Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio... a lot of things will automatically get better.
YASA was founded in 2009, a spin out from Oxford University following the PhD of founder and still CTO, Dr Tim Woolmer.
"Over the decades that followed both of these technologies were explored. But despite the potential for weight reduction, smaller size, shorter axle length and increased torque, it was the difficulty in manufacturing the axial flux technology that limited its commercial viability, because the motor could not be made by stacking laminations, as with radial machines."
"The breakthrough innovation came by segmenting the axial flux motor in discrete "pole-pieces", so the motor could be manufactured using Soft Magnetic Composite material.
SMC can be pressed at low cost into a wide variety of 3D shapes. This removed the need for the complex laminations, overcoming the major manufacturing challenge of the axial flux machine."
"In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.
The opening of this facility boosts YASA’s manufacturing capacity, setting new benchmarks in e-motor technology and quality, and enabling production to scale beyond 25,000 units per year."
This is awesome. Lighter motors also make electric flight more viable
> Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio... a lot of things will automatically get better.
EV motors are already lightweight. The electric motor in a vehicle like a Tesla Model 3 already weighs less than you do. Reducing that one component by 75% would be a weight savings equivalent to about a half of a passenger.
Not a significant efficiency improvement for vehicles that weigh over 3000lbs (or double that for many EVs).
Every little bit helps, but this isn’t a game changer.
This, or a miniaturized version thereof could change the game for light electric vehicles -
imagine an electric motorcycle that weighs substantially more like an electric bicycle.
Right now it takes about 10-15lbs of motor to produce a 3KW motor for an electric bike, this motor is about 10 times that in power density afaict.
The Livewire electric motorcycles use something like 100-200 lbs of motor to produce 1/4 as much power, 75kw, so that’s an improvement of 8-16x.
Electric pedal bikes are already at the limit of what their chassis’s support even with small motors.
10kw+ is comparable to starter gasoline motorcycles in the US (or midsize motorcycles elsewhere) capable of going on the highway. At that point, you need to start scaling everything, like brakes, tires, and the size of the chassis.
The livewire has a motor large enough to drive a car.
Does this motor design scale down? It's not clear from the article - the article focuses more on the relative efficiency gains over the previous model.
A 30lb 1000hp motor doesn't necessarily mean that they can also produce a 3lb, 100hp motor. It would be cool if it did, but I doubt that it does because usually component strength doesn't scale linearly.
That being said, these are still valuable for traditional EVs. Even if they are only a modest weight savings in the grand scheme of modern vehicle weight, their ability to improve packaging options will be a boon. One thing the industry has dicovered is that the generic "skateboard" platform doesn't make for the best vehicles, in terms of packaging.
I'm more fascinated by the question of whether it scales up... imagine much smaller and more efficient electric engines for cruise liners and cargo ships.
There’s no area in the world that allows e-bikes with more than 750w motors. A 3kw motor is illegal (cf Surron), unless you are talking about an e-moped requiring registration.
They are not allowed, but still commonly owned and used.
The law needs to catch up. There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to. They can't be treated like bicycles because they're too fast but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles. We need a new category for light motorcycles.
The real problem, IMO, is that the law is generally not deferential enough to cyclists and already forces them off sidewalks, onto the street, and to follow traffic laws designed for cars. There's not much else to take away, and the rules right now are unreasonable enough that cyclists always break them.
I think what I would like to see are explicit requirements for insurance and licensing for powerful e-bikes, but made significantly cheaper so that people will actually bother. Requiring helmets for the insurance would also make it much more straightforward. We can require them to take the street or a dedicated bike lane and fully mandate that they have to be walked on sidewalks.
> The law needs to catch up. There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to.
I'm not so sure about that.
I don't want a 6000kw Sur Ron riding in the bike lane with me. The whole point of the bike lane was to make a safe space for riding a bicycle. I want the bike lanes to be safe enough for children to ride their bikes in, and having something that powerful in it is not conducive to that goal. They are by and large too fast and too unlike a bicycle for bike lanes. Having things that powerful there is going to dissuade a lot of potential (non electric) cyclists. My girlfriend already gets too freaked out by how fast some of the legal e-bikes in the bike lane go.
Certainly they shouldn't be on the sidewalk. But what does that leave? Just the road. If that's the case they probably need to just adhere to whatever standards the state has for scooters or mopeds. Which probably means some kind of license, maybe registration, and possibly insurance.
But that type of e-bike manufacturer doesn't want to make a light electric scooter that's road legal, they want to make a thing that skirts regulations by being "for off road use only".
And the buyers by and large don't want to deal with license and registration, and certainly not insurance.
Just because people are doing an illegal thing a lot doesn't mean that the law needs to find a way to make it legal.
I think what they mean is these e-bikes pushing 60mph should be legal but reclassified as something closer to a motorcycle. The problem with keeping them illegal is people tend to treat them like bikes when they should be on the road.
I don't think there's any inherrent difference, but until the laws catch up the "powerful e-bikes" are clearly more dangerous. Riding a traditional motorcycle requires a license, passing a driving test, and following the rules of the road - none of which are true for e-bikes.
> There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to.
They are called motorcycles. At > 4kw they are that (here). So either you get them registered a such, get a license and insure them, or downgrade them to under 4kw, get a license and insure them as a moped, or downgrade them to 2kw and pedal assist only and register them as a pedelec. All other options is 250w continuous (you can get away with about 500w peak) and pedal assist only.
You are also not insured if you drive an illegal bike on the road.
