E-Mobility Engineering 016 l Aurora Powertrains eSled dossier l In Conversation: Thomas de Lange l Automated manufacturing focus l Torque sensing insight l Battery Show Europe 2022 report l Sodium batteries insight l User interfaces focus

engines already removed, install the e-powertrain, do some programming and have it work. “You can’t just place components wherever you like in a conversion model though, so that meant a lot of compromises that were suboptimal for performance, such as a 9.5 kWh battery and only 40 km of range. So the new eSled, being a clean-sheet design, is a lot more capable overall thanks to the all-new chassis optimised for our parts.” Olli Haavikko, co-founder and chief mechanical design engineer at Aurora Powertrains, adds, “We started on concepts for the blank-sheet design in the summer of 2019, with a key goal of doing away with all the limitations on packaging, range, weight, battery capacity and so on.” Thirty-four of the old eSled conversion kits were produced, its standard platform being a Lynx Adventure LX600 ACE snowmobile chassis. Eight have been leased to tourism organisation Hurtigruten Svalbard in the Svalbard archipelago (and now in their fourth year of commercial use), seven more have been sold to Experience Pyha in northern Finland, and 20 units are rented through Aurora eMotion. The last of these are used in tours run by Safarctica, one of Finland’s biggest destination management companies and a close partner in Aurora’s tourist services. “We therefore have several years of r&d and more than 100,000 km under our belt to validate that the technology works,” explains Autioniemi. “We expect most deliveries of the new eSled model’s pre-orders to be completed by December next year, but we’re also manufacturing a small beta-testing fleet consisting of a few dozen eSleds for our pilot customers to trial this winter.” Body and suspension The new eSled needed to run on a single track driven by a belt and electric motor, with two skis for stability and steering. Beyond this and regulatory compliance, Aurora was largely free to design the eSled as it liked. While the rear looks much like a conventional snowmobile, with a rubber track, tunnel and rear suspension (the electric powertrain has little bearing Snowmobile Challenge in Houghton, in the US, in 2015, to enter the Zero Emissions Class of contenders offering designs of fully electric snowmobiles. The competition involved judges analysing each snowmobile using several criteria, including but not limited to performance, handling, cost and assembly methods. Autioniemi and his colleagues were the sole entrants from outside North America (all the others were from Canada or the US), and they won their category that year and again in 2016. These victories encouraged the team to spin Aurora Powertrains out as a company from Lapland UAS in March 2017, to commercialise the eSled and its battery systems, initially as a conversion kit for IC-engined snowmobiles but with production now discontinued in favour of the new OEM eSled. Subsidiary Aurora eMotion was founded 12 months later to help oversee eco-tourism services from some of Finland’s biggest Arctic resorts in Rovaniemi, Levi and Yllas. “It wasn’t just the international recognition,” Autioniemi says. “The SAE competition had us redesign the snowmobile according to a set of rules based on international snowmobile safety regulations. That educated us on how to build a standards-compliant snowmobile that we could legally build and sell to businesses for tourism and other applications.” That prepared the team for how to produce the first commercial eSled conversion kits, with a lot of r&d going into making the system cost-effective for small batch production while still maximising the speed and range to fall not too short of conventional IC- engined models. “We also streamlined the kit’s integration process, because we wanted everything to bolt on smoothly without drilling a bunch of holes or cutting a load of material away,” Autioniemi notes. “We wanted to receive the chassis with the IC ;Oe -innisO company»s first e:led was a conversion kit designed around electrifying a 3ynx (dventure 3? (*, snowmoIile Winter 2022 | E-Mobility Engineering 21 Dossier | Aurora Powertrains eSled