IDTechEx visited Polaris Industries in Switzerland to learn more about this acquisitive and highly successful company that grew 20% last year, when so many others were fighting for survival. Polaris Industries is world leader in off-road vehicles with $2 billion in sales. It owns lifestyle motorcycle brands Victory and Indian as well as having leadership in snowmobiles and a rapidly growing military activity including small pure electric vehicles. Unusually, this military activity involves standard products not bidding for projects. Other standard pure electric products are the golf-car-like Breeze range of specialist pure EVs and the GEM neighbourhood electric vehicles. Its Product Development Center in Minnesota employs 350 people.
It recently bought the Chrysler GEM neighbourhood electric vehicle business in the USA and, the subject of our visit, some of the Swissauto activities in Burgdorf Switzerland, notably including the Range EXtender REX single cylinder range extender optimised for vehicles such as city cars that will mainly travel in all-electric mode and need the range extender only occasionallly.
At 22 kW this is at what we see as the sweet spot of range extenders. It is unusual in being a single piston petrol device with no need for a fuel pump, this providing unusual fuel economy, low emissions and cost control. Indeed, it seems to us that power to weight ratio may also be good, raising possibilities in hybrid aircraft and many other applications.
For higher power it can develop into a two piston engine. Polaris already makes small piston engines at the quality end, not competing with the Briggs and Stratton you see in your ride-on lawn mower. All this adds up to Polaris Industries planning to expand rapidly as an engine manufacturer, though working through Tier One suppliers as it is not one.
IDTechEx forecasts that well over 30 million hybrid vehicles will be sold in the next ten years. Most will be cars but include in that figure hybrid buses, heavy industrial outdoor vehicles and light industrial and commercial vehicles. Then there are military, marine surface craft and other hybrids. Only the very biggest will have the no battery diesel electric type of powertrain not normally called an electric vehicle. Most of them will be series hybrids with internal combustion piston engines designed from the ground up for that purpose. At the fringes, these will compete with micro jet engines, fuel cells and other range extenders which together may take around ten percent of the potential, since they are not yet in production and they have their pros and cons. Paradoxically, with modern specialist gear trains, many of these designed-to-purpose range extenders will also be useful for use in small conventional, non-electric vehicles as well, further increasing their potential sales. About twenty companies are developing these engines.
There are some common themes across the various activities in pure and hybrid electric vehicles at Polaris Industries. They are familiar with both synchronous permanent magnet motors and asynchronous induction motors and can see some move to the latter for cost and reliability reasons as performance ceases to be a constraint. Lead acid traction batteries are widely used but lithium ion has to be a prospect for the future, we think. Engineering Director Stacey Stewart pointed out that their many electric vehicle types gain economy of scale with key components even as these are continuously modernised. We noted that although the military vehicles have lead acid technology for now, they have 22.5kW 48V high-efficiency AC induction motors. We learnt that the trend to higher voltage such as 500V in the Frazer Nash pure electric sports cars and 700V in the pure electric Hummer is unlikely to be repeated in recreational, rough terrain vehicles for safety reasons. Higher voltage, combined with appropriate electric motors, can provide efficiencies but their use is disputed. There seems to be scope to use the near- silent range extenders in Polaris Industries' vehicles as well as selling them on the open market.
For more attend Electric Vehicles Land Sea Air USA 2012.
