Chinese EVs tested in Australia first

AUSTRALIA and New Zealand have become an unlikely development laboratory for one of the world’s larger battery pack diagnostics firms because the region takes delivery of Chinese-built electric vehicles that Europe gets later, in a different form, or not at all.

Test EV founder Nathan Gore-Brown, the Australasian distributor for Austrian firm Aviloo, told GoAuto that a growing share of his work involves building and validating test capability for models Aviloo’s European base has had no car to work with.

“Australia is … the pointy end of the spear for Chinese vehicles,” he said, agreeing that this market’s diversity, complexity, competitiveness and climate extremes have helped reverse the usual direction of automotive technology.

Rather than importing capability developed overseas, Test EV is increasingly generating local data from battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles and feeding it back to Aviloo’s Vienna headquarters.

So far, Aviloo’s remit has covered only BEVs and PHEVs. “If it’s got a plug on the side, we look to service it,” Mr Gore-Brown said, adding that the company aims to support vehicles within about 12 months of their launch in a market.

Mr Gore-Brown cited the Chinese-built Kia EV5 battery electric SUV that reached Australia in 2024 as an example.

“We developed it here, for instance,” Mr Gore-Brown said of the test routine. “A lot of BYD, a lot of the Chinese vehicles, we’ve been pioneering that work here,” he said.

However, when the European market received the EV5 late the following year, the model was sourced from South Korea and features numerous differences including battery chemistry.

Mr Gore-Brown trained as an auto electrician, taking New South Wales apprentice of the year honours in 2001 before moving to Britain and joining Jaguar at Whitley in August 2002.

He spent three years in the car-maker’s dynamic stability control team, working on the S-Type and the all-alloy XJ as well as Jaguar’s diesel program, then seven years at Aston Martin in Gaydon before returning to Australia in 2012.

He later opened Tesla’s Fortitude Valley store in Brisbane as its first dealer principal and counts about 30 years in automotive, electrical and vehicle design work, a decade of which has been spent with electric vehicles.

This background in vehicle engineering enables Mr Gore-Brown to help Aviloo’s technical team “get closer to it” by reading what is happening beneath the skin of both the car and the diagnostic device.

He explained that this additional layer of expertise comes in handy due to the way Aviloo processes battery health data.

Rather than pass on the car’s own state-of-health reading (a figure Mr Gore-Brown says has no consistent manufacturer standard and is frequently optimistic or simplistic, with some vehicles reporting 100 per cent state of health well past the point they should) the system corrects it against a machine learning model built on full discharge-cycle testing, weighing about 25 separate elements before issuing a certificate.

Aviloo’s approach mirrors the energy-based principle the United Nations’ GTR 22 regulation sets for how manufacturers should report battery health, while material supplied by Test EV says one in 10 cars tested carry a state-of-health gap of more than 10 points between what the car claims and what the pack actually holds.

“Everybody else just reports what the car thinks it is,” said Mr Gore-Brown, when asked how Aviloo differs from other widely used systems.

He said the volume of data involved defeats manual inspection.

“There are too many points over too long a period of time for you as a technician, even a really good technician, to spot the holes,” he said, pointing to local cases where a sensor dropped out for one or two messages on 200-millisecond cycles.

Such glitches can be invisible to the driver or even a technician’s scan tool but detectable by technology such as that developed by Aviloo because the system expects a sensor cycle and flags its absence.

Mr Gore-Brown added that Aviloo technology has now run more than a million tests worldwide and that the feedback loop extends beyond which models exist on the market to how local operating conditions are shaping the underlying battery ageing model.

As a result of Australasia’s wide climatic range, ambient temperature is emerging as a factor in battery pack degradation.

Citing data he said auctioneer Pickles has reported, Mr Gore-Brown pointed to a measurable difference in how packs age in a hot Queensland climate compared with, for example, Melbourne or Tasmania.

He said these data points are now rolling into the correlation model Aviloo applies globally.

Mr Gore-Brown admitted that not every new vehicle arrival makes it easy to test battery health, with some Chinese brands not exposing enough data for the system to return a full cell voltage heat map for example, although it is still possible to detect if an imbalance is present and infer a result from data the vehicle does surface.

“Some vehicles are very data rich, and some vehicles are a bit data poor,” he said.

Overcoming this will likely require local foundational testing in China; material supplied by Test EV says Aviloo is opening an office in the People’s Republic as the nation’s automotive industry explodes from regional curiosity to global volume player.

Mr Gore-Brown said that for now, the flow of information runs in both directions.

“We’re taking back that information from our local area,” he said.

For the first time since domestic car manufacturing ended, electrification and the Chinese vehicle boom looks to be repositioning Australia as less of a destination for other markets’ decisions and hand-me-down technology, and more of a place where new diagnostic capability is created first and sent back the other way.

How long this lasts depends on how long Australasia keeps receiving Chinese models ahead of Europe, or how quickly companies like Aviloo can establish themselves closer to the source of production.