“100,000 parked cars to become one giant battery for green energy”

"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants," Isaac Newton is said to have once remarked. For MOBI, that giant was Professor Gaston Maggetto. A true visionary, says Joeri Van Mierlo.

“The early 1970s were marked by the first oil crisis and a growing environmental awareness,” Van Mierlo explains. “Gaston Maggetto recognised the potential of electricity in transport long before it was taken seriously. He decided to dedicate his research to electrically powered vehicles. At the time, many dismissed it as fanciful, but history has proven him right. He earned international recognition for his work.”

Nearly twenty years ago, Joeri Van Mierlo helped lay the foundations of MOBI, building it into a truly interdisciplinary research group.

“Within the team, engineers work alongside economists who calculate the total cost of ownership for electric vehicles – meaning all the costs incurred over the vehicle’s entire lifespan. We also conduct life cycle analyses to map out the environmental impact of each material, from mining and production to end-of-life recycling. And we study consumer behaviour too, because we want to understand how people respond to new technologies like self-driving cars.”

Joeri Van Mierlo has now become a giant in his own right for the next generation. MOBI has grown into Europe’s largest research centre and a leading authority in the field of electric vehicle research. For Joeri, it’s a childhood dream come true — with a little help from chance.

“I studied and did my PhD at VUB, and also completed my civilian service here. Just two weeks after I finished, the army and civilian service were abolished. But honestly, I’ve never regretted it for a second. I was already fascinated by mobility, and one of my tasks during civilian service was to draw up a traffic safety plan for the campus. You wouldn’t believe it now, but back then, the busy roads around campus had no traffic lights or cycle paths. Accidents were a regular occurrence.”

And so Joeri naturally found his way into the world of mobility. From the start, his main motivation was the fight against air pollution and climate change. For him, there was no doubt that electric cars would play a key role in that battle.

“Walking, cycling, or using public transport is always better, of course. But a large share of journeys will still be made by car. Just reducing car traffic from seventy to sixty percent would already require a doubling of public transport capacity. We can no longer do without cars entirely. So they had better be as environmentally friendly as possible — electric, in other words.”

Only in recent years has the electric car really started to break through. The road to this point has been long and frustrating. That was largely due to the makeup of the batteries. Half a century ago — when Elon Musk was still in nappies — there were already nine striking blue electric cars driving around the VUB campus: heavy Italian models with steel-welded bodies, used by staff and students to shuttle between the Etterbeek campus and the Jette hospital. Even in car-sharing systems, VUB was ahead of its time.

Joeri Van Mierlo: “We couldn’t go any further, because they were powered by lead-acid batteries. The range was no more than 40 kilometres at best. And you needed serious muscle to drive them — there was no power steering or brake assistance. You had to slam the brake pedal with all your strength and just hope you stopped in time.” (laughs)

The iconic blue cars would have deserved a place in a museum. Unfortunately, over the years, they completely rusted away. From blue to brown to gone. But the research continued. In the 1990s, the lead-acid battery was replaced by the nickel-cadmium battery. To promote electric mobility, Joeri Van Mierlo drove from Brussels to Monaco during that period, in a convoy that also included colleagues Gaston Maggetto and Peter Van den Bossche. Along the way, they stopped frequently to give demonstrations to local councils. There were plenty of opportunities to do so — the range of a nickel-cadmium battery was still only about 70 kilometres.

Joeri Van Mierlo: “At MOBI, our battery team is currently investing heavily in the development of solid-state batteries. Right now, there’s a liquid electrolyte between the anode and the cathode of a battery. We’re aiming to replace that with a solid material. We have high hopes, because a solid-state battery could be made more compact and lighter. That’s the holy grail in the sector: to create batteries that are smaller, lighter, and more compact, while still performing just as well — allowing us to make the cars themselves smaller and lighter too.

Our colleagues at EPowers, also part of the MOBI team, are doing the same for power electronics. These are the components that transfer energy from the battery to the electric motor and are responsible for speed, acceleration, and so on. That team recently opened a new lab where they can run lifespan tests on those components.”

For this kind of research, MOBI collaborates with other top-tier research groups across Europe, in countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and Sweden. These consortia apply for funding through European framework programmes and work closely with European car manufacturers. The ambitions are high and the economic stakes enormous: Europe wants to hold its ground amid the rising tide of Chinese electric vehicles — and perhaps even regain the lead.

“Twenty years ago, when MOBI was just getting started, China was barely on the map. Back then, Japan and South Korea were setting the pace. Things can change quickly. That should motivate us to push harder — ideally a gear up. Solid-state batteries could be a major step forward. Though of course, our Chinese colleagues aren’t standing still either.”

MOBI also takes a broader view than just the vehicle itself. The research group is also exploring how cars can be integrated into the electricity grid.

Joeri Van Mierlo: “We need to move towards a climate-neutral society, powered by solar and wind energy. But those sources aren’t always available. The electricity generated when the sun shines or the wind blows needs to be stored. That can be done using large stationary batteries, but electric vehicles offer an additional solution. All those car batteries together represent a huge storage capacity. If there’s a surplus of electricity, hundreds of thousands of parked cars could store it and feed it back later — to homes, businesses, or the grid. Together, they would form one giant battery.

That requires bidirectional charging systems between the car and the home, so energy can flow back and forth as needed. We’re developing systems to manage this smartly — charging and discharging at exactly the right time.”

Speaking of smart: in the yellow units designed by Willy Van Der Meeren, MOBI researchers are also working on intelligent lighting for self-driving cars.

“They’re developing technology that allows vehicle lights to transmit communication signals to other road users — for example, to warn that there are roadworks 500 metres ahead, or that a car has broken down. With Waze, users still have to enter that information manually. Self-driving cars will be able to do it automatically, without human input.”