All four Japanese motorcycle brands have agreed to a standard on swappable battery packs for two-wheelers, Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki, and Yamaha are reporting.
The Swappable Battery Consortium for Electric Motorcycles is focused only on the Japanese market, and shouldn’t be confused with a similar agreement and effort that Honda and other brands (Yamaha, KTM, and Piaggio) agreed to earlier this year.
Since its inception, the Japanese consortium has been working on standards for mutual-use swappable batteries and their replacement systems, in the hopes that these solutions would help the adoption of electric motorcycles in Japan.
The main focus has been on providing consumer-friendly ways of quickly recharging motorcycles, and ensure longer range capabilities – something that a well-designed swappable battery pack does quite well.
With the Big Four in agreement on a standard, would can assume other brands hoping to enter the Japanese market with an electric two-wheeler would follow suit.
According to the consortium, parts of the specifications agreed upon are compliant with the Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan, Inc. Organization (JASO) technical paper TP21003, which was issued on March 19th.
The next step going forward is for the consortium parties to conduct technical verifications and standardizations of the mutual-use swappable batteries, to ensure regularity and repeatability between the various manufacturers.
There is a larger hope that with the Japanese and European consortiums that a larger global standard could be achieved, and thus there could be widespread adoption in the motorcycle industry of this standard.
Source: Honda
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