14 November/December 2023 | E-Mobility Engineering smart Europe’s vice-president of r&d shares some of his insights into developing the company’s distinctive battery EVs. By Rory Jackson While automotive OEMs might now agree that electric powertrains are effectively the future of all mobility, it should be remembered that only 20 years ago, many of them saw electrifying vehicles as a peculiarity at best, and a waste of resources at worst. So, by the early 2000s, very few had ventured into e-mobility. Matters weren’t helped by General Motors’ now-infamous recall of its EV1, the company citing insufficient profitability despite widespread consumer enthusiasm for the car. While most OEMs had little interest in pursuing all-electric vehicles following the GM debacle, one company went against the tide to give the world its first and then biggest success story in EVs – the smart EQ Fortwo, better known by its colloquial name, the smart. Dr Tilo Schweers not only bore witness to that car’s development, but personally led the creation of the smart electric drive programme, as the company’s head of homologation (road approval), technical documentation and special vehicle engineering for the smart’s EV and HEV programmes. That programme led to the company’s first all-electric powertrain vehicle, from the smart EQ Fortwo’s first trial through to volume production that began in 2009. Although he worked outside smart and the Mercedes family in the late 2010s, these days his career has led him back to smart, where he is now vice-president of r&d of smart Europe and leads the company’s EV design, manufacturing and certification activities in Europe and China. Surprisingly, Dr Schweers’ academic background had little focus on automotive electric power systems. “Keep in mind this was in the 1980s and ’90s, so we had different topics on our agenda back then,” he says. “But there were two main ones that influenced me back then, which I’ve carried with me ever since. One was motorbike research – for which I gave a regular lecture at RWTH Aachen University on motorbike technology and engineering – and the other was a deep involvement in the first stages of what would become electronic stability control [ESC] technology, long before it became a standard offering in passenger cars.” Particularly important to the foundations of ESC (sometimes better known as ESP or electronic stability program, as branded and popularised by Bosch) was his creation of evaluation criteria for judging the impacts of such systems in passenger cars. Notably this was a few years before recognition and standardisation of relevant criteria such as the Moose Test for evasive manoeuvring. Schweers’ research, publications, and ultimately his PhD, laid much of the crucial groundwork for ESC to become mainstream. Smart thinking The smart company and marque has returned under a German-Chinese joint venture, with r&d for its smart #1 (pictured) led by Dr Tilo Schweers (Images courtesy of smart)
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