ZF Meets Changing EV Market with Suite of Improved Components

According to ZF Group, efficiency is out as a top demand of EV manufacturers. Instead, the company’s new EV Select powertrain platform is focused on improving weight, component volume, overall cost and NVH.

June 6, 2025

Chris Clonts

Ottmar Scharrer, ZF Group’s senior vice president for electrified powertrain R&D (left) and ZF board member and electrified powertrain leader Mathias Miedreich with an EV Select innovation demo vehicle. (ZF)

ZF Group announced this week that it has developed a flexible and modular EV powertrain solution called EV Select that it says meets or exceeds current production technology for efficiency, power density and other characteristics while being easily integrated and scalable.

In conjunction with annual tech day presentations held this year in Germany, Otmar Scharrer, ZF senior vice president for electrified powertrain R&D, gave a virtual presentation to a handful of U.S. media outlets, including SAE Media. He said that the EV Select platform meets the rapid pace of technical developments in the EV space.

“Our customers want to have the latest technology available quickly, with limited integration effort,” he said. “With our EV Select platform, the overall system and components are perfectly matched to each other,” while also being interchangeable depending on requirements.

Among the highlights presented by ZF:

E-motor technologies, including the frictionless I2SM separately excited machine that performs as well as their permanently excited synchronous motors.
Inverter technology with industry-leading power density and high efficiency in 800V architectures.
Converters that account for future demands for bidirectional charging.
Reduction gears for both parallel and coaxial designs that create high torque density in high-speed motors and are 25% smaller and about 10 kg (22 lbs) lighter.
A new thermal management system, called TherMaS, that uses propane as a refrigerant for better performance in high- and low-temperature environments. The company said that in tests, the propane and a more efficient use of waste heat from the drivetrain were able to increase EV range in winter operation by between 10% and 30%.

Scharrer said that the company strives to meet what its customers and potential customers want and was surprised when an extensive survey of 24 customers in the U.S., Europe and Asia indicated that efficiency was no longer a top-line priority for EV manufacturers. Instead, manufacturers are looking for reductions in weight, size of components, overall cost and NVH.

He cited one iteration of EV Select, a prospective 300 kW drivetrain, was benchmarked against a market-leading similar drivetrain from China. The ZF example was 10 kg lighter, took up 19% less volume and resulted in an overall cost savings of 15%. Acknowledging that manufacturing costs would always be higher in Germany for a given system, Scharrer said that savings calculations accounted for parts being manufactured in the same place and in the same manufacturing situation. That essentially means that if the ZF system were made in the same Chinese plants with Chinese suppliers, it would be 15% cheaper than the system they benchmarked against.

Scharrer called the complete system a “serious design, but still a prototype,” adding that while components would be available as early as the fourth quarter of this year, as an entire system it was still two years away from production.

In Germany, where vehicles demonstrating the new tech were available to drive, Scharrer said one exceptionally popular feature was new software-controlled regenerative braking that could halt a vehicle without ever engaging a disc pad and “totally smoothly in a way that you could have your coffee without spilling anything. This is a great advantage.” He said that while current technology could use the e-motor to slow the vehicle to about 10 km/h (6 mph) before needing to engage the brakes, the new software method allowed better control of the rate of slowing.

The technology was perhaps hinted at two years ago when Formula E was able to eliminate rear hydraulic brakes from its racecars, relying solely on improved regen braking and the front hydraulic brakes.

Scharrer also said ZF has a new internal-combustion EV range-extender that will launch next year in China, where the market is embracing the tech. He said there is interest in the United States for potential use in pickups and heavier vehicles. A previous ZF system is currently in use in some London taxis.

And since no news conference is valid in 2025 without mentioning AI, Scharrer said that using AI in the software controls of electric drives not only shortens development time, but also improves results in the overall Worldwide Light-Vehicle Test Performance (WLTP) cycle and: