Elsa De Geer is hooked on batteries

Less than six months after Elsa De Geer had finished Scania’s trainee progamme, she’s the component owner for a battery. As an development engineer at Energy Storage Design at the Research & Development department she’s also solving a number of technical challenges within areas such as electrical safety and vibration resistance and how to fit all the components, especially the batteries, on the truck. The puzzle rarely works out on the first try.

That she’d end up at Scania wasn’t a given. Her aim was a PhD in biotechnology, when Dennis Honkanen at Electric & Hybrid Powertrain Technology, a friend from their time at Lund’s university, called and told her all about his great job at Scania. A job that he thought De Geer would enjoy even more than he did.

When she first started, her assignment was emission control. But during her time as a trainee, she’d read about trends and e-mobility and swiftly changed her path to battery technology. “I’d like to work with technology for the rest of my life. That’s why I choose an area that I believe will keep on developing for a long time to come.”

As a development engineer, De Geer puts a lot of effort into the performance of the batteries. In the future, she hopes the batteries will keep more energy and be charged at a higher speed, and of course fulfill all the safety requirements. “Electrical vehicles will pass today’s vehicles since the development is moving forward extremely fast. That is also a challenge for us working with battery development. Our components don’t live for that long and we continuously need to upgrade them so the customers will buy our trucks and buses.”

But De Geer is really up for it. It’s when the experts struggle that she enjoys it the most, with difficult technical issues to solve. “We’ll fix this, that’s my gut feeling.”