Applications such as electric vehicles and energy storage have gradually seen material demands. However, whether the two applications can be operated safely and effectively depends on the battery. Many industry leaders in Taiwan have been investing in those fields or cross-domain developments for many years. Among them, Taiwan startup XING Mobility has not only written a new chapter for battery cooling technology but also successfully found a new breakthrough for Taiwan manufacturers in the international market competition.
XING Mobility was established in 2015, co-founded by Royce Hong, chairman of Panasonic Taiwan, and former Tesla engineer Azizi Tucker. They successfully developed the first electric race car in Taiwan in 2016 and launched the first electric supercar with an immersion-cooled battery system in 2018.
"Whether immersion cooling technology is used in energy storage, electric vehicles, or any other field, the technology itself has not changed much, and XING Mobility is just trying to be as versatile as possible. I think immersion cooling technology will become a very big topic in 2023 or 2024," said Hong. He continued to state that such technology has long been developed in the server world, but if it is used in electric vehicles, the reduction in temperature and energy consumption will be even more pronounced than in servers.
The biggest problem with electric supercars is heat dissipation. Hong explains that even if a normal passenger car has 200 horsepower, it only takes 50 to 60 horsepower to meet typical operating demands. Even for rapid overtaking, an increase in horsepower is only a matter of 5 seconds. If a supercar has 400 to 500 horsepower, barely anybody would really turn on "full power." For a race car, however, it's a completely different story, as the track is designed so that the driver has to constantly switch between speeding and braking, and the heat generated by such a high level of discharging will continue to build up.
How harsh is the racing environment? According to Hong, any American electric car or luxury sports car brand running on an international race track in Taiwan will probably have all the warning lights on by the third lap. So if you want to successfully complete a 20-lap race, the cooling system has to be extraordinary. However, there has not been any electronic system on the market that can handle such a situation, and XING Mobility has not been able to find a product that meets the cost and performance requirements, so they have had to build their own!
Royce Hong told DIGITIMES that its potential car maker customers are all mid-to-high-end manufacturers that have already launched several generations of electric cars. "In terms of battery cooling technology for electric vehicles, XING's solution is unique and reliable, so car makers' senior R&D and CTOs are knocking on our doors, so it is clear that unique, forward-looking, and world-leading technologies are the focus of car makers' attention nowadays." This also reflects the fact that XING Mobility has been on the stage of countless international battery exhibitions in recent years.
