includes measuring voltage rates, capacity, and cycle rates. You have tests for them all!
Moreover, intelligent battery systems will also increase cost-efficiency by optimizing battery usage. Heavy battery usage can increase heat and, thus, accelerate the degradation phase, leading to higher long-term costs. This is done by planning routes and schedules to reduce idle times and avoiding busy routes as much as possible.
3. Battery analytics
Batteries can reach their full potential when you have the right analytics. Each intelligent battery system tool will have a dashboard showing your battery health status, performance rate, charge status, cycle rate, and more.
For example, let’s take the Elysia battery analytics software. It has over a decade of battery experience and will give you a dashboard showing the battery performance during the vehicle’s life and capacity rate.
The dashboard metrics allow you to see how long your battery will last during your trip and have a fast charging speed that will help you when you are in a rush. Overall, battery analytics are important if you make as few battery replacements as possible.
4. Environment sustainability
Compared to fuel vehicles, electric ones are much more environmentally friendly. Fuel vehicles will emit more than 350 grams of CO2 compared to only 200 grams of an electric vehicle. This means that electric vehicles have a less negative impact on the environment and even impact the linear model of buying and selling batteries.
The most commonly used types of batteries are lithium-ion batteries. Other battery energy storage solutions include:
- Lead-acid
- Lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide
- Sodium-sulfur
- Zinc-bromine
- Nickel-cadmium
Compared to other rechargeable battery technologies, lithium-ion batteries have a much lower environmental impact. This is because of their battery chemistry. They don’t have toxic heavy metals; even when they do, they’re easy to recycle.
Lithium-ion batteries hate heat, and they degrade really fast when temperatures are extreme. Intelligent battery systems will show you a dashboard of your charging and discharging requirements.
Degraded batteries will harm the environment since they use more energy than a healthy battery. Intelligent battery systems can alert users of overhanging and stop battery charging automatically.
5. Competitive advantage
Intelligent battery management systems can give you a significant advantage over competitors. The more you take care of your batteries, the better it’ll be for your business. You’re looking for cost reduction and improved performance; when you focus on battery maintenance, everything becomes easy.
Intelligent battery fleet systems are great for:
- Monitoring your battery status
- Reducing battery degradation
- Estimating the charge cycle of the battery
- Optimizing performance
- Giving analytical reports
There isn’t a single intelligent battery management system that will have a fixed set of criteria you need to adopt. The technological features will usually involve:
- The cost and size of a battery pack
- The application of the battery, its safety, lifespan, and warranty
- Certification requirements from government regulations where costs are faced if you don’t comply with them. This usually includes safety measures since batteries can have high levels of hazard if they overheat and have no control over them.
Your competitive advantage of having an intelligent battery management system for your fleet involves the fact that it monitors aging and charging status and the depth of the discharge. Thermal management and overcharging are prevented, so you comply with government regulations and remain one step ahead of competitors who don’t use it.
6. Much better customer service
When a customer is driving their electric vehicles, they want to be comfortable and not worried about what will happen on the road. Optimized routes and reliable delivery schedules allow this to happen.
Intelligent battery fleet systems remotely monitor and control all vehicles. It ensures real-time tracking and can even remotely disable a vehicle if it’s stolen or misused. Therefore, even if someone’s vehicle got stolen, they’d still be able to get it back with these features.
Moreover, these systems can reduce crash incidents with route optimizations and reduce the time to get from point A to point B.
7. On-time maintenance
If you take care of your vehicle, it’ll take care of you. Intelligent battery fleet systems are great in letting you know when your next service is supposed to be. Similar to gasoline and diesel engines, batteries need to be regularly maintained as well.
When a battery replacement is required, the system will tell you and will only be replaced based on what the manufacturer recommends. Each vehicle has different electrical requirements, and usually, after each maintenance period, the system might require up to eight hours of sleep time to relearn the new battery state of charge. The system might disable some electrical features to protect the battery during the replacement phase.
Maintenance also involves all parts connected to the battery, the connectors, cables, etc. They all need to be cleaned and replaced when possible.
Alternatively, even though you might not change parts as often as you would in a regular gas or diesel vehicle, monitoring battery performance is also considered part of the maintenance plan. Charge and discharge control helps prolong battery life to make it last as long as it can.
How intelligent battery fleets are impacting businesses
Technology has changed the way we work and has impacted how battery degradation is managed. Since lithium-ion batteries are used in electric vehicles, extreme temperatures might speed up their degradation process. Intelligent battery fleet systems have realized this and implemented important measures that we mentioned in the article.
Overcharging and discharging are now controlled and don’t allow the battery to overheat. Also, let’s not forget that lithium-ion batteries will wear much faster when they are completely charged and discharged. The intelligent battery management system doesn’t allow this to happen internally.
Therefore, you aren’t only winning in the long term but also reducing costs and carbon footprint, making a better environment to live in, and staying on top of maintenance schedules.
The Author:
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. For roughly four years, Tony has managed to write more than 500 SEO-optimized articles, and most of them have ranked #1 on Google. When writing, Tony’s main focus is to carefully do research and make sure that his content is high-quality.
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