USA – Investors are enamoured with the startup company. Some of the shine is starting to wear off, however, in the automotive industry, where the practice of new firms merging with SPACs (special-purpose acquisition companies) in order to raise money on the stock exchange has led to mixed results. The view of John Kimes is that SPACs have “soured” the market. The underperformance of some SPACs post-merger, often down significantly from their initial public offerings, is making investors more and more cautious about putting their money behind other startups, he argues. 

For Kimes, it’s personal. As founder, and now CEO and President, of a startup company himself, Kimes is naturally concerned about investors balking from handovers of significant funds because of the irresponsible actions of others. On the other hand, his company has already raised USD10m following seed round funding in 2019, and Kimes told me multiple times that he is unsure how long he can continue to call his firm a startup. 

From outside, Sigma Powertrain certainly looks like a startup. As of writing, the total number of personnel employed at the company is thirteen. In August, that number will grow by just two. The company works out of four sites in the vicinity of Livonia, in Metro Detroit, each around 3,000 square feet in size. One site is an office-cum-engineering space where all the prototype design work happens. One is a “crowded” assembly line for the company’s products. The other two sites constitute a garage and a corner of a machine-shop, owned by one of the company’s investors, which houses a dynamometer. But all this belies the fact that Sigma Powertrain is built on patents and intellectual property going back several decades. 

Distilling what his company does in a single sentence, Kimes said that Sigma Powertrain “predominantly builds ratio-changing gearboxes for commercial vehicles”. In August, the company is launching its first product, the ‘MID-Series’ electric transmission for classes 1-6. It uses a Ford 6R100 production Ravigneaux gearset, which are made at the Ford transmission plant in Sharonville, Ohio. The MID-Series is an integrated electric drive system with Cascadia Motion motors and other requisite components for a “plug-and-play” powertrain. But the company’s flagship product is the ’EMAX’, set for launch in November. The EMAX electric drive system incorporates a transmission based on a patented design which uses no hydraulics. It is designed for electric vehicles in classes 6-8, as well as offroad vehicles and heavy equipment. 

The patented transmission began as Kimes’s brainchild, conceived while he worked in various capacities for the major American OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers. While aspects of his concept were taken on by the manufacturers he worked for, he was unsuccessful in persuading them to run with the idea in its entirety. Frustrated by the intransigence of his managers, Kimes kept the idea going as a pet project, carried out in his spare time with friends and colleagues over pizza and beer. That’s the way things might have remained to this day, were it not for the rebirth of the electric vehicle in the past decade. Kimes saw this as an opportunity for turning his idea into a viable product. While his original focus was on passenger cars, he saw that heavier vehicles would continue to require transmissions if they were to go electric. Hence, Sigma Powertrain was born, and Kimes’s business case is built on the unique design of his transmission, made to meet the special requirements of a commercial electric vehicle. 

Background to Sigma Powertrain

Kimes’s industry pedigree goes back 35 years, to when he graduated from the General Motors Institute co-op programme in Flint, Michigan. (The GMI is now Kettering University, a private institution.) He was taken on as a trainee in General Motors’ ‘Hydra-Matic’ division, responsible for making automatic transmissions for GM brands. Kimes admits that transmissions were not his “first choice” as a career specialism, and he was overawed by the complex engineering work being done at GM. Knowing nothing, “less than nothing”, about transmissions when he walked into his interview, his prospective boss asked him, “F equals?” Showing that he understood Newton’s second law of motion at the very least, Kimes replied with the letters ‘m’ and ‘a’, and he was told, “we’ll teach you the rest.” 

After several years of training, Kimes worked his way up to become lead development engineer on the ‘4L80’, and he also played a part in the creation of ‘4L65’ – both of which are still employed in GM pickup trucks and rear-wheel-drive cars today. Following that, he moved to Ford in 2000, where he applied his competence in transmissions to making innovations. One thing he worked on was a “rocker clutch”, a mechanical clutch to replace the ones which Ford had been hitherto buying from a supplier. The patent is filed under no. 7100756 from 2004, and lists Kimes as one of four inventors working at Ford – an invention which he claims saved the company “over a 100 million a year”. 

Kimes described the clutch as follows: 

The device is a one-way clutch. It only held torque in one direction, and it allowed you to freewheel in the other direction. […] What if we took the one-way clutch and we added locking elements that would lock in the opposite direction of the one-way clutch, and then add an electro-mechanical control for these devices? So, we took the space occupying two clutches – a hydraulic clutch and a one-way clutch – and in the same space we added a function of reverse as well as holding in first. So we had a controllable reverse and a passive first, and it was on the same package.

By removing the friction elements, Kimes said they were able to reduce parasitic losses from the clutch by around 90%. 

It was following the acceptance of this clutch design that Kimes had his “eureka” moment: “Why can’t I put these clutches everywhere in the transmission? Why can’t I have them for first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and get rid of the hydraulics altogether?” Hydraulics, in Kimes’s view, are an efficiency killer in the driveline. Bringing his clients to his way of thinking, however, had variable results. Later working as a consultant for parts supplier Means Industries, Kimes helped to develop the electromechanical clutches further, but failed to convince anybody that an all-electric transmission was worth investing in. Unfazed, Kimes and his partners continued to work at the transmission concept in their free time, until the opportunity to design ratio-changing gearboxes for electric vehicles presented itself. 

There was something of a false start in 2007, when Kimes presented his concept for a two-speed electric transmission to Tesla. The idea was rejected as J B Straubel, then Chief Technology Officer at the company, elected to abandon multi-ratio gearboxes for the ‘Roadster’. It is a decision which Kimes believes set a precedent for electric cars, leading most to opt for single-speed transmissions. With the passenger car market seemingly closed off, Sigma Powertrain, which was founded in 2016, turned its focus towards heavier electric vehicles, where multiple ratios are necessary to provide both hill climb and highway speed capabilities, according to Kimes. 

