BorgWarner Akasol AG
Powering the Mobility of Tomorrow Today
- This article first appeared in the Railway-News magazine Issue 5 2021.
The battery systems of AKASOL have been providing energy for a multitude of electrified commercial and industrial vehicles for numerous years. The modular approach followed by AKASOL does not only offer remarkable flexibility and scalability, but also the highest economic efficiency. In co-operation with ALSTOM, this proven technology will now be brought on to the railways, bringing a highly efficient and environmentally friendly alternative power unit to yet another industry.
What started as an association of electrical engineering students practicing research and development at Technical University Darmstadt in 1990, was transformed into a company in 2008. Early on, the vision of alternative mobility concepts constituted the main incentive for conducting research and forging products ready for serial production out of it. This objective was achieved in 2015 when AKASOL won series orders for two major European bus manufacturers. Since then, various orders have followed and leading to massive growth for AKASOL and paving the way for new serial production facilities, which opened up in Michigan (US), and Langen (Germany). Finally, in 2020, the company moved its headquarters to the newly built Gigafactory 1 in Darmstadt. The value created in those three plants exceeds the materialistic one represented by more than 4,500 series systems delivered to 84 customers globally; compared to the use of conventional combustion engines, 280t of CO2 reduction will be achieved over the lifetime of all equipped CVs.
