What OEMs told us at The Battery Show: Start at the Machine
Insight
Every conversation we had at The Battery Show landed on the same question: “How do we turn a system of record into a system of action?”
We spent four days at Huntington Place in Detroit, the largest advanced battery event in North America, talking with operators, OEMs, and battery engineers. This is what they told us.
The question underneath every conversation was readiness
Who | What they told us |
|---|---|
Telecom operator | Plenty of data lakes, not enough visibility. They already collect enormous volumes of battery and asset data, but nothing watches it and tells someone what to do. |
Operations lead, industrial equipment fleet | How ready is my fleet. Equipment readiness based on battery condition, not a raw state of charge number sitting in a report somewhere. |
Automotive OEM representative | They would rather buy battery intelligence than build it. The question was never whether they could build it, only whether building gets them to market faster. |
Three segments with different stakes, and the same starting point. Nobody asked for more data. Everybody asked for a way to use what they already collect.
Three people asked for three different first screens
That readiness question doesn't belong to just one person inside a customer's organization. A fleet manager, a service manager, and a battery engineer sat through the same demo and asked for three different things, each on a different time horizon. The fleet manager wanted to know what they can send out this shift. The service manager wanted to know where risk is building that they can't see yet. The battery engineer wanted to know whether a fault is the pack or the system.
Fleet manager | Service manager | Battery engineer | |
|---|---|---|---|
Horizon | Today, this shift | Months to years, across the fleet | One fault, one pack, right now |
Main question | Which machines are ready, and which need attention? | How healthy is the fleet over time, and where is risk building? | Why did this pack fault, and is it the pack or the system? |
Action taken | Pull a machine, charge or swap a battery, call service | Plan service visits, review warranty extensions, budget replacements | Find root cause, push a firmware fix, advise service |
The split came up in the same shape across conversations, before we had shown anyone a screen. It is the organization chart of anyone running a fleet with batteries inside it.
What people pushed back on
People who sat through the demo recognized themselves in that split immediately. The pushback that followed was the same at nearly every table: who sees what. The operations lead's first question about a shared fleet view was whether it is secure. Nobody questioned whether the data was useful. They questioned who gets to see it and who gets to act on it. Any product that puts a whole fleet on one screen has to answer that before it answers anything else.
The machine is the unit, not the battery
Here is the finding that mattered most. We expected people to navigate from the battery outward: pick a pack, then find out which machine it sits in. Every conversation corrected that.
Packs sit together in the real world. A forklift, a floor scrubber, a scissor lift: the packs inside it are wired together, charged together, and fail together as a system. Nobody on a shop floor looks up a pack by serial number. They look up the machine, then ask what is wrong with it.
The fleet manager thinks in machines. The service manager plans around machines. Only the battery engineer drills down past the machine into the battery system and then the individual pack, and only when a specific fault calls for it.
Fleet, site, machine, and only then the battery. The machine is the level where a fleet manager's readiness question, a service manager's warranty question, and a battery engineer's fault question all meet.
Cost avoided, not a new expense
The screen that drew the strongest reaction in every demo was about warranty. The idea is simple. A pack that is aging better than its warranty assumed is a candidate for extended coverage, not replacement. Service managers did not read that as a feature. They read it as money they are spending today that they do not have to. That reaction told us more than the demo did.
What we are taking back
We went to Detroit to show a product. We came back with a clearer picture of who uses it and in what order. The fleet manager comes first, with a readiness question that has to be answered in machines, not packs. The service manager comes next, with a horizon measured in budget cycles. The battery engineer comes last, and only when something has already gone wrong.
The rest of what we heard, on alerts, on charging, on how readiness should be counted, all got simpler once the machine was the thing on the screen. That is the direction the work is going.
The harder work sits underneath the screen
None of this works without understanding how the hardware behaves first. Packs wired together report as one. A fault at the cell level reads differently from a fault at the system level. A screen that ignores that will be wrong in ways a battery engineer catches in the first minute, and that groundwork happens long before a customer sees anything.
It is also the answer to the automotive OEM's buy-or-build question. Every OEM's packs, wiring, fault behavior, and vocabulary are different, and translating them into something a fleet manager can act on is most of the work. Buying that translation is faster than building it. That was their math, not ours.
The show confirmed the question customers are asking. The machine is where the answer starts If you want to see what the machine-level view looks like for your fleet, book a demo.
Tushar Sonvani, Hanina Kahfi
