Ford Mustang Mach-E: HV Battery reverse engineered.

On the official media site of Ford there are also some pictures about the HV battery system. I’ve tried to extract some technical information about the construction and design of the HV battery pack and the cell modules. Of course, these are speculations, but I’ve tried to underpin them as well as possible.

HV-Batterie Ford Mustang Mach-E Extended Range — The HV battery pack of the Ford Mustang Mach-E is quiet similar to the one of the Chevy Bolt EV. (Photo: © Ford)

As many of the competitors of the Mustang Mach-E Ford (Jaguar I-Pace, Mercedes-Benz EQC, Audi e-tron, Porsche Taycan …) installs pouch cells in the battery pack, which are made by LG Chem.

Comparing the battery system with the one of the good old Chevy Bolt EV you will recognize a lot of similarities:

Chevrolet Bolt EV Batteriesystem — The battery system of the Chevy Bolt is made by LG Electronics. The pouch cells are from LG Chem. (Picture: © Chevrolet / GM)

The basic construction of the battery pack with the two floors as well as the cell module connectors (orange busbars) are quite similar, the same with the cell modules. The Chevy Bolt uses cell modules where two cells are mounted on one black plastic cell carrier (frame). The cell carrier also includes a thermal path to the cooling plates of the cell modules. This construction is practically the same at the Mustang Mach-E battery. So it’s very likely that the battery system of the Ford Mustang Mach-E is designed and made by LG Electronics.

According to Ford the Extended Range (ER) battery contains 376 cells. With this information it’s possibe to partially reverse engineer the battery system:

Scheme HV battery Ford Mustang Mach-E Extended Range — Die Extended Range HV battery of the Mustang Mach-E contains 10 large cell modules. Each large cell module contains 32 cells. These cells are connected 4 times in parallel and these 4 parallel cells are connected 8 times in series. The 2 small cell modules contain 2 cell carriers less, so there are only 28 cells, which must be in 4 times parallel connection as well.

For the Standard Range (SR) battery Ford specifies 288 cells in the battery system. According to this article the cell configuration of th e SR battery pack is 3p96s. In a former version of this article I assumed that all cell modules in the SR and ER pack are the same. But obviously that’s not the case.

Standard Range und Extended Range Batteriesystem Ford Mustang Mach-E — Left: Standard Range battery system; right: Extended Range battery system. (screenshots of the Ford configurator, pictures: © Ford)

The 2nd floor has been removed in the SR battery pack (see picture above), there are only 10 cell modules left. The large cell modules are limited to 32 cell and the two small cell modules are limited to 28 cells, because the ER pack already fills the entire package space.

Because the SR pack has a 3p-configuration the number of cells of each cell module must be divisible by 3 and by 2 (because of the double cell frames). This could be achieved for example by this configuration:

Scheme HV battery Ford Mustang Mach-E Standard Range — The SR battery pack contains 8 large cell modules with 3 cells in parallel and 10 cells in series connection. The large cell modules consists of 2 cells less than in the ER pack. The number of cells in the small cell modules are reduced by 4.

With this example the 3p96s-configuration could be arranged. Finally there are four different cell modules sizes, which is quite cost intensive. On the other hand the inverter is always connected to a battery with a similar voltage level.