Some random extra info I've gotten direct from aem over email or from talking to aem people at Holley high voltage....take all of this with some salt.
Their BMS system (currently in development but very close to release) is master/slave based which saves a lot on huge wiring looms. They all just sit on CAN so ideally each slave only needs two wires going to the rest of the system instead of like, 16.
I want to say they're shooting for like $1600 for a set of one master and 5 slaves, which would cover 108 total cells. That seems expensive for the number of cells covered though, but Orion costs like $1200 for a set of 96 so maybe it isn't too bad. Also I think they only do discharge balancing, since I don't think they'll have a power line to do charge balancing
They're working on CCS fast charge support, [edit; it will be some kind of addon module, not something the bms-18 will be able to do with a firmware update], and they're doing software work now to support it (mostly around really tight temperature monitoring, requiring a chiller in the battery cooling loop etc).
The support will be rolled out in phases as they validate it. 50kw max at first, then slowly opening it up as they validate it can safely do that with most batteries.
However this is still deep in development so, no idea when this'll be.
Their PDUs (little satellite power units which can switch accessories and stuff) I believe have multiple PWM pins, so they can be used to run basically everything including cooling pumps and fans and power steering pumps, all over CAN from the main unit. They're 8 channels each but $800 per unit which seems a little high. I want to say they can also run contactors but that might be something the VCU does directly.
So, for a moderate price increase per piece of hardware you can cut down a hell of a lot on wiring and abstract a lot of the fiddly shit, which sounds gr8 to me.
