Why We Are Building VENDOR.Drive

VENDOR.Drive is the onboard energy architecture we are developing for electric vehicles to change the job of the traction battery: from the reservoir that has to hold the entire journey to a buffer for start-up and acceleration. Our goal is electric transport that drives without planning the next charging stop and delivers electrical power at its destination. We are engineering VENDOR.Drive for integration by vehicle manufacturers and engineering partners. Project stage: TRL 2 — Technology concept formulated.

What problem are we building VENDOR.Drive to solve?

A battery electric vehicle has to carry, as stored chemical energy, every kilowatt-hour it will use before the next charge, and then refill that energy through the charging network. This one design choice ties together three things engineers would rather size separately: range, peak power and dependence on infrastructure.

Every kilometre of range is paid for in mass and money

The average battery in a new battery electric car sold in 2025 was close to 70 kWh in the EU, below 60 kWh in China and around 90 kWh in the United States [2]. BloombergNEF’s 2025 survey put battery-electric-vehicle packs at 99 USD/kWh, the cheapest transport segment, against an all-segment average of 108 USD/kWh [4]. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports latest-generation cell energy densities of up to 205 Wh/kg for LFP and 265 Wh/kg for NMC chemistries [2].

In a battery-only architecture that mass travels on every trip, whether the range is used or not.

Range is tied to the charging network

Public charging points worldwide passed 7 million at the end of 2025 [3]. The ratio is uneven: around 11 electric light-duty vehicles per public charging point globally, but about 33 in the United States [3]. In China, public charging points reached 5.16 million at the end of August 2026 [7].

Charging time is downtime

Fifteen minutes at a 150 kW charger can add almost 180 km of range to a car, but only about 30% of battery electric cars on the road can use ultra-fast charging at all [3]. For a commercial fleet every charging session is a vehicle that is not earning, and the average electric truck range of about 300 km is below what long-haul routes need [3].

Fast charging concentrates load on the grid

The EU Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1804, requires a charging pool for cars and vans of at least 400 kW, with at least one 150 kW charging point, every 60 km on the core TEN-T network by the end of 2025 [3][5]. More than 40 public truck chargers in the EU already exceed 1 MW [3]. Grid upgrades for charging depots can take between one and several years, depending on voltage [3].

Why today’s answers do not solve it

Each established answer fixes one part of the problem and moves the pressure somewhere else. None of them changes the role of the battery as the journey’s energy reservoir. That is the role VENDOR.Drive changes.

Bigger batteries add mass and raw-material exposure: lithium prices at the beginning of 2026 were more than twice their level a year earlier [2]. Faster charging works only where the battery accepts it and the grid can deliver it; about 50 of 670 battery-electric models support more than 250 kW [3]. Fuel range extenders bring the fuel tank back: extended-range electric vehicles fell to less than 7% of global electric car sales in 2025 [1]. For a broader comparison, see our articles on range extenders and EREV, BEV and PHEV.

What VENDOR.Drive changes

From energy reservoir to power buffer. We are engineering VENDOR.Drive so that the onboard energy architecture supplies the traction electrical system while the vehicle moves. The battery stays in the vehicle, with two jobs only: starting the architecture from rest and covering short peaks such as acceleration and manoeuvring. Our target is that it no longer serves as the store that has to hold the whole journey.

Range decoupled from chemical capacity. Once the battery is no longer the journey’s reservoir, the size of the pack no longer has to define how far the vehicle goes. Our goal is driving without planning the next charging stop.

Breaking the dependence on the next charge. Charging infrastructure stays useful. Our goal is to break the dependence on a charging stop before every next driving cycle.

Propulsion in motion, electrical power at destination. We are designing the same architecture to supply compatible external loads after arrival: communications and emergency equipment for emergency response, pumps and telecom nodes at field and temporary sites, mobile services for commercial and municipal operations. It is designed as a vehicle function, not as a separate generator carried in the back.

From transport fleet to mobile energy fleet. Our direction is a fleet that moves energy capability together with people, equipment and cargo. It is not a vehicle-to-grid (V2G) or virtual-power-plant scheme; the energy goes to the load where the vehicles are.

The architecture, its application classes and its integration principles are set out on the VENDOR.Drive product page.

VENDOR.Drive is a dedicated propulsion-energy implementation of the VENDOR architecture. It is not VENDOR.Max carried by a vehicle, it is not a fuel range extender, and VENDOR.Energy does not build vehicles.

Who stands to gain

• Fleet operators: our target is to remove charging windows as a constraint on the working day and to let vehicles power equipment on site.
• Vehicle manufacturers: our goal is to offer a way out of the race to ever larger packs, with range decoupled from battery mass and cost.
• Emergency, utility and municipal services: we are designing vehicles to arrive with power for the job.
• Grid operators: our aim is electric transport that needs less megawatt-scale charging capacity at depots and corridors.

How we get there

We build VENDOR.Drive together with the platform it goes into. Integration starts with the electrical architecture of a target vehicle: its DC bus, its load profile and its installation space. On each platform we set:

• the transient current envelope under acceleration, \( di/dt \);
• coupling-voltage compatibility with the DC bus;
• dynamic response of the energy architecture relative to the buffer’s discharge characteristic;
• the power-to-energy ratio of the buffer layer;
• the regenerative event profile, where applicable;
• the thermal, dimensional and protective envelope;
• control and diagnostic interfaces.

Vehicle type approval follows the specific integrated vehicle configuration, as for any new drivetrain. Independent measurement follows the protocol on Technology Validation, and the origin of the energy is explained on Where does the energy come from.

Who we are building it with

We are building VENDOR.Drive with vehicle manufacturers, engineering partners, fleet operators and pilot platforms ready to put it on a real vehicle. Start with the VENDOR.Drive product page; the pilot programme is where a platform starts the joint integration step.