CATIA Customer Los Angeles-based Xos is on a mission to decarbonize commercial transportation and facilitate fleet owners’ seamless transition from traditional internal combustion engines to 100% battery-electric. As demand for its electric solutions continue to grow, the US company needed an end-to-end platform to manage all product development and accelerate time-to-market.
The company implemented the 3DEXPERIENCE Cloud platform, complete with CATIA, ENOVIA and DELMIA apps, to bring its design, engineering and manufacturing processes together in a single, secure, standards-based environment. The platform enables Xos to meet its customers’ design requirements while keeping costs down as it brings more new vehicles to market.
Delivery vehicles are a major source of pollution. The Hellenic Institute of Transport in Greece estimated that between 20% and 30% of a city’s carbon dioxide emissions in Europe now come from last-mile deliveries. In the US, 27% of total greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation industry. Regulators are calling for change, and companies like Xos are making it happen.
Xos is a fleet service provider and OEM dedicated to decarbonizing commercial truck fleets. Founders Dakota Semler and Giordano Sordoni, two former fleet owners and operators, sought to build a solution for the issues they faced first-hand around increasing emissions regulations and the rising costs of maintenance and fuel. Their Los Angeles-based company designs and manufactures 100% battery-electric Class 5 to 8 medium- and heavy-duty trucks that travel on last mile, back-to-base routes of up to 270 miles per day.
“About 70% of Class 3 to Class 8 commercial vehicles operate on routes that are under 200 miles per day,” said Dakota Semler, CEO of Xos. “They return to base every night where they could access dedicated charging infrastructure. And that makes them ideal for electrification. We don’t need to wait for the technology to mature to be able to solve these kinds of routes.”
Fast growth, high demand
The demand for Xos’ products and services is high. To keep up, the company expanded its workforce fourfold since it launched in 2016 and opened a new 85,000 square foot headquarters in Los Angeles in May 2021 as well as two new flexible manufacturing facilities. As the scope and scale of its company continues to grow, Xos realized it needed a powerful technology platform to manage all its product development processes in one place.
“As we’ve grown, one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is high demand, and it’s not slowing down,” Semler said. “It has been really challenging meeting that demand with our existing systems and manufacturing capacity. Prior to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we had separate computer-aided design (CAD), product lifecycle management (PLM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems operating in disparate environments. As we switched between them, we risked making mistakes and experiencing carryover issues. Now, we can incorporate a lot more of the value chain into a single system. Anything we can do to shorten that product development lifecycle enables us to go to market and achieve a faster return on our investment, and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables that.”
“The biggest business impact of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is the ability for us to quickly get up to speed with the rest of the market,” said Matt Sommer, director of Product and Development Operations and IT at Xos. “Being an earlier stage company, it’s difficult for us to quickly implement all the tools and processes that we need to be able to operate a full business. With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on cloud, we’re able to do that quickly without having to worry about IT implementation and other work that would distract us from making great products.”
Custom design
Xos’ proprietary battery system, the X-Pack, and modular chassis, the X-Platform, are purpose-built for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles.
“One of the core reasons our customers come to us is for our technology,” Semler said. “It starts with our proprietary battery system, which we’ve built from the cell level up. We also develop the software to control the vehicle, operate all of the power electronics as well as the onboard safety systems.And our modular chassis platform allows us to accommodate a wide range of different commercial vehicle use cases. Everything from a parcel delivery truck, all the way up to a Class 8 tractor or vocational vehicle.”
With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Xos manages all these different elements within the same environment.
“One of the biggest impacts of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform that we feel every single day is the ability to scale and grow beyond our existing footprint of engineering and design,” Semler said. “Things like parametric modeling and the embedded tools for routing and the specific engineering and surfacing tools – we have all of that capability within one system. And then to directly carry it forward through our PLM is pretty innovative. It enables us to move quickly to operate with leaner teams and, ultimately, to do more with fewer resources.”
These capabilities allow the company to develop custom-built truck fleets that meet customers’ specific safety, security, reliability and sustainability requirements.