Any ebike that goes faster than 25kmph in Europe and whatever it is in NA should not be allowed anywhere were pedestrians can go.
The real solution people don't want to accept is that ALL non arterial roads in ANY urban/suburban/rural environment should be limited to 30kpmh (and equivalent in NA). And by limited I mean traffic calmed: 1 lane per direction, narrow lanes, raised street crossing, raised intersections, European style roundabouts, the works (Dutch style) - so that people actually respect the speed limit because they don't want to bang their car.
Once that happens, bike stay in bike lanes (or multi use paths with pedestrians) and everything else can go on the regular non arterial roads and stuff that's registered (mopeds and up) and go on any road.
But my "solution" requires major political adoption and probably decades of sustained vision in investment. In places with good governance it will happen naturally and everywhere else will slowly be left behind.
I see kids blasting around at high speeds without helmets.
Kids treat them like fast bikes you do not have to pedal. Wiping out on a bike at 13mph is a very different proposition to wiping out on a bike at higher speeds.
I saw just a couple nights ago some kid doing what appeared to be about 40mph on an eBike. Wind in his hair, not pedaling, just blasting it. I am sure new regulations will come to speed limit them, but at the cost of dead and disabled young people.
ETA: I went to go look up laws requiring speed limiters on bikes, and the top hit was about how you can disable them:
Article states typical eBike speed limiters are 20-28mph. That is the kind of sustained speed Olympic cyclists can maintain for some period of time, and much faster than kid's toys need to be capable of. And these are the mandated limiters!
A kid died right in front of my door on one of those. They call them fatbikes around here and they're super dangerous to operate. Way too much torque and speed for kids (and, fairly, most adults) to handle responsibly.
On a decent hill you can get a regular bike going >60mph. A dirt bike will let you ride off road at nice speeds over random terrain (no licensing required when not on public roads). In the realm of bikes, these are not an outlier. Limiters are easily overcome and speed limits are barely enforced on cars, let alone bikes. When you get a bike like this you deal with the danger and wear protective gear just like you would with any other bike (motorized or not).
>>On a decent hill you can get a regular bike going >60mph.
Yes, I've done this before by riding all the way up a local mountain on a road bike, clad in lycra, then on the way down I went over 60mph. It was terrifying and the physical fitness required to get up there in the first place required months of riding to actually do it. Meanwhile literal kids ride these on pavements, in between people, in cities where pedestrians walk - it's simply not acceptable. And I do own and ride an ebike(limited to 15.5mph) legally.
And here is the problem. They are already supposed to be speed limited if it's an e-bike. It's easy to tell the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle, but the difference between an e-bike and electric motorcycle is far more subtle. And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes.
> And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes.
Because they have pedals which nobody uses. In theory, it's pedal assist, but kids aren't really pedaling eBikes, they are using them like electric motorcycles.
You might think: Hey, how can you tell the difference between somebody using an eBike with pedal assist if so many of them look just like regular bikes?
I don't really see young people pedaling bikes at all of any kind. It's adults who don't have cars, or adults who are exercising pedaling bikes.
> I saw just a couple nights ago some kid doing what appeared to be about 40mph on an eBike. Wind in his hair, not pedaling, just blasting it.
Saw an ebike zip past me at about 40 MPH in a wheelie, little motor screaming, splitting a lane in traffic. (El Camino Real, Silicon Valley). If anything happens ahead of them, they're toast. Can't stop and can't evade.
That assertion seems to be a disconnect of language. But - Selling firearms in Wal-Mart is bad enough, but it does tend to be more rural Wal-Marts than suburban (and not at all urban).
Said firearms are under lock and key in the same way they would be at gun stores. There are many gun shops in the same areas where Wal-Mart sells firearms. At least - where I live, which is a blue state. All bets are off for Texas.
We have everything locked up too just as you describe. We just have a lot of places to buy them, it's not like Wal-Mart here has a bin in the middle of the isle full of AR's next to the bin of Pokemon stuffies. Only pellet and BB guns are found on the shelf.
I don't know why I'm being pedantic, guns here are insane for many reasons but not because of this one. What bothers me is once you do buy it, you can just carry it anywhere you want now. Like random guys in MAGA hats holding what looks like a machine gun on a street corner is no longer an unusual sighting. It's weird, when I was a kid, my dad had rifles mounted to his truck rear window and it was common. Then, there was what seemed like a zero tolerance decade or two when guns were only on the news (gang violence) or in a gun safe (for hunting only). Then the pendulum swung to the wacky side of guns everywhere.
My kids school recently hosted a "gun recycling day" recently, with good intentions I think, but obviously once it occurred the parents were riled up with "you seriously invited people to bring their guns to the school! Where are the guns? Did they get moved off campus? etc" It's technically a private school and the event was hosted by the affiliated church, but still, pretty tone deaf to have that kind of event on the same property as a couple hundred elementary students
I live on the edge of the suburbs in a Blue state, at least where I live (and further on towards the city) open carry gets you the attention you're looking for from the police. People don't tend to do it.
I am not sure about further out. I know people in Michigan who keep a piece in their glovebox. I've seen in the movies what you talk about - the gun rack in the truck cabin. None of my rural relatives ever did that, not even in Michigan which is pretty gun-friendly away from cities.
> I don't know why I'm being pedantic, guns here are insane for many reasons but not because of this one.
Yeah, I mean. In Illinois at least, the guns get into the hands of the bad guys overwhelmingly because of straw buyers. Not because of "the gun show loophole". A small number of guns are obtained through theft. Mostly it's straw buyers, at least when it comes to guns used in crimes.