The EMAX

Principles of the EMAX design

Sigma Powertrain’s flagship product, the EMAX, is a compact and power-dense electric drive system which incorporates the company’s patented clutch technology. Measuring 18 inches in length and weighing about 300 pounds, the 3-speed transmission accepts an input torque of up to 5,200 Nm. The gearshifts are comparable in speed to an AMT at less than 500 milliseconds. The gearbox is packaged with a range of modular inputs and outputs, meaning that the customer can choose, for instance, to add on one or two motors, depending on the desired application. 

The EMAX design is based on four “pillars”, the first of which is the clutch technology developed by Kimes over the years. The dynamic controllable clutch, which employs the rocker clutch Kimes patented at Ford, engages and disengages the gear using an electromagnetic switch. The EMAX also uses brake clutches and disconnect clutches, of which the latter allows for switching between drive modes in an all-wheel drive vehicle. 

The second pillar is a patented power-flow technology. Kimes said the EMAX uses a planetary gearset configuration which is “extremely efficient and has wide ratio spread”. The power-flow technology is also versatile, potentially allowing for many different applications, from one to three-speed transmissions, multiple motors, and varying architectures such as central drive and e-axle systems. 

The third pillar is functional safety. An electronic controller monitors the speed differential across the races, interrupting the gearshift if it is above 100 rpm. In addition, a chip independently decides whether it is safe to engage or disengage a clutch when shifting. The two controllers act like separate switches in a series circuit, according to Kimes, adding redundancy to the system in accordance with ISO 26262. 

Software is the final pillar of Sigma Powertrain’s technology and is arguably the most important. With Kimes’s patented clutches, the embedded software provides smooth shifting and allows for park and hill-hold without any additional hardware. Each clutch can operate one way, in forward or reverse, as well as being turned on or off in both directions. This means, for example, that the clutch can freewheel to go forwards as the vehicle comes to a stop, while at the same time preventing the vehicle from rolling backwards. “If you’re in traffic and it’s stop-and-go, you don’t need to feather the brake, you’re not eating any energy to hold on the hill.” Half the company, Kimes said, is made up of software engineers; he joked that the hardware engineers “just make really pretty paperweights”, while the software engineers “actually make them work”. 

Outlook for Sigma Powertrain

Sigma Powertrain currently consists of thirteen people. The number will grow to fifteen in August. Kimes knows that the business in its current form is not scalable. But he remains committed to an organic growth model based on solid cashflow. It is “tempting”, he admits, to adopt a more rapid growth model, but he does not want the reputation of “pump and dump”, or artificially inflating the value of the company’s IP. 

Your customer wants a robust product that delivers the benefits that you say it’s going to deliver. So, they’ll take a risk. There are companies that will take a risk on your ability to scale and make that product if you’ve got a solid foundation out of the gate.

Nevertheless, Kimes is planning a move to a single facility to put all of the company’s operations under one roof. Once the company has moved, it will be in a position to hire more people and ramp up production. 

We need some young guys. We need some osmosis of this technology to the next generation. And that's what we're doing now. […] We want young people hungry to learn about what we do and give my older guys a break, because they’re doing everything so far.

“What we’re doing is unique,” said Kimes. He and his engineering partners have all “drunk the Kool-Aid” and believe in the importance of transitioning road vehicles from diesel to electric. Kimes sees his all-electric transmission as an enabling technology which will help to electrify heavy commercial fleets which make a disproportionate contribution to road transport emissions in North America. 

When asked why it was that he had to set up his own company in order to pursue this goal, Kimes replied that it is “very difficult” to find acceptance for innovative concepts within the large automotive manufacturers. The rocker clutch which Kimes helped to design for Ford back in the 2000s began as an unauthorised “skunkworks project”, conceived and developed afterhours. At the time, Kimes was told by his supervisor to stop working on it. The large OEMs are too conservative and are unrewarding of failure, a major handicap for aspiring innovators. “I fail my way forward,” said Kimes. “Fail fast, fail often. That’s how you learn.” 

The EV landscape is “a wild, wild west right now,” Kimes said. With the big manufacturers overburdened by legacy products, legacy plants, and outmoded ways of thinking, newcomers like Tesla are forging ahead. “Tesla wasn’t burdened with any legacy… I think it’s going to be a long time before anyone passes them. You almost have to jettison everything and start afresh.” Nevertheless, taking the lonely road of the small and agile innovator comes with serious challenges. On at least one occasion, Kimes has been told by a potential OEM customer to partner with a Tier 1 supplier, which he found “disheartening”. He is intent on safeguarding Sigma Powertrain’s independence and holding on to its identity, even if it means losing out on big customers. There is no shortage of smaller customers who are more than willing to work with Sigma Powertrain on their electric vehicle concepts, and Kimes is happy to “scoop up all the little guys” and establish the company’s reputation as a supplier of solid products. 

Being a pioneer in an established industry can seem a thankless job. Continuing the ‘Wild West’ analogy, Kimes said: “Pioneers take all the arrows and the settlers get the land – the second mouse gets the cheese, so to speak.” It has taken Kimes almost a lifetime of work to get his pet project to where it is today, and there is no guarantee that it will pay off. His great fear is that his concept will be ignored, and the industry will take a different direction. But Kimes remains optimistic, and he puts a positive spin on the pioneer-settler analogy: “the pioneers get all the patents.” 

John Kimes is an inventor, product development executive, entrepreneur, and business operator with 30 years of global product development and engineering experience in the areas of vehicle powertrain and electrification. He holds 45 U.S. patents related to the transmission and powertrain systems design.