Xos

Delivery vehicles are a major source of pollution. The Hellenic Institute of Transport in Greece estimated that between 20% and 30% of a city’s carbon dioxide emissions in Europe now come from last-mile deliveries. In the US, 27% of total greenhouse gas emissions come from the transportation industry. Regulators are calling for change, and companies like Xos are making it happen.

Xos is a fleet service provider and OEM dedicated to decarbonizing commercial truck fleets. Founders Dakota Semler and Giordano Sordoni, two former fleet owners and operators, sought to build a solution for the issues they faced first-hand around increasing emissions regulations and the rising costs of maintenance and fuel. Their Los Angeles-based company designs and manufactures 100% battery-electric Class 5 to 8 medium- and heavy-duty trucks that travel on last mile, back-to-base routes of up to 270 miles per day.

“About 70% of Class 3 to Class 8 commercial vehicles operate on routes that are under 200 miles per day,” said Dakota Semler, CEO of Xos. “They return to base every night where they could access dedicated charging infrastructure. And that makes them ideal for electrification. We don’t need to wait for the technology to mature to be able to solve these kinds of routes.”

Today, dozens of Xos battery-electric trucks operated by the likes of FedEx Ground, Loomis and UniFirst are out on the roads making deliveries to households and businesses across America. Customers choose Xos based on its ability to deliver vehicles that meet their requirements in terms of range, payload capacity, cost efficiency, ease of operation, and ease of charge.

“Apart from us, there’s nobody building ground-up commercial electric vehicles engineered for this space that are actually holding fleets accountable and truly delivering a total cost of ownership saving,” Semler said. “Starting from the battery pack, we engineer durability into our vehicle systems. We also focus on delivering total cost of ownership savings in under three to five years. By engineering our vehicles to achieve that, we've been delivering value to customers from day one.”

The demand for Xos’ products and services is high. To keep up, the company expanded its workforce fourfold since it launched in 2016 and opened a new 85,000 square foot headquarters in Los Angeles in May 2021 as well as two new flexible manufacturing facilities. As the scope and scale of its company continues to grow, Xos realized it needed a powerful technology platform to manage all its product development processes in one place.

“As we’ve grown, one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is high demand, and it’s not slowing down,” Semler said. “It has been really challenging meeting that demand with our existing systems and manufacturing capacity. Prior to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we had separate computer-aided design (CAD), product lifecycle management (PLM), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems operating in disparate environments. As we switched between them, we risked making mistakes and experiencing carryover issues. Now, we can incorporate a lot more of the value chain into a single system. Anything we can do to shorten that product development lifecycle enables us to go to market and achieve a faster return on our investment, and the 3DEXPERIENCE platform enables that.”

Xos selected the 3DEXPERIENCE Cloud platform with the key objective of unifying its technology and accelerating its product development strategy.

“The biggest business impact of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is the ability for us to quickly get up to speed with the rest of the market,” said Matt Sommer, director of Product and Development Operations and IT at Xos. “Being an earlier stage company, it’s difficult for us to quickly implement all the tools and processes that we need to be able to operate a full business. With the 3DEXPERIENCE Cloud platform, we’re able to do that quickly without having to worry about IT implementation and other work that would distract us from making great products.”

“The 3DEXPERIENCE platform has enabled us to deliver our technology in a much more cohesive way,” Semler added. “Operating in the cloud allowed us to set up our infrastructure early and correctly so that as we scale production and grow our engineering teams, we know the infrastructure will continue to support us.”

A cloud implementation made sense for Xos on many levels, particularly as it gave the company access to enterprise-level IT without the upfront investment.

“We chose the cloud versus on premise, because it gives us all the tools and processes that we need to be successful without needing all the infrastructure in place,” Sommer said. “The cloud is becoming more and more advanced every day, and we believe that the tools and features available in the cloud are on par with what you could get with an on-premise installation.”