My family is filled with outdoorsy people (myself included), and although the numbers don't paint a picture of legal CCR owners being problematic, the wide array of people I've known who do carry makes me wonder how the hell it isn't a bigger problem. All manner of unhinged weirdos, some of whom pretty openly muse about the opportunity to shoot the kind of person they don't like. (Lots of normal people too - but plenty of weirdos)
Yeah! Like the NRA says, "From my cold dead hands!"
And like the NRA also says, "Unless you're attending an NRA convention, in which case please leave your firearms at home or use one of our provided lockers, because gun-free zones are a communist hellscape except here, and please pass through this metal detector too."
My neighborhood is full of kids on these things. The safety dynamics of driving around have changed completely. Small children flying on and off road at high speeds. It's crazy.
Listen, your world may not allow you to sell an e-bike with a 1000hp motor on it. But my world allows me to put a 1000hp motor on an e-bike and not tell anyone.
I've noticed that people seem to believe as long as they bought something it should be safe. If you're smart enough to build something, I have to hope you're at least smart enough to realize that there might be consequences.
So that you can flip over in an uncontrolled wheelie at an even lower fraction of the throttle? Even if there was infinite energy throughput (aka power) at zero mass, the main limiter for power per total system mass would still be the battery. In any practical setup, even in super short runtime designs, getting, say, twice the power would not all that dramatic a runtime hit if it was achieved by scaling the same motor technology and paying for the extra mass with a little battery capacity. Unless of course you want to actually use that power increase for any meaningful fraction of the runtime, then you'll obviously drain the battery fast. But a zero-mass power increase would not change that a lot either.
Increasing power density (of the motor) just isn't worth much when it does not happen to coincide with an increase in efficiency (and then the battery mass saved for achieving the same range will quite literally outweigh the mass saved by a smaller engine for achieving the same power)
The good news is that those striving for power density aren't really at liberty to completely ignore efficiency in the process because cooling is a key issue for them.
Not a game changer but I wonder if ligher motors allow you to do things like have one motor per drive wheel, removing the need for differential gearboxes?
Then you can do clever things with traction control without having to use the ABS system to brake the drive wheels.
Or dramatically change the turning circle on big cars and vans. Maybe even reduce the size and weight of the braking system by taking on some of that role.
Putting the motors in the wheel is bad for a separate reason: Unsprung weight.
Every ounce you have in the hubs that don't float on the suspension reduces certain suspension attributes. You end up with a crappier ride and poor performance.
Yes, I agree. I was careful about how I worded this to avoid saying anything about the motors actually being in the wheels for this reason.
Although, I guess at some point in the future if we can get the weight down low enough and the strength of the motor high enough we could replace the existing braking system with a motor for the same weight penalty we already pay.
In an ideal world all the energy from breaking would be used for regen anyway.
I'm not sure how close we are to that but it's an interesting thought experiment thinking about the trade offs we might be able to make in future.
I mean if your have a 750kw motor for each wheel, then they're probably always spinning when you floor it, so you also have enough torque to fully use your tires for stopping purposes
EDIT: Quick maths show that decelerating at 1g (basically what the best sport tires can do) in a 2000kg car at 300kph requires absorbing ~1500kw, so conveniently two of these motors.
If the motors are light enough, though, that might be acceptable... especially if they can make an even smaller version for that application. (You probably don't need 750 kW on each wheel - even for a supercar that'd be excessive.)
Exactly this, which is why I'd expect automakers to use the short axles and CV (constant-velocity) joints which are already well-developed technologies for 4-wheel independent suspensions
I see no reason the small motors can't be mounted inboard from the wheels on the underside of the chassis, as are a rear differential or front transaxle in an ICE car.
Having such a small and lightweight power package opens up serious design and performance opportunities. Plus, even without major redesign to take full advantage, every reduction in weight rolls through the system, providing immediate improved acceleration, cornering, & braking or similar performance using smaller tires, brakes etc..
Exactly. Main problem is battery energy density. Cars can drive about 20 kilometers on 1 liter of gasoline. In comparison, Tesla's 4680 cells are at about 272-296 Wh/kg and CATL's Kirin Battery at about 255 Wh/kg. A bit efficient EV often uses 200 Wh/km, so for 1 kg of battery the electric vehicle can only reach 1-2 km. An order of magnitude difference. Theoretically, batteries could go to 1000 Wh/kg some day, which would mean about 5 km per 1 kg of battery assuming all else remains equal.
For EVs no but it's huge for flight if it could be scaled down. Paramotors and ultralight planes are on the verge of being competitive with gas they just need a bit more energy density per pound in the system.
I would expect that lighter motor components would potentially allow weight reduction in load bearing components. Not an advantage for SUV-type cars, but for light and ultralight vehicles it could add up to more weight saving and longer ranges.
> The electric motor in a vehicle like a Tesla Model 3 already weighs less than you do. Reducing that one component by 75% would be a weight savings equivalent to about a half of a passenger.
Looks like it’s about 45 kg for a Tesla and 13 kg for this one. It at twice the horsepower. So maybe 8-10kg for a down rated model. IIRC, axial motors need their diameter to retain their efficiency advantage so a down rated one would likely be lighter but close to the same external dimensions.
But that’s still a lot less rotating mass, and might make multiple motors attractive again.
> It drops a buck fifty per motor. That IS a game changer.
You’re reading their marketing material. You have to think of this like all of those PR releases you’ve seen over the years about new battery technology that is 4X smaller or new hard drive tech that is 10X more efficient. The real world improvements aren’t going to be as big as their one lab test.
