Since the beginning of 2018, Bosch has won electromobility orders worth roughly €13 billion (US$14.4 billion), including production projects for electrical powertrains for passenger cars and light trucks.

The Mobility Solutions business sector is again developing better than global automotive production in 2019. Despite the market’s current significant downward trend, the sector’s sales from operations will come in at just under the previous year’s level.

The transformation of mobility entails challenges, but also opportunities. We want to grasp them.

—Dr. Volkmar Denner, chairman of the Bosch board of management

Technologically, Bosch is both further refining conventional powertrains and fast-tracking electrification. In addition, the company is working to make mobility automated, connected, and personalized. One key to this lies in electronics and software.

The company’s mobility operations currently employ some 14,000 software engineers, and annual expenditure on software expertise comes to €3 billion. The objective is to keep people mobile in an eco-friendly way and to ensure that mobility is accessible to everyone.

We are also devoting ourselves to developing mobility solutions that have no appreciable impact on global warming and air quality.

—Dr. Denner

Each year, the company invests some €400 million in emissions-free mobility. Bosch is aiming to achieve a leading position in the market with its 48-volt battery, and recently concluded a long-term cooperation agreement with the Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL) for the production of battery cells. (Earlier post.)

At the start of the year, Bosch forecast sales of €5 billion by 2025 with electromobility components and systems for passenger cars and light trucks. Now it expects to exceed that figure. Bosch also wants to create a mass market for fuel cells and is taking them into production.

In 2030, however, three-quarters of new vehicles will still have a conventional engine under the hood, some of them with electrical support from a 48-volt system or a plug-in hybrid. For this reason, Bosch is working to improve the efficiency of both gasoline and diesel engines. Its most recent advance uses modifications to the engine and modern exhaust-gas treatment to bring particulate emissions from gasoline engines down to a level as much as 70% below the Euro 6d standard, even in real driving conditions.

Bosch also wants to minimize particulate emissions from braking. Developments here include the iDisc, which generates as little as 10% of the brake dust produced by a conventional brake disc, and the regenerative braking system, which can cut brake dust by more than 95% in electric vehicles.