Peter Mertens, automotive industry veteran and investor, has participated in a pre-seed investment of the Israeli start-up V-HOLA Labs (VHOLA) and joined its board. The start-up develops solutions for measuring, monitoring and reducing electromagnetic radiation (EMR) in fully or hybrid electric vehicles. EMR is becoming a growing health concern as the automotive industry speeds towards electrification. VHOLA’s technology brings two types of solutions. One is an aftermarket vehicles’ radiation detector which will measure and record the cabin’s electromagnetic field levels, helping Fleet managers to analyze their vehicles behavior over time, targeting B2B such as school buses fleet at first. The second is an integrated solution implemented at vehicle’s design, helping OEMs in preventing harmful radiation peaks by regulating the energy flow and EMR throughout the vehicle’s lifetime. The core technology is patent pending.
“Many smart high-tech solutions like VHOLA’s are coming from Israel,” explained Peter Mertens. “In the field of electromobility, VHOLA is an important and promising solution for controlling electromagnetic radiation. I am an absolute proponent of electromobility, and precisely for this reason we should take an unbiased look at risks from electromagnetic radiation and limit those risks as far as possible”.
“We are very pleased with the commitment made by Peter Mertens, as he is the most relevant authority at OEMs’ R&D departments, along with his industrial and educational background”, said Asaf Tsin, Founder and CEO of VHOLA. “Our measurements already present alarming results in electric vehicles, meaning, there is an acute need for our solution. We have already extensively tested our aftermarket solution in field trials in Israel covering more than 30 vehicles, including E-Bus, Electric and Hybrid cars.”
Note: In Europe, the protection standards for non-ionising electromagnetic fields (EMF) follow the recommendations of the ICNIRP (https://www.icnirp.org/) based in Munich. More about “Passenger Exposure to Magnetic Fields in Electric Vehicles” see here.
About Peter Mertens
Following senior executive positions at Mercedes, GM and JLR/Tata, Dr. Ing. Peter Mertens was an executive board member at Volvo Cars (2011 to 2017) and most recently (2018) at Audi AG when he retired for health reasons. Since end of 2019 Mertens is back and he is involved in supervisory boards of high-tech companies, which all have one thing in common: it’s about the car of the future.
SOURCE V-HOLA Labs
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