A Model 3 motor is already well under 150lbs, unless you start including ancillaries like the inverter and power transmission parts.
They’re not dropping “a buck fifty” from typical EV motors.
I'm not reading anyone's marketing material. If you want to dispute the shipping weight, feel free to correct this website whom I assume charges for shipping based on weight [0]. I'm sure they'd love to know they have it wrong.
According to purchasable equipment, the Model 3 engines weight ~175 lbs. If that's wrong, that's on them for claiming it. Subtract 28 lbs from that and you're at 147 lbs. That is very close to 150 lbs.
That’s a drive unit, which is more than the motor. Read the description:
> This kit includes the Tesla motor, inverter, gear box, power cables and drive shafts.
Drive shafts, gearbox, power cables, inverter. Also includes the mounts, which is likely not factored into the lab calculations for this marketing material.
You cannot drop 150lbs from the Model 3 motor because it doesn’t even weigh 150lbs.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Dropping 10 lbs per motor is HUGE. Dropping 30 is amazing. Whatever is dropped, it's significant. Pretend that it isn't all you want, but anyone doing production work knows how important this is.
I'm happy to compare apples to apples when we can do that, and if you want me to say I was wrong about the Tesla motor size I'm happy to say that I was just going by what was available on the internet and skipped the details. But I did so in service of a point which you still haven't actually engaged with beyond "Nu uh!".
Auto makers could drop 10lbs, 100lbs or even more from every EV right now by choosing more expensive materials, more expensive manufacturing processes, or simply cutting back on amenities.
10lbs is not significant in the grand scheme of things. The real question is how much it costs, what are the tradeoffs, and how practical is it.
> But I did so in service of a point which you still haven't actually engaged with beyond "Nu uh!".
That’s not a fair take on what I’ve been posting at all. I said every little bit helps, but pointed out that motor sizes are already small.l
10 lbs per motor in an aircraft is huge. And the fact that they can do it WITHOUT having to use more expensive materials or manufacturing or amenities is the thing that is huge about it.
It's a fair take on your responses because talking about a SINGLE motor is missing the point. You're not engaging with the actual point that OP made, you're trying to dispute OP by engaging in your own point about what difference this would make in single-motor cars, instead of what difference it will make in general.
That's cool but the conversation was about cars. It's a welcome but tiny improvement for cars. Even after you multiply by 2 or 4, especially because the more motors a car has the smaller they are.
No, it's literally - by the discussion partner's own estimation[0] - cutting the motor size in half. That's not a tiny improvement, it's a half-weight reduction for the motor. It's not as big as I naively estimated from a google search, but it's still half the weight. That's the kind of thing engineers chase as a benchmark and rarely every actually achieve. It's great.
But also, I reject your attempt to reframe the discussion as strictly car focused. OP specifically mentioned flight. Which doesn't necessarily mean it was all about aircraft - the article is about cars after all. But it certainly doesn't mean that the conversation was strictly about cars, either.
[0]: I've googled this claim and I'm willing to accept it, but the only sources for it I could find were subtractive estimations from youtubers whom had pulled apart the motors. Even additional claims from forums and whatnot seemed to trace back to one of those video sources. It would be nice if Tesla would deign to discuss some specificiations themselves, but if there's an actual official source, I have yet to see it. And, for what it's worth, the motors that I've seen referenced were all for the rear motor that I understand to be the smaller motor in Teslas. Either way, I don't doubt the 70 lbs estimate is far off, so it's moot.
Smaller motor can be one per wheel which means a shorter drive shaft, less rotating weight which means more torque to the road under acceleration and deceleration.
Tesla still doing a gearbox? Their marketing has been telling me they got rid of those. Typical.
Exactly. I was very surprised to find out a fully loaded 40 ton electric truck only uses ~100kw / 100km ( https://www.youtube.com/@electrictrucker ) when my 2 ton Volvo averages 20-22kw/100km on road trips.
Superfastmatt did a test recently where he proved to himself that the front area of the vehicle and trailer is the dominant factor on mileage, not the weight towed or friction.
For a guy trying to drive 300 mph though maybe he should have been able to do that with math instead of sketchy road tests.
I wish more people on the road realized the extent to which weight reduction improves all aspects of the driving experience... it really does compound unlike any other change that you can make to a vehicle. IMO heavy vehicles are a scam and the antithesis of the direction we should be moving.
I agree with you however I believe weight and safety are in a complex relationship right now, which has nothing to do with performance and handling.
Unfortunately I feel much less safe in a Fiat 500 when a significant portion of cars in the road weigh nearly 3 tonnes and perhaps can't even see me. I suspect most people are in SUVs because they're the pragmatic trade off between safety and convenience, not because they were hoping for excellent performance.
Yup, it's an arms race to see who can buy the biggest vehicle so that they can see over the second biggest vehicle and survive a collision with it.
But small cars are only unsafe because of that discrepancy between the largest and smallest cars, and it's not just weight, but height difference. It's possible to survive crashes at very extreme speeds in very light cars if they are designed to work that way (see: F1 crash g-force). Not so much if you literally get run over.
The culture needs to change. A vehicle is not a living room. The driver's seat is not a sofa. You don't need a TV in the dashboard. You don't need 8 seats when 7 of them are unoccupied 90% of the time. You don't need to go into debt to buy a land yacht.
So yeah... you're right, but it's a bummer that we've arrived at this situation.