Xos partnered with Dassault Systèmes business partner Adaptive to implement the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

“What we value most from our collaborative relationship with Adaptive is the ability to communicate, get support, and receive services as we need them to keep our business operating,” Sommer explained.

As it works around the clock to keep up with demand, Xos values working closely and securely with its value network.  

“ENOVIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows us to collaborate efficiently with our partner network by seamlessly adding them to our environments and giving them secure access to the specific data they need,” Sommer said. “We manage innovation with our value network by being collaborative, so we really appreciate the ability to interface with everyone quickly in an efficient way that’s not through email.”

“Being on the cloud allows interoperability across time zones, across companies and, ultimately, leverages the team aspect of working together with our partners,” Semler added. “In a traditional CAD environment, you just don't have that flexibility. A team in another time zone can carry on with a particular project and then the next morning we can pick up from where they left off. We’re getting much greater levels of productivity with this approach.”

Xos’ proprietary battery system, the X-Pack, and modular chassis, the X-Platform, are purpose-built for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles.

“One of the core reasons our customers come to us is for our technology,” Semler said. “It starts with our proprietary battery system, which we’ve built from the cell level up. We also develop the software to control the vehicle, operate all of the power electronics as well as the onboard safety systems.And our modular chassis platform allows us to accommodate a wide range of different commercial vehicle use cases. Everything from a parcel delivery truck, all the way up to a Class 8 tractor or vocational vehicle.”

With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Xos manages all these different elements within the same environment.

“One of the biggest impacts of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform that we feel every single day is the ability to scale and grow beyond our existing footprint of engineering and design,” Semler said. “Things like parametric modeling and the embedded tools for routing and the specific engineering and surfacing tools – we have all of that capability within one system. And then to directly carry it forward through our PLM is pretty innovative. It enables us to move quickly to operate with leaner teams and, ultimately, to do more with fewer resources.”

These capabilities allow the company to develop custom-built truck fleets that meet customers’ specific safety, security, reliability and sustainability requirements.

“ENOVIA configuration management has been key in our ability to do this for our customers,” Sommer said. “Because of the nature of our business, we have a highly configurable product and ENOVIA allows us to keep track of all variations and manage change in a much more efficient way than we were able to previously.”

The company is now in the process of implementing DELMIA, which it will use to design and manage its growing number of manufacturing plants.

“DELMIA is key to our success over the next few years,” Sommer said. “As we grow as a company, we need the ability to quickly and efficiently boot up new facilities around the world. We truly believe that DELMIA is going to be one of the key reasons that we’re able to do this, especially with access to all its rich features on the cloud so we can deploy it from anywhere.”

Xos’ fleet-as-a-service offering, Xosphere™, provides customers with a comprehensive suite of products and services – such as charging infrastructure, vehicle maintence, and leasing and financing options – all available in one intuitive user platform to help them more easily make the transition from diesel vehicles to electric.

“When we deploy any Xos electric vehicle to a customer, we have to deliver the associated charging infrastructure and maintenance services with it, which we manage on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform,” Semler said. “We have an internal saying that technology sells our first truck to a customer, but maintenance, service and support is what sells the next trucks after that. Maintenance is an incredibly important aspect, particularly for commercial vehicles operating on the road so long every single day. It really becomes one of the core cost centers for fleets to manage and, ultimately, try to reduce. By handling all aspects of the vehicle on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we can generate better uptime performance. We also now have the visibility to deliver all the associated services and support they need.”

As Xos looks to the future, the company hopes to make it even easier for fleet owners and operators to embrace electric mobility.

“We have a lot of exciting things coming down the pipeline, including new products that we’re engineering within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform,” Semler said. “We’re also using it to build out our portfolio of services, which we refer to as the Xosphere, such as our fleet management tools – service ticketing, vehicle support and energy management. Ultimately, we believe that the Xosphere on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform will be the single tool that fleets will use to manage all their fleet assets, not just Xos trucks.”

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