Abstract Mild hybrid vehicles with 42 V electrical systems require advanced batteries with low cost, very high reliability and peak power performance. Valve-regulated lead-acid (VRLA) batteries could provide better performance/cost ratio than any other electrochemical couples, by improving their cycle life performance at partial state-of-charge (SoC), charge acceptance of the negative plate and thermal management under power assist conditions. Modular wound designs are being developed for this application, because they can combine the best attributes of the high power VRLA designs (low resistance and high compression) with a more efficient thermal management and could improve reliability by reducing the potential cell failures in manufacturing (better quality control could be assured for individual 3-cell modules than for complete 18-cell block batteries). Thermal management is an important issue for VRLA batteries in a power assist cycling profile. Although water cooling is very efficient, it is not economical and increases the weight of the complete storage system. The modular VRLA design allows air circulation around the external walls of every cell in order to maintain the temperature around 40 °C, even at very high power cycling profiles. In order to increase the life at higher depth-of-discharge (DoD) and consequently to optimise the weight of the complete battery systems, a new 6 V module has been designed with improved thermal management features. Cycle life performance under partial-SoC conditions (around 60% SoC) has been tested in both 6 and 12 V modules. The basic power assist profile as specified by the European car manufacturers is composed of a high power discharge (boost) period followed by a rest (cruise) and recharge in three steps (regenerative braking). Very good results have been obtained for 12 V VRLA spiral wound batteries under power assist profile (more than 200,000 cycles at 1.25% DoD, equivalent to 2500 times the nominal capacity), but smaller 6 V modules, although providing very promising results (50,000 power assist cycles at 2.5% DoD, equivalent to 1250 times the nominal capacity), still need further improvement to comply with the very demanding conditions of mild hybrid vehicles. Failure mode is related to negative active material sulfation, that could be overcome by improving charge acceptance with high surface conducting additives in the active material.