And that’s why any vehicle over 2 tons should require a commercial driver’s license. Let plumbers and tree removal services drive them and not 19 year olds whose parents want their child to survive a fatal crash at the expense of everyone else in a twenty foot radius of the wreck.
> In a crash, the fatality rate of the occupants of the heavy pickup truck is about half that of the compact car. But they are also far more dangerous to the fatality rate of people in other cars.
> The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically. For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.
Unfortunately car safety is only evaluated in terms of safety for the occupants. Not safety of society.
Well, for an about 1 meter tall obstacle (like a kid), some of these large SUV shapes have ~10 - 12 meters of a blind spot to spot this obstacle.
There is another small vehicle around, which usually has a lower stopping distance, and a smaller blind spot in front of the vehicle at around 7-9 meters under somewhat more adverse conditions than regular highway traffic. That's the Leopard 2 tank.
That vehicle also has less problems to find a parking spot.
If a pedestrian gets hit by a tall vehicle, where the bumper is at waist level or above, then the pedestrian goes under the vehicle. This is what causes most of the fatalities these days. Breaking your legs is bad, but getting run over is the end.
In reality, any 'vehicle' which does not meet both passenger car safety and passenger car fuel economy standards [1] should only be allowed to be licensed as a "commercial" vehicle and should pay "commercial" rate (higher) taxes (and maybe even require a "commercial" stamp on one's drivers license to operate). If the states had done this when SUV's first appeared on the scene, we might not have nearly every car on the road being a hulking monster SUV today.
[1] which no SUV's nor trucks used as passenger cars, do because they are classed as 'utility vehicles' and have lower safety/fuel economy standards -- which is why the auto-makers went whole-hog on making/selling them, it got their CAFE averages down artificially.
You take a defensive driving course, I’ll let you drive a tank down the road. But my neighbor’s kids should not be behind the wheel of a death dealer. Those vehicles were meant for skilled laborers, not Sally who is on her phone while driving.
Maybe... I think it would definitely help. I think just driving a smaller car that puts you in control might cause a lot of people to switch. I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe comparatively in breaking, merging, changing lanes, parking, etc. etc. I think most people just have little experience to compare it to anymore.
I also think it's odd that people don't already choose other options w/o a tax in place, considering the price of a bigger vehicle is almost always just going to be higher because of materials and a bunch of other factors.
>I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe
Which two cars? I've gone from a 911 to a BMW X5 and the X5 was just as fun for what it was. They are completely different cars, I'm not sure what you would expect and why you judge others.
That's a totally different comparison. I'm sure the X5 is fine for what it is, but most people are driving around in ~30k USD SUVs. That's the type of vehicle that I'm referencing. I'm comparing it against my 2012 VW GTI w/ a lot of mods. Both vehicles cost about the same new. They have similar interior cargo space. My GTI is worth less than 15k USD. I'm not judging just based on fun, it's true that a nimble car can get you into trouble, but in my experience it also often gets you out of trouble.
A basic BMW 5 series is over 2 tonnes, with the top spec model tipping the scales at 2.5 tonnes. I mean I agree with the general sentiment but it's not just SUVs that need to go on a diet. Everything is getting heavier and heavier and heavier.
I see the same trend. My thoughts: 2 tonnes of shit sells for more than 1 tonne of shit. 650 HP entices a lot more people than 1,200kg. I usually have to dig to find the weight of the vehicle. It's a consumer education problem more than anything imo.
Weight is not the only thing that matters though. You also need to consider center of gravity and wheel base. A YJ Jeep Wrangler and a Honda Fit both weigh around 2700 lbs and they even have similar wheel bases but the driving experience between those 2 is night and day. A Honda Fit can take a turn at speed without feeling like you're going to go flying. You'll feel like you're able to flip making a turn going 20 mph in a YJ.
This is why the first performance mod that most people put on their cars is an adjustable coil over suspension. Dropping the car down by an inch or 2 changes has just as much of an impact as shedding some weight.
Ironically, most people put lift kits on Jeeps but that also usually comes with widening the wheel base and putting on larger wheels/tires.
Lifting an off road vehicle isn't ironic at all, nearly every characteristic that makes a vehicle good on road makes it bad off road and vise versa.
Increased height makes for increased ground clearance and improved break over angle. Sway bars are another suspension component that's great for reducing body roll on road at speed, but reduces articulation and ground contact off road. Differential lockers also negatively impact turning radius, and cause tire chirp, wear, and oversteer under throttle on road, while increasing traction off road.
What's silly is daily driving an off road vehicle on road, especially if you never take it off road.
You are correct, ideally you would do both. My car is lowered on coilovers, I also have front and rear sway bars, but weight reduction is so much more than just handling.
I didn't realize that Jeep was so light... pretty nice actually, but yeah, that's just an application mismatch. People buy Jeeps that will never see even a dirt road in their lives. Then they get on a dirt road once or twice and say, "Look what it can do!" Sure... a rally car would be much better. In order for the Jeep to come into its own you need to be doing something that requires ground clearance... that's basically their singular purpose: rock crawling (which almost no one does).
The Jeep YJ he is talking about is an 80s design, and some models topped 3200lb by the end of the run. So he is comparing the weight and handling of a car from the 80s to a car from the 2000s at the earliest (although the curb weight he cites means that the fit he is talking about would have to be a later model, from 2015 or later).
The modern Jeep Wrangler, and the one that would be contemporary to the Honda Fit weighs in at 4,000 lbs in the 2-door base model or significantly more depending on options.
