Charging time is one of the regular criticisms leveled at EVs. People who are used to filling up a fossil fuel car in minutes worry a lot about spending half an hour or more to fill a battery. Any improvements at this time could make a big difference to the EV experience and adoption rate. UK startup Breathe Battery Technologies thinks it has the solution – or part of it, at least.
“Breathe is a battery performance company,” says Dr Ian Campbell, CEO, Breathe Battery Technology. “We find ways to improve the standard performance of the battery system in a very meaningful way for our customers, especially in the automotive and consumer electronics industries. We give them software that significantly increases the capability of the batteries they’re already buying from their battery suppliers.”
Breathe Charge can significantly increase the charging performance of EV batteries.
Many battery upgrades require a new cell or pack design, but Breathe has taken a different approach, creating software that works with existing hardware. “A lot of the capabilities locked away in batteries are not being utilized,” says Campbell. “The idea was to bring out this latent ability. The first products we built are Breathe Charge and Breath Life. These are our main products today.”
Breathe is not just focused on the automotive industry. “Our products manage the process of charging a battery in a laptop or a smartphone, headphones or an electric car,” says Campbell. “Breathe Life manages the delivery of the charging service to focus on protecting the health of the battery to make it last longer. You get closer to the performance of the original battery for longer and battery life improves. Today with Oppo we have 28 different mobile phone models worldwide that ship with our Life software. Instead of these devices having a two-year lifespan, it’s four years because the software is protecting it from premature battery death.”
However, software for the automotive industry uses Breathe’s technology to improve batteries in a different way. “Breathe Charge increases charging speed, but it means more than that,” says Campbell. “This means more stable charging across different scenarios, such as temperature environments and battery age.”
Volvo will integrate Breathe Charge into the next generation of electric vehicles. (Photo by John … [+]
The technology has already caught the attention of at least one major automaker. In March, Volvo invested in Breathe and will be the first to use its technology in cars. “There’s a huge amount of funding going into scaling up battery manufacturing capacity,” Campbell says. “But hundreds of gigawatt hours of batteries are leaving factories with just a PDF next to them — a data sheet — that has some statically written numbers that say, take care of me this way. Then the car manufacturers, everyone from Tesla to Ford to GM, take those values from that data sheet and use them to take care of their very expensive battery system.”
Breathe Charge brings a more dynamic approach. “We’re replacing that kind of workflow,” Campbell says. “We make it possible for a battery from one of these big cell phone manufacturers to arrive with a car manufacturer like Volvo, not just with a PDF next to it with some hard numbers, but with a very intelligent piece of software. This software function, by its very nature, is significantly more capable of taking care of that battery. It dynamically evolves along with that battery as it evolves throughout its life and with different usage scenarios.”
This includes the regular charge-discharge cycle. “It’s adjusting the charge as the state of charge goes from zero to 100%, but also as the battery ages over its lifetime,” says Campbell. “It takes care of that in a very dynamic way, like how we might treat our bodies a little bit differently as we get older.” Using software from Breathe is cheaper and faster to adapt to each new battery. “Batteries will increasingly be defined by software,” argues Campbell. This fits in with the general automotive trend towards software-defined vehicles. “Battery is taking exactly the same path, and we’re pioneering that change.”
Dynamic software can squeeze out untapped potential. “Battery manufacturers are using artificially conservative values, so they’re way off their performance limits,” says Campbell. “This leaves a lot of performance and end-user experience leeway on the table. We developed a technology platform called Phi-X2, which is an electrochemical battery model. On the back of that technology, we see in real time as you’re driving the car what the true limitation of the system is, while still respecting all the safety margins that are so important.”
This capability is why Breathe won the sourcing agreement with Volvo to provide its Charge software for Volvo’s next-generation electric car platform. “Manufacturers are massively evaluating software solutions to reduce costs,” says Campbell. “Customers like Volvo can adopt what we build very quickly, cost-effectively and without having to make any hardware changes to their system. They do not need to change cells. No chemical change, battery management system or thermal management system is required. They just need to program it into the BMS without any hardware changes, so it is 100% compatible with existing microcontrollers.
This helps solve a major problem that all automakers face with their battery implementation. “You can optimize for charging speed, energy density or costs,” says Campbell. “But the biggest difficulty is to create a balanced growth in all simultaneously. We get automakers out of that rock and hard place. They don’t have to make that difficult trade-off between charging speed and power density. They can maintain the same lifespan, energy density and range, but suddenly have a significantly faster and more stable charging experience by adopting Breathe Charge. The built-in software is basically a replacement for the type of lookup table they have prepared in what they get from their cell manufacturers. It replaces this with a real-time physics-based battery model.”
Breathe signed a supply agreement with Volvo in March 2024.
The benefits can be substantial. “In Volvo’s case, under typical environmental conditions, we can help them and their customers reduce charging times by up to 30%,” says Campbell. “As we move outside that normal window, that number can often be even higher, for example in very hot or cold conditions. Also, when the battery ages, the traditional lookup table type approach cannot fit the battery as well. Volvo will be able to offer personal benefits to many drivers.”
Breathe claims that its software is much more capable of extracting performance than a pre-configured table of values. “By moving toward software-defined battery systems, we can begin to develop batteries that are less subject to extremely painful limitations,” says Campbell. “The automotive industry today is incredibly focused on sustainability and charging performance.” Breathe thinks its technology can deliver both, as part of the move towards software-defined vehicles.
“The degree to which software touches the battery system will become more and more embedded in the industry’s workflow,” concludes Campbell. “Today, we are only scratching the surface of the software’s impact on the battery system and overall vehicle end-user experience. The kind of performance that we’re going to experience as end users is going to be significantly better than where we are today and have been for the last few decades.”