Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) pursuing fleet and equipment electrification understand that battery charging is necessary for ongoing operations. However, this everyday necessity can inadvertently lead engineers to dismiss or delay critical design considerations and opportunities to holistically integrate battery systems.
This misframing reduces chargers to a necessary but secondary utility, and charging practices to fixed, routine tasks that must be engineered around rather than engineered for.
This approach ignores the fact that optimizing any ubiquitous process restriction or operational necessity creates major efficiency gains and, by extension, a market advantage. For example, charger optimization that accounts for operators’ typical depths of discharge (DoD) and charge times can achieve a 46.3% cost reduction with zero hardware changes.
For OEMs, fleet managers, and the broader industrial market, one thing is clear: Charging solutions can no longer remain an afterthought.
Smart charging and battery system integration must become core design-stage priorities.
Sidelined Charging Strategies — Electrification Drivers Demanded Fast Solutions
A number of factors drive the electrification of vehicles and equipment for construction, mining, agriculture, and other off-highway applications, from operating costs to workers’ health and safety. However, pending regulatory deadlines and competitive pressures, in particular, have forced OEMs to continually accelerate their development efforts.
While OEMs helped inform and meet market demands by making electric vehicles and equipment a new operational standard, keeping pace often required trade-offs with tangible consequences. Among them, charging strategies for battery systems, such as on- or offboard configurations, DC-DC conversion, and thermal regulation, were often underdeveloped or overlooked before product rollouts.
Treating chargers as accessories rather than core components of the performance ecosystem has led OEMs to implement generic charging solutions that aren’t suited for each application’s specific demands. For instance, the same battery system, charger, and charge algorithm might be used across:
Refrigerated or indoor/outdoor warehouse environments that contend with repeated thermal shock
Rental equipment that is regularly left in a depleted state of charge (SoC)
Floor cleaners that require elevated protection for on-board components against liquid ingress
Each of these scenarios benefits far more from purpose-built battery and charging systems.
Due to the broad lack of charger integration, system-level planning, and duty cycle considerations, many operators and fleet managers now experience compound effects such as:
Suboptimal charging efficiency — Charge times are generally longer than necessary, often leading to more vehicle or equipment downtime and requiring greater energy consumption. Both add to daily operating costs.
Accelerated battery wear and capacity loss — Irregular usage and charging patterns (e.g., infrequent operation, incomplete charging, aggressive duty cycles, consistently full DoD) contribute to accelerated battery degradation. Fleet owners and operators expect electrified vehicles and equipment to deliver long-term cost savings and minimal maintenance needs, but they end up replacing batteries earlier than anticipated.
"Blind" charging — Most heavy-duty, non-road mobile machinery (NRMM) now supports telematics and data analysis (e.g., via CAN bus), but many charging systems remain unintegrated. Without this information, fleet managers cannot effectively deploy resources or plan predictive maintenance to minimize downtime.
Inconvenient configurations — Non-optimized battery systems and charging solutions add weight and reduce on-board space that can be reclaimed without sacrificing performance (e.g., integrating chargers with an existing liquid cooling system). OEMs can then further outfit vehicles and equipment, expand their potential applications, and improve operator comfort and mechanics’ internal ease of access.
Parts inaccessibility — OEMs that collaborate with battery and charging experts can simplify systems, promoting compatibility with widely available components. This reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for fleet owners and operators, as well as the complexity of OEMs’ own supplier relationships and logistics.
No onboard charging — The general lack of charger infrastructure and accessibility at many work locations necessitates onboard charging functionality for some applications (e.g., construction, agriculture, outdoor power equipment). Outfitting off-highway vehicles and heavy-duty equipment with onboard charging capabilities requires optimizing system integrations, configurations, weight, and safety measures.
Recognizing, understanding, and addressing these challenges and bottlenecks leads OEMs to gain competitive market advantages.
How Intelligent, Intentful Charging Redefines Operations
When OEMs rethink their approach to charging technologies and strategies, they begin evolving battery systems into connected, adaptive parts of their overall system:
- Adopting holistic integration strategies at the design stage — Considering a given application’s charging needs during the design phase enables OEMs to ensure system alignment and ‘future-proofing’ from day one instead of dealing with retrofitting mismatched chargers, batteries, and software.
- Creating dedicated charging algorithms for data-driven results — Modern smart chargers collect detailed data from charging events and battery response. A tailored charging algorithm embedded within the charger’s control logic uses this data in real time to optimize current, voltage, and timing. This minimizes avoidable battery stress such as heat buildup, resistance growth, and reduced charge acceptance. When designed for the specific battery chemistry, application, and duty cycle, these algorithms preserve battery health, slow degradation, and support long-term performance.
- Battery‑stress parameters — Effective charging depends on how well the system monitors temperature, internal resistance growth, charge‑acceptance limits, and discharge behavior. Managing these factors enables the charger to deliver energy more safely and efficiently, preserving battery health across demanding duty cycles.
- Delivering real-time insights through telematics integration — Chargers communicating with telematics platforms enable fleet managers real-time visibility into charging progress, energy consumption, and battery health. Remote diagnostics reduce the need for on-site troubleshooting, and charger data helps fleet teams optimize charging schedules and predict maintenance needs.
- Developing battery and charging systems that meet every operational demand — An effective charging solution matches the battery chemistry, but also the application, duty cycle, and environmental conditions. For example, construction-site vehicles and equipment likely require greater vibration protection than Class III forklifts traversing smooth warehouse floors. Such a comprehensive approach empowers optimal energy delivery, minimizing wasted charge time and maximizing productivity.
Developing and executing these intelligent charging strategies requires a unified supplier ecosystem. The right partnerships accelerate procurement, streamline integration, test and validate performance, and ensure that charging functions as a strategic enabler rather than a limiting factor.
Integrated and Optimized Charging Solutions Deliver Optimal Performance
Batteries represent the most important component of any electrified fleet. As such, OEMs must treat charging systems as more than generic electronics and charging strategies as more than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Chargers have become core components of any electric vehicle or equipment’s performance ecosystem.
When OEMs rethink charging with purpose-built engineering for a given application’s duty cycle parameters, then fleet owners, managers, and operators experience:
- Maximized longevity — Vehicles and equipment, as well as their systems and components, deliver optimal performance according to OEM-specified timelines. This leads to improved owner and operator satisfaction while adhering to warranty targets. To extend battery longevity, configuring a dedicated charging algorithm helps prevent overcharging, overheating, and excessive cycling stress.
- Minimized downtime — Reliable performance (e.g., battery longevity) and easy parts accessibility equip fleet managers with the information needed to maintain uptime, schedule predictive maintenance, and deploy ad hoc resources as needed.
- Maximized ROI — Many fleet owners and managers pursue electrification for long-term economic benefits, such as reduced energy costs and minimal maintenance. While they expect higher up-front costs, battery and charging systems should capture the maximum value per volt during every charging session and shouldn’t fail to deliver their expected return on investment.
Smarter Charging: Now a Core Design Parameter for OEMs
As electrification evolves from a regulatory necessity to an industry reality, genuine progress regarding power output, asset longevity, and operational resilience requires a shift in thinking. Instead of building the machine first and worrying about charging later, OEMs and fleet operators must flip the order of operations.
The most cost-effective way to achieve this reorientation is to develop collaborative partnerships with battery and charging experts. Gaining access to expertise across both electrification technology and industrial application demands can circumvent the trial-and-error process that so often defines the transition to advanced infrastructures.