If you compare a YJ to a Honda Civic of the same era, you see that the 1986 civic was 1800 lbs up against a 1986 YJ at 2800 lbs.
It's not at all about looks, it's about a different kind of handling, for off road, that's mutually exclusive with on road handling.
Yes, some people choose to emulate off road appearances, such as with fake bead locks and then only ever drive their vehicle on road. That doesn't discount the fact that there are a great many explicit choices you can make in designing and building a vehicle that sacrifice on road performance for off road performance.
Driving Volkswagen e-up for the first time was a very unique experience to me. My brain needed to adjust that a car can be that nimble and responsive due to its small size/weight and instant torque from the electric motor.
> I wish more people on the road realized the extent to which weight reduction improves all aspects of the driving experience
This is a blanket statement and completely untrue. Good driving experience is directly correlated to TRACTION, not just weight. And traction isn't just a function of weight - it also is affected by center of gravity, friction between the wheels and the road. Traction is what gives you the perception of being in control of the car.
I used to own two cars of the exact same model - one petrol and one diesel. The petrol is lighter in weight, about 100+ kgs lighter than the diesel variant. And the driving experience on that is slightly scary especially on roads with strong winds. In fact, it is so light that if you drive over tiny puddles or rumbles strips, the car will sway sideways. The diesel always feels more planted because it is front-heavy, thus adding more traction to the front wheels (both are FWDs). I always prefer the diesel for longer drives because of the heft and confidence it provides.
I get what you're saying, but tire technology has improved traction so greatly in the last decade that we can definitely take the slight loss in maximum theoretical traction for the massive benefits in other areas. There is also the question of what "maximum traction" is... what scenario are we talking about? Straight line acceleration from a dig or skidpad turning at a high speed? If we're turning at all then the momentum (which increases w/ mass) of the vehicle is what pulls it off course and causes the tires to break traction.
I also drive a FWD (a quite spicy one) and I break traction all the time, not because of weight, but because of torque. You can modulate torque, not weight. The biggest traction increases that I made on my FWD were when I put on sticky summer tires, the second was subtly changing front control arm geometry and bushings, and the third was adding stiffer engine mounts.
Agreed on getting tossed around in a light car though, not much can be done about that... other than making the roads better and lowering the center of gravity.
> In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.
It’s a little sad to me that fundamental innovations in electromechanical engineering like this get just a few million in investment, yet if this had been yet another derivative software startup with “AI” in the pitch, they’d probably have 10x+ or more investments being thrown at them.
Seems to me everyone wants to invest, instead, into something that can be "web scale" with low marginal cost, that is, natural monopolies. There is not enough anti-trust enforcement.
The issue with this type of motor is that it is part of the unsprung weight since it is inside the wheel. This is probably why savings here matter a lot more (or at least in a very different way) than the battery weight.
Ok, now I understand why this motor is only used in supercars - installing four (or even only two - according to https://www.mercedes-benz.de/passengercars/technology/concep..., even the AMG GT-XX has "only" three of them) hub motors with twice the power of a Tesla Model 3 in any other car would be ridiculous. So, the actual challenge is to make this motor even smaller while keeping the same power to weight ratio, so it can also be used for regular cars? That is, if they want to build something for the mass market, not only for an exclusive clientele?
I don't think their motors are axial flux, they're just large and narrow to fit inside wheels. Or at least all the images on their website depict radial flux designs.
Do e-bikes really need significantly more power than they have? They already run arguably dangerously fast for their application. Is efficiency not the primary target there?
e-bikes don't necessarily need more power but they could benefit from a smaller and lighter motor. If it becomes small enough to "disappear" in the pedal assembly for example, it would allow more design/parts commonality with normal bikes and fit more people's aesthetic criteria.
The lower weight would be definitely welcome, my ebike is comically heavy compared to a normal one and sometimes I have to carry it up flights of stairs (some German railway overpasses, grr).
Also in scooters it could fit in the wheel (since the wheel is tiny and has to spin quite quickly - no reduction gear needed vs a bike with 26-28" rims) allowing a simpler design and cost savings. But maybe in scooters they're already using in-wheel motors, I'm a bit ignorant there.
There are some advantages to hub motors in an e-bike, and if the motor and an appropriate gearing system could be made light enough the disadvantages would be reduced.
Oddly, a very large majority of current fully suspended e-bikes with rear cargo racks have those racks unsprung, which suggests that most e-bike manufacturers don’t actually care about the handling of anything other than their pure e-MTBs.
While more power may not make sense, less weight is an easy way to get more efficiency. And if you can keep the same power at a lower weight, that's a win.
Hmm. I am NOT an expert (though I ride and have owned 3 traditional motorcycles). IIUC, reducing unsprung weight is really crucial for handling -- which is why so-called "inverted" forks / front shock absorbers became basically the standard.
They don’t need this motor, but if it can be scaled down… at over 10kW/kg sustained, one could wish/hope to get 200W at 50g (disclaimer: I have no idea how this scales with size). Combine that with 1kg of a 600Wh/kg battery (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797452. Again, I have no idea how realistic that is), and you have a bicycle that’s only a little heavier than a non-electric one, but gives you a boost for 3 hours (more if you use it sparingly. If you’re cycling at leisure, 100W already is a lot of power)
Yeah, you kind of shouldn't use a Raspberry Pi to blink an LED, though. Great "Hello World" project. But there are so many ways that are cheaper, lighter, smaller and more reliable (and don't require a lengthy boot-up).
