A lot of 48V infrastructure comes from the marine world - where 4 x 12V lead-acid batteries in series is common for this reason. So a lot of components already

A lot of 48V infrastructure comes from the marine world - where 4 x 12V lead-acid batteries in series is common for this reason. So a lot of components already exist and can be made to work in the automotive sector with simple modifications. (In the marine world, it's much simpler to combine and split batteries in powers of 2 for cell balancing - you can take 4 x 12V batteries and charge them in parallel, discharge them in series)