Weight in any vehicle is always a key consideration. Weight impacts performance of the vehicle in many ways. The more weight, the more power required to achieve the desired vehicle performance, the bigger the engine, the more fuel has to be carried and consumed, the heavier the vehicle becomes. These are all direct costs to the owner.  

The more weight - the harder the braking load, the more wear and tear on brake parts, suspension, steering, tires. The impact on service costs is significant over the life of the vehicle. The more weight - the higher the safety risks.

It is not difficult to understand why this essential equipment is such a burden. For decades, most generator manufacturers have favored the traditional approach of combining a fixed speed diesel engine with an air cooled alternator. When demand for power increases, the control mechanism injects more fuel to maintain the RPM at a constant speed and frequency. The diesel engine has to be large enough to cater for this constant speed under all loads. It is like trying to drive your car at a constant RPM up a hill without gears. You would need a much larger engine.

Fischer Panda’s solution to the problem was to radically change the approach to marrying a diesel engine to an alternator. Allowing the controller to vary the RPM according to the load means the full torque range of the engine can be used, which in turn means much smaller engines are required.

Conditioning the power that is produced at variable RPM is managed by an intelligent inverter that takes the variable frequency from the alternator and produces constant frequency , perfect sine wave power all the time every time. That means your important equipment is protected from under or over supply. The result is a weight saving that can be as much as 50% off the traditional generator types on the market.

Designing a specialty vehicle for Civil Defence, Fire and Rescue, Communications or any special purpose is always a compromise between how much equipment/instrumentation can be carried, how much room for critical field staff is needed, and the power required to support the mission. Space on board is at a premium.

Fischer Panda’s solution to maximizing your available space is immediately realized in part by the reduced engine size - you just don’t need as much room. The rest of the story is in the alternator. By using exclusively water cooled alternators, and permanent magnet technology, the alternator is kept at a constant operating temperature without need of a major through-flow of air.