From Wikipedia on Axial Flux Motors:
>"Mercedes-Benz subsidiary YASA (Yokeless and Segmented Armature) makes AFMs that have powered various concept (Jaguar C-X75), prototype, and racing vehicles. It was also used in the Koenigsegg Regera, the Ferrari SF90 Stradale and S96GTB, Lamborghini Revuelto hybrid and the Lola-Drayson.[9] The company is investigating the potential for placing motors inside wheels, given that AFM's low mass does not excessively increase a vehicle's unsprung mass.[10] "
I think they misspoke when they said "in" the wheel, but supercars can have a separate motor for each wheel, and the closer they are to the wheel the better the torque as it's not also driving a longer shaft. The smaller the motor, the closer you can get.
I guess if you can make the motor and a suitable reduction box lighter than the equivalent bearing and driveshaft combination you could make the suspension arms mechanically simpler.
By using motors at each wheel you'd eliminate the need for a differential, saving a good 40-50kg or so. Of course, if you kept the drive shafts and put the motor and reduction box in the middle, you'd be able to use inboard brakes and save a lot of unsprung weight!
it would be really interesting if it became possible to do electronic only breaks. I'm sure the regulatory system isn't there yet, but it would let you shave a whole bunch more parts and complexity
There are cars with inboard brakes, although not recently. From a packaging point of view putting them out at the wheel makes sense, since there's a lot of space you're not using otherwise.
It's hard to fit inboard brakes to front wheel drive cars because there's so little space but Citroën managed it with the 2CV and various derivatives, and the GS/GSA/Birotor family. They had an inline engine with a very compact gearbox behind, with the brake discs (drums, on very early 2CVs) right on the side of the gearbox.
You got lower unsprung weight and possibly more usefully the kingpin was aligned with the centre of the tyre, so when you steered the tyre turned "on the spot" rather than rotating through a curve.
Some old Jags and Alfas had inboard discs on the rear axle, which was of course rear wheel drive. They were a bit of a pain to get at.
I’ve generally assumed that brakes are in the wheel because they’re not all that massive, they get decent cooling airflow in the wheel, and they can produce enormous amounts of torque.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think these motors are intended to be used inside the wheel. That would add a ton of additional requirements in terms of physical durability as well as constrain optimal torque and RPM of the motor design.
I believe the Aptera was originally going to have motors in the wheels... My understanding is the the first version will forego that, as there were challenges i guess, but i think they still to eventually do that.
> This is probably why savings here matter a lot more (or at least in a very different way) than the battery weight.
Wouldn't that make it worse or just ... different. Before this the unsprung weight wouldn't have had a motor in there and now it does. Increasing the unsprung weight doesn't seem a like a good thing.
What current mass production EVs use hub motors? It seems a lot more sensible to have the motors inboard, mounted to the chassis, and drive the wheel(s) with axle shafts. It seems in my searching this is how nearly all EVs are currently designed and produced.
YASA doesn't call it a hub motor specifically but that's one place where it helps to save as much weight as possible. And for the cars most likely to have 1000+HP weight matters too. A Tesla motor weighs 100-200lbs, so saving that much weight down to 28lbs on a supercar is highly desirable.
I think large drones will be another place where a downsized version of this motor will make a huge difference, assuming the power scales nicely with size.
See also the Saab Emily GT project. Even with an older, heavier gen of these axial flux motors they found significant performance gains by controlling each wheel via its own motor.
I didn't want to put the usability of the motor into question or go into a complete evaluation of advantages/disadvantages :) This was just an explanation that weight trimming the motor might be very much worth the effort - even if it somewhat "insignificant" compared with savings that are possible in battery weight.
In-wheel application is possible, but it's important to understand that the pancake shape is only a consequence of the axial flux design and Yasa doesn't make motors in other "formats". Yasa motors shaped like this have been used in several supercars and all of them have been in-board on the axles, not in-wheel.
It compounds. If you have a lighter more efficient motor you need a smaller battery for the same range, that combined weight loss means you meed lighter brakes etc etc, and because the car is now lighter you size of your motor you need is less.....
They claim, this compounding effect works out to basically double the effective weight saving from battery and motor.
ie if you start with saving 50kg on motor, and 50kg on battery, you end up saving 200kg over all. Still only about 10% of a typical electric car.
> If you have a lighter more efficient motor you need a smaller battery for the same range
Nitpick: You can have a lighter motor, but you're never going to have a significantly more efficient motor because existing EV motor systems are already 95% efficient or better. The electric motor is an old and refined technology.
Suppose you go from a 95% efficient electric motor to a 99% efficient motor. How much more efficient is it? You might say 1.04x (or actually 99/95 efficient). Except, that's not the whole story - electric motors need cooling, and you've just dropped the heat output five-fold (going from 5% heat to 1% heat). Lower heat output means less venting needed and thus better aerodynamics.
I'm not an expert - but the axial flux design while old is been largely ignored due to manufacturing problems that have now been overcome ( so most of the dev has been on the radial flux variety ).
And apparently axial flux motors have shorter magnetic flux paths which reduces losses.
ie the efficiency gain is due to the switch from radial to axial flux - not some incremental gain on radial flux.
Having said that the efficiency gains are relatively small - 1-2%.
However again there is a compounding effect, in that the reduction of loss of energy as heat, leads to requiring less cooling - and/or the motor is able to operate a full efficiency over a wider power output range ( as heating the copper increases the electrical resistance ).
What's a bit of a shame is they are no longer an independent company ( ie wholly owned owned by Mercedes ) - so that might mean we are less likely to see these motors combined with solid state batteries any time soon.
