What's actually in an eGSE repower kit

"Conversion kit" covers a wide range of things. At one end it means a motor and a bracket, with everything else left to whoever installs it. At the other it means a specified, tested powertrain that arrives as a set of parts designed to work together on a named vehicle.

The difference does not show up in the quotation. It shows up in the installation, and again three years later in the service records. Here is what the parts are, and what each has to get right.

1. The traction drive

The motor and its drive unit — the power electronics that actually control it.

The thing to check is that they are matched and supplied together. A motor and an inverter sourced separately can be made to work, but somebody has to do the characterisation, tune the control, and own the result when it misbehaves at temperature. On a kit, that work should already be done and should not be arriving on your bench.

Questions worth asking a supplier:

• Is the drive unit specified for this motor, or a generic unit configured for it?
• What control interface does it expose — and is it the one your vehicle already uses?
• What does the torque curve look like at low speed, where this vehicle spends its life? Peak power is the least interesting number on the sheet for GSE duty.
• Air or liquid cooled, and what does that decision commit you to installing?

2. The auxiliary drive, if the vehicle needs one

If the engine was driving hydraulics — a belt, a lift, a tipper — then removing it leaves that system without a prime mover. A kit for such a vehicle needs a second motor for the auxiliary load.

Two things separate a considered solution from an afterthought:

It should be sized against the real auxiliary duty. Belt loaders in particular do a lot of auxiliary work, and an undersized pump motor produces a vehicle that drives well and works slowly. Operators notice inside one rotation.

It should share the traction drive's voltage class and family. One pack, one voltage, one set of service procedures, one spares list. A kit that pairs a high-voltage traction drive with an incidental low-voltage auxiliary has quietly given you two energy systems to maintain.

3. Mounts and driveline adaptation

The unglamorous part that determines whether the installation takes days or weeks.

Platform-specific mounts mean somebody has already solved where the motor goes on this chassis. The alternative is a universal bracket and a fabrication job, which turns a repower into a one-off engineering exercise — and, importantly, makes the second and third vehicle no faster than the first.

Where the motor cannot sit in line with the axle, this is also where a reduction gearbox lives. Coaxial and offset (parallel-shaft) gearboxes solve different packaging problems: the first adds length, the second moves the output onto a different centreline. Either way, a gearbox built to the same motor interface arrives as part of the assembly rather than as a separate sourcing exercise.

Ask whether the mounting hardware is designed for your platform or adapted to it.

4. High-voltage harness and distribution

Cable, contactors, fusing, the distribution unit, and the connectors that tie them together.

This is the part most likely to be treated as an installer problem, and the part where a fleet is least well served by improvisation. A supplied harness means the conductor sizing, the protection and the routing have been engineered once, by someone who knows the currents involved, and can be repeated identically on every vehicle in the fleet.

Points to confirm:

• Fusing and contactor rating appropriate to the pack and the drive.
• A defined service disconnect and a documented safe-state procedure.
• Ingress protection suited to equipment that lives outdoors and gets washed.
• Terminations and connectors specified — not left to whoever is holding the crimper.

5. The vehicle control unit and instrument cluster

The component that decides whether the converted vehicle feels like a vehicle or like a conversion.

The VCU takes the existing controls — pedal, direction selector, parking brake, whatever the platform has — and turns them into torque commands, while reporting state back to the operator. A good one integrates over the vehicle's CAN bus so the drive joins the system the vehicle already has, instead of running in parallel to it.

What good looks like:

• Pedal mapping that matches the platform's behaviour, so operators do not have to relearn a vehicle they have driven for years.
• Regenerative braking blended with the service brakes, so deceleration feels normal.
• Fault codes a fleet technician can read with the tools they already own, because the vehicle will eventually fault at three in the morning.

The instrument cluster deserves its own mention, because a converted vehicle's original one is now lying to the operator. A fuel gauge with no tank behind it, a temperature needle reading an engine that is not there, a tachometer measuring nothing — a cluster full of dead instruments is how a conversion announces itself as a retrofit every time somebody climbs in.

Replacing the cluster is what closes that gap: state of charge where the fuel gauge was, and the telltales that now matter in place of the ones that do not. A kit that includes the cluster has solved this once, for every vehicle in the fleet. A kit that does not has left you an aftermarket gauge on a bracket.

6. Telemetry — sometimes included, increasingly expected

Not every kit includes it, and it is worth deciding deliberately rather than discovering later.

A CAN logger on the vehicle answers questions a converted fleet will definitely ask: what the duty cycle actually is, whether the pack is sized correctly, which vehicles are underused, when something started drifting before it failed. That data is also what a funding application or an internal business case needs, and it is much easier to collect from the start than to reconstruct afterwards.

What is *not* in a kit

Worth being explicit, because it is where budgets go wrong:

• The battery pack, usually — but see the section below, because who chooses it matters more than who invoices it.
• Charging infrastructure. Chargers, supply, and the electrical work to feed them are a separate project — often a larger one than the vehicles, and with a longer lead time.
• Installation labour, unless explicitly included.
• Operator and technician training, which is not optional on a high-voltage vehicle.

A quotation that covers only the first list and a plan that assumes it covers both is the most common way a conversion programme comes in over budget.

The battery: a choice, not a line item

Pack selection is usually quoted separately from the kit, and it is tempting to treat that as a procurement detail to settle later. It is not. The pack determines the duty the vehicle can actually sustain, the space the conversion has to work within, the charging strategy, and a large share of the total cost.

It is also the decision most exposed to circumstances that have nothing to do with engineering. Cell supply is concentrated, lead times move, and tariffs and procurement rules increasingly distinguish between where a cell was made. A fleet buying in North America, a fleet buying in Europe and a fleet with domestic-content obligations attached to public funding are not choosing from the same shortlist, even for the same vehicle doing the same job.

The useful arrangement is one where the drivetrain supplier helps you choose rather than handing you a fixed pack or leaving you to work it out alone. Actium selects the battery supplier jointly with the customer, and has sourced from US, EU and Chinese suppliers depending on what the programme needed — availability, cost, certification requirements, or where the funding says the content has to come from.

Ask any supplier two questions: whether they are tied to a single cell source, and whether they will work to your sourcing constraints or expect you to work to theirs.

The question underneath all of this

Ask a supplier what happens on vehicle number twelve. A kit that has been engineered for a platform gets faster and more predictable with repetition. A collection of parts does not — every vehicle is the first vehicle again.

Actium's repower kits ship with a matched traction motor and drive unit, platform-specific mounts, HV harness and distribution, a VCU with CAN integration and a replacement instrument cluster — with an Actium Pump for auxiliary hydraulics where the platform needs one, and telemetry available alongside. Battery supplier selection is done jointly with the customer. If you want the detail for a specific vehicle, talk to us.