Mahindra-owned Pininfarina has announced a partnership to design cars that will be built upon the modular electric vehicle platform developed by Benteler and Bosch.
Pininfarina’s expertise in design and integrating the upper body with a chassis will be making it an excellent partner in the collaboration. Among themselves, Benteler, Bosch and Pininfarina will be able to cover the complete development process for an electric vehicle including the building of prototypes. The partnership will give a strategic advantage for new electric vehicle manufacturers to quickly implement their prototypes in many different variations and designs, saving them both time and money.
Marco Kollmeier, Vice President of the Business Unit Electro-Mobility at BENTELER Automotive has said that businesses that want to enter the e-mobility market will strongly benefit from the partnership and they can build their products upon the standardized interfaces integrating the body and chassis. This will help the auto manufacturers to bring their product to the market much faster without having to spend years and millions developing them.
The technical foundation of this partnership is the rolling chassis that Benteler and Bosch have developed, based on the BENTELER Electric Drive System (BEDS). In development since 2019, the rolling chassis comes with integrated crash management and can be used for a wide variety of EVs thanks to its flexible and scalable battery-storage systems. The chassis has been developed to fit several battery sizes and body shapes from hatchbacks to MPVs.
Bosch will be bringing its expertise in electrical and electronic components to the table in this joint venture. It will be in charge of providing electric/electronic components, sub-systems, including electric drives, steering system, vehicle control unit and the braking system.
For India, however, this EV platform will not be relevant as Mahindra has already developed its own flexible EV platform with the MESMA 350. The MESMA 350 is a modular architecture that can support various body shapes and sizes. It can also support battery capacities up to 80 kWh and electric motors from 60 kW to 280 kW as well as dual motor configurations. The Mahindra eXUV300 will be the first car from the company to be launched on the MESMA platform and the company has announced that MESMA will help bring economies of scale, drive costs down and enable the launch of smaller variants or models suitable for India.
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