Yea that's the thing right, the battery is so very much of the weight that optimizing the other parts are "meh" at this point. What is cool is that the 600Wh/kg solid state batteries seems like they are really finally here soon :) i.e removing 200-300kg from a car in one go will be a game changer.
Range being worse with a fully loaded car than with a lightly loaded car isn't exactly news, and not exactly limited to electric cars. I can clearly feel my old diesel struggling more when I'm driving 3 friends and with loads of heavy stuff in the back than when I'm alone. That makes the gas bill more expensive.
You probably know already, but ICE cars only convert about 20–30% of fuel energy into motion, while EVs are often +90% efficient. So when an EV has to work harder (extra battery weight or colder weather), you notice the drop in range more.
In an ICE, the same load is less visible because most energy gets wasted as heat. This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
> You probably know already, but ICE cars only convert about 20–30% of fuel energy into motion, while EVs are often +90% efficient. So when an EV has to work harder (extra battery weight or colder weather), you notice the drop in range more.
There's a kernel of truth here in that Otto engines suffer lower efficiency at part load, however I suspect the real reason is that gas car range is "good enough" and refilling is fast, so one doesn't tend to obsess about remaining range.
> This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
That's because a) some batteries suffer degraded performance at low temperature, and b) ICE cars use the plentiful waste heat for cabin heating whereas an EV needs a heat pump or even resistive heating of the cabin air.
> That's because a) some batteries suffer degraded performance at low temperature, and b) ICE cars use the plentiful waste heat for cabin heating whereas an EV needs a heat pump or even resistive heating of the cabin air.
You are making my point here actually. Combustion engines suffer from the exact same, but because they waste so much energy as heat already, less “extra” energy needs to be spent on that.
I don't think there's a contradiction here. Electric cars suffer degraded range when it's cold (in part) because they're so much more efficient that they don't produce enough waste heat to heat the cabin. And batteries are so much less energy dense than diesel and gasoline that the extra power draw reduces their range to a meaningful degree.
Yes heating impacts range in an EV, but it's not really an efficiency thing, it's because you can't get it "free". If an ICE didn't let you harness the heat, you'd see a similar percent drop in range.
And for extra weight, it's just not true. Making a motor work 10% harder at 90% efficiency, compared to making an engine work 10% harder at 20% efficiency, both of these are going to reduce your range by 9%.
The unexpected benefit which I've noticed when switching from a small, light car to a heavier, medium EV car is that the latter doesn't drive/feel any worse when fully loaded. Makes the trips that much more pleasant.
True! If only grandma wouldn't insist on bringing 250kg of weapons and ammunition with her everywhere I'd get much better range in my EV, but alas this is the USA.
Instead of technological advancements of EV motors, we can immediately use existing pharmaceutical tech (Ozempic, GLP-1) to immediately deliver weight reduction to cars. However, this will be immediately offset by the increase in weight of weapons carried, thanks to Jevons Paradox.
Manufacturers may just keep the battery size and market the improved range instead? Smaller cars in urban and suburban environments have always had lots of benefits, but since many of them are collective in nature, it has largely fallen on tragedy of the commons, and we got larger cars with larger hoods instead.
Not true. Tesla themselves said the way they got the Model 3 to be so efficient was by optimising every single part exhaustively. It’s expensive at design stage but results in the most efficiency gains across the fleet - so worth it (especially something like the motors)
Hub motors are problematic because they increase the sprung weight of the wheel, which loses more traction when hitting bumps. Dangerous while cornering or braking. Scale down a motor like this to 300 HP and you could have an amazing AWD vehicle.
This video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WU9Ptibu2WQ&t=179s claims that SMC materials have much higher losses at low frequencies than laminated materials, up to around 400 HZ when they very rapidly pull ahead.
So as the core of a step down transformer for consumer electronics, SMCs would be worse than a laminated core (stack of sheet metal pieces punched with a press, stacked and wound with the windings). But in a motor operating at 100s of rpms, no problem. And as I understand it, in high torque motors the magnetic fields pulse far more often than once per revolution because the windings are many and small, so that several can pull on the armature at any orientation.
Tesla Model Y's battery is 771 kg. The motor in Model Y weights about 45 kg, about three times as much as the motor in the article. By reducing dual motor configuration weight from 90 kg to 28 kg, we reduce total powertrain weight by 7%.
This is a negligible improvement to most things about an EV. Motors are already extremely power-dense.
There is a single exception, and it's a big one. Direct-drive, wheel-hub motors are not well-regarded right now, specifically because they increase unsprung weight (the part of the car more closely coupled to the road surface than the passenger) and this impacts handling substantially. So instead we backport a bunch of the mechanical infrastructure that transfers power from a traditional ICE engine to the four wheels. We're paying that bill already, on almost all production EVs. Quadruple the power density and simple, 1-moving-part wheel hub motors look like a lot better case versus central driveshafts and mechanical linkages.
> Direct-drive, wheel-hub motors are not well-regarded right now, specifically because they increase unsprung weight
It will always be lighter to not have the motor in the wheel.
> So instead we backport a bunch of the mechanical infrastructure that transfers power from a traditional ICE engine to the four wheels.
No, we do it because it's smart and efficient for freeway-capable vehicles.
Wheels get banged up in use. They're easy to replace for different applications. They're exposed to 200 kph salt spray at hundreds of RPM. They are not a great place for motors.
That wasn't so much a criticism of the electric motor, which it sounds like they can scale down, as the Neanderthal part of my brain lighting up. Mongo like power to weight ratio.
