For a man who prefers rockets and roadsters to micromobility, Elon Musk is—perhaps inadvertently—playing a key role in revolutionizing a core component of e-scooter technology: the battery. Onstage at Tesla’s most recent Battery Day event, the visionary CEO described his company’s newest energy storage innovation, an integrated structural battery pack, in these terms:
The battery for the first time will have dual use: [it] will both be used as an energy device and as structure. So this is really quite profound…The volumetric efficiency of a structural [battery] pack is much better than a non-structural pack. It’s really major. [There’s] a 10% mass reduction in the body of the car, 14% range increase and 370 fewer parts.
In other words, according to the founder of SpaceX and Tesla, there are three key advantages to structural battery packs: Less mass. More range. Fewer parts. This same logic is at work in e-scooter design, albeit on a simpler scale. As operators like Bird innovate new technologies to increase the safety and sustainability of our vehicles, integrated batteries that serve a dual structural role have emerged as a clear way to streamline vehicle design, reduce manufacturing materials and improve sustainability.