Bollinger Motors streamlined battery pack patent drawing.
Bollinger Motors thinks the battery pack design it developed for its upcoming electric vehicles is worth legally protecting. The company announced today that it has filed for a patent for the pack’s design, and the patent includes “mechanical, electrical, and systems-engineering innovations,” the company said.
CEO Robert Bollinger said in a statement that the company’s engineering team “has created a pack with high-strength structural properties, exemplary cooling features, and state-of-the-art software.” Those structural properties start with a central I-beam that is surrounded by battery modules, and the I-beam has channels filled with a cooling fluid that can be pumped through the pack to pull heat out of the modules.
Those modules mean the battery is not one-size-fits-all, and instead uses 35-kWh “strings” that can be configured to make packs that vary in size as well as energy capacity. The smallest pack would obviously be 35 kWh, and the company said that “70, 105, 140, 175 kWh, and higher” sizes are all possible and ,any of these sizes would also be capable of both 350- and 700-volt configurations. CEO Bollinger told me the strings are “essentially battery packs unto themselves, [and] can each operate independently of each other if one ‘goes down’.”
Bollinger Motors streamlined battery pack patent drawing.
Bollinger’s in-house battery management system (BMS) was designed to handle any number of those 35-kWh strings, which means a single BMS can be used no matter what pack size or voltages future Bollinger EVs use.
Bollinger added that these are the three main reasons that make their battery pack different enough to be patentable. Bollinger Motors filed its provisional patent application for the battery pack, number 17/068,260, on October 12, 2020.
Late last year, Bollinger filed for patent protection for its all-wheel-drive, Class 3 electric vehicles, for the “specific arrangement of major components and subsystems,” the symmetrical layout of some of the EV’s major components and software vehicle controls. Bollinger has also filed for a patent for its pass-through storage area that lets its utility vehicles carry 16-foot long boards.
Both of the company’s first two vehicles, the B1 sport-utility vehicle and B2 pickup truck, will start at $125,000 and first deliveries are scheduled for early 2021. Bollinger says it will build the battery packs for its electric vehicles starting next year, and it will also make them commercially available for standalone applications.
