Monitoring, Maintenance and Reliability: Interview with Luis Barreto of MegaFlux

MegaFlux Fleet Electrification Solutions are among the pioneers of electric drivetrains technology with roots stretching as far back as a century ago. eDRV spoke to Luis Barreto about their fleet charging solutions, the buyer’s journey in hardware and the importance of using OCPP as a standard in Mexico.

Is MegaFlux entirely located in Mexico? How did their EVs come into being?

Yes, although I'm based in Houston, our operations are all in Mexico today. The Gottfried family, my partners who founded MegaFlux, has been building electric motors and equipment for about a hundred years and were the first to patent the variable speed wind turbine. The family realized early on that electric mobility is going to be the reality and started preparing for it about 15 years ago. 

They took a very practical and smart approach to the problem. Rather than trying to replicate and start from scratch in building an electric power train, they focused on electrifying the vehicle. They replaced the diesel engine with an electric motor and tied it into the existing transmission. Our motor is designed to replace the diesel motor and use the transmission and we've actually worked with both manual and automatic so that we can have it work seamlessly in buses and trucks.

Is EV adoption supported in Mexico?

We have gotten a lot of support from the government to develop a Mexican-built electric bus, which we have done. We unveiled the Taruk last year, a 9.5 meter bus that is fully electric, has ~75% national content, and was recently certified as “Hecho en Mexico” (built in Mexico) by Secretary of Economy Marcelo Ebrard. Mexico is a massive market for mass transport. 50% of Mexicans use public transportation every day, so it's a great opportunity.

Megaflux now offers charging solutions as well. How has that been for the company?

We realized early on that you can’t sell a fleet EV without the infrastructure being solved. The options in the market were lacking so we needed to do it ourselves. We are at the stage where we are about to start our deployments at scale. We haven't done any scale deployments yet, focusing on smaller fleets. With Taruk, we're getting to the stage where we're now engaged in a variety of conversations with a bunch of different states and cities with real interest in deploying fleets at scale. 

There’s the civil works side which is fairly easy. You're going to drop in a substation and, depending on the load, set up the chargers. In support of our customers, we realized a couple of years ago that this is an area where there is very little technical knowledge. We ended up having a lot of customers come to us with the problem of how to plug a European charger to a Chinese bus. They weren't “talking to each other”. So we went in there, got to the firmware level, updated them, and got them to talk. I've been an infrastructure investor for fifteen years and I find that if you break it down into parts, it's pretty straightforward.

When it comes to communications between charger and bus, did you build that all yourselves?

We've been building in-house software and developing much of our technology ourselves. A lot of this experience already comes from the programming my partners have done for the equipment that they've been building for other functions. Everything within our vehicles is really our software or programming that is controlling it, because we need to be able to do that to solve the day to day problems that we find.

We also build our own power packs. We buy cells from China and put them together into packs ourselves with our proprietary designs. From software programming to thermal management, we do it all ourselves. 

I can't tell you the number of horror stories from customers who previously bought from world class brands, who bought 50 trucks from a Chinese brand without a charger. The truck OEM said they're not in the charging business, so the customer had to go find an engineer who then found a charger. When they plugged it in, the charging just didn't work with both parties pinning each other for the responsibility.

Given your experience with horror stories in EV charging, what are your priorities when choosing the right charger?

Our main concerns are location, the interconnection to the grid, how high we can get it at that location and in what period of time. For 100 buses you can get to 10 megawatts of capacity. In cities in Mexico where the utility is state-owned and has a monopoly this is quite hard. Getting that speed to market is equally difficult.

Then the question becomes how many chargers do we need? Can we charge daily or every two days? With buses, it's typically a daily charge but with a truck fleet, we've actually had clients that don't use them as much, so it charges every two or three days.

Depending on that usage pattern and the availability of power, we'll think through what the optimal size of charger is to ensure that everything is charged daily, yet keep the cost as low as possible. What we find is in some setups we have one charger for every two vehicles because you charge every off day. In other setups where footprint may be an issue, one large charger with two connectors is able to deal with two buses at once.

Ultimately, in the end, we're trying to keep the costs as low as possible by understanding the way the fleet's gonna be used. We try to come up with the optimal way to keep costs low and also ensure fleet availability because that's ultimately the main mission. 

What have been your major learnings from your charger buying experiences? 

Monitoring, maintenance and reliability are the key variables. We have had chargers that haven’t worked out of the box and obviously that's a big issue. Luckily, we haven't faced any meaningful problems, in any of the deployments where we've been involved with the infrastructure construction. 

There are some fleets that are not mindful of the needs of charging infrastructure and might wait 8 months before building it. 8 months of trucks sitting in a lot is extreme and might lead some fleets to hire a diesel generator just so they can charge! Solving the capital needs of a charging network goes a long way in this industry. 

Monitoring and maintenance is also key where some clients are asking us to take on because none of our competitors offer any support and sometimes the service is absolutely terrible like in getting spare parts or needing a long time to solve smaller issues. It’s essential to have local technical support where, if there's any problems, we can switch the charger or get somebody out there quickly to deal with it. 

OCPP is now becoming the global standard for charger-server communications. Is this also the case in Mexico? 

I wish there were more OCPP in Mexico! We really need to nail that down into having one EV charging infrastructure that is standard for everybody. But a lot of chargers claim to be OCPP compliant but many of the fleets have their custom software solutions so that interoperability is key.

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