General Motors (GM) announced the launch of its new wBMS (Wireless Battery Management System) today, which will power the third-generation electric vehicles equipped with Ultium battery.
GM stated that battery management through wireless technology can make battery matching more flexible across different vehicle models. This also allows commercial trucks and performance cars under GM’s pure electric planning to use wBMS battery technology.
The wBMS technology eliminates the complex work of designing different wire harnesses and dedicated wired communication systems for different vehicle models for power batteries. Compared with before, the total harness within the wBMS battery pack has been reduced by nearly 90%. The reduced harnesses reduce the weight of the battery pack, and are conducive to vehicle lightweighting. On the other hand, a reduced number of harnesses in the pack creates more internal space for the battery pack, facilitating the arrangement of more batteries.
At the same time, wBMS also makes the software part of the battery management system easier to update and rewrite, and even enables over-the-air (OTA) upgrades. wBMS can coordinate the voltage balance of each battery group to obtain optimal performance. It can also perform real-time battery group operating condition checks and adjust module and sensor parameters inside the pack according to instructions.
Finally, GM announced that wBMS technology will be standard on all GM pure electric vehicle models using Ultium batteries. According to previous reports, the capacity planning for GM’s Ultium battery ranges from 50 kWh to 200 kWh, covering compact cars to full-size pickups.
This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.