Setting Micromobility Battery Standards: Swiftmile CTO Keith Moravick and SAE
Swiftmile Chief Technology Officer Keith Moravick was recently appointed the inaugural chair of the SAE Micromobility Battery Standards Committee, which kicked off in late September. We sat down to get his perspective on where the industry is today, why unified standards for LEVs are so important, and what he’ll focus on as chair.
Let’s start with the basics — who is SAE and what do its committees do?
SAE International is a standards-development organization for the mobility industry — they convene sector professionals into committees and develop common standards and practices. Its purview is incredibly wide — everything from aviation, to trucking, and AVs. But what ties all its work together is safety.
You’re chair of SAE’s new Micromobility Battery Standards Committee. How did it come to be and how did you come to lead it?
The battery standards committee was spun out of the Powered Micromobility Vehicles Committee, SAE’s first foray into the micromobility sector. In 2019, that group generated an important taxonomy of vehicle classifications for micromobility vehicles, which took the many new types of LEVs and put them into a handful of neat buckets useful for the cities who suddenly found themselves regulating shared e-scooters, e-bikes, and e-mopeds.
As that committee went about its work, it became clear that micromobility batteries were a whole separate frontier that needed more common ground — connectors, voltages, currents. In my role as Chief Technology Officer at Swiftmile, we were already working on this exact same challenge: creating a universal charging network for micromobility vehicles. So it was a natural fit.
Who makes up the battery standards committee?
We have wide representation across the micromobilty sector — vehicle and battery manufacturers, shared micromobility operators, scholars, testing professionals, and liaisons from some of SAE’s 28 (!) battery-focused committees. The committee is taking a top-down approach following standard systems engineering practices, focusing on the needs of the industry and resolving common pain points. We’re incredibly transparent in our practices; anyone can watch our meetings online, and it’s up to committee members to make proposals and create consensus among their peers.
I see my role as facilitating and enriching that discussion. I hope to provide a forum where the industry can openly discuss the issues and challenges confronting the development of charge infrastructure. During our first couple meetings I’ve brought in experts in the current governing standards for LEVs, EV charging, and battery development to share how they achieved common standards in their own realms.
What are your top priorities for micromobility battery standards in 2021?
The first is achieving interconnectivity — aligning on a common connection point and communication channel between charging infrastructure and micromobility vehicles. So whether it’s an e-scooter or an e-bike, shared or personally owned, it uses the same plug. With the convenience and cost savings this will bring, I’m pretty optimistic we can get consensus and produce some meaningful guidance within the next year.
The second is battery management — slightly more work, but our goal is to create a more formal ‘handshake’ and common set of rules that batteries follow when they’re plugged in to charge. Right now, the battery management system is usually a modular add-on to batteries, and they don’t all act the same way. We want to get things to a place where these decisions are inherent and predictable, and information regarding the battery voltage, capacity and electrical current requirements are consistently exchanged.
What role does the public sector play in this discussion?
We can set the standards, but SAE doesn’t have any formal power beyond that. But cities do. Once micromobility charging and battery standards are set, cities can require shared operators to adhere to them, clearing the path for universal public charging networks like Swiftmile. That’s a vital shared amenity just waiting to be unlocked via common standards.
The second piece is making big investments to scale up these charging networks. Public adoption of micromobility has greatly accelerated in response to the pandemic. It’s encouraging to see the ways cities have acted to make it easier for people to travel on two wheels — tactical bike networks, slow streets, and even LEV purchase subsidies. As more people choose micromobility, we’d love to see that matched with public investments in LEV charging infrastructure like Swiftmile. One simple way to get there is simply co-locating hubs with existing EV charging stations.
How is Swiftmile preparing for a world of universal micromobility charging?
Even without formal battery and charging standards, we’ve built our Mobility Hubs to be interoperable with most of the micromobility vehicles out there. There are some informal “standards” already in existence, so Swiftmile has simply followed the lead of our customers until now. With more calls for unified LEV charging, we now find ourselves in a leadership position and our customers are looking to us for large-scale solutions.
Swiftmile works with all of the major e-scooter operators and is an element of micromobility programs in Austin, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. Interoperability also means vehicle size — so we’re building our latest hubs to accommodate e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds, mobility scooters, and even delivery bots.
So, the way that I see it, we’re really not far from a world where every LEV speaks the same language, and can charge in the same place, which is really exciting. I think the members of this SAE committee will be some of the unsung heroes in that story!
Where can people contact you to learn more?
