Industrial Standards and Organizations 155 Voluntary Standards Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) The SAE is an international organization with more than 120,000 members that was founded in 1907 and is focused on three industry sectors: aerospace, automotive, and commercial vehicles (Society for Automotive Engineers, 2014). The SAE is one of the largest organizations of engineering professionals in the world which has two stated purposes. The first is to act as a professional organization for those working in the engineering fields and second is to act as a voluntary standards development organization.
By involving a large number of engineering experts in their standardization efforts the SAE has been able to develop standards for virtually all aspects of automotive, aerospace, and commercial vehicles and already offer many standards surrounding vehicle electrification. Today there are about twenty different working groups within the battery standards committee working on developing and updating electrification standards. One of the big benefits of the SAE standards is that they are quite affordable as they tend to run less than $100 each and with an SAE membership then can be significantly less than that.
Additionally the standards are developed and updated by experts in the specific areas. So even as a small company, you can access the collective knowledge and best practices of a large group of industry technical experts and engineers. With the rapidly growing interest in vehicle electrification, the SAE formed a battery standards development committee in 2009 that, even today, continues to work to develop and update standards that can be applied to automotive electrification in areas such as:
Battery standards testing Advanced battery concepts Battery testing equipment Battery safety Battery packaging Small task-oriented vehicle batteries Hybrid battery technology Battery materials testing Battery labeling Battery terminology Battery electronic fuel gauging Battery transport Starter battery Battery recycling Truck and bus batteries Thermal management These work groups, among others, have developed a significant set of standards. The following table is, at the time of this writing, a listing of the standards that SAE has either published or is currently working on targeted batteries for automotive electrification.
There are also a large amount of additional standards that relate to hybrid and EVs but which are not battery focused, some of which are included in this list. It is also important to note that many of the SAE committees include participation from other industry groups such as ISO, International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), UL, and others in order to ensure that there is no overlapping of standards and that any new standards will fit within a greater role in the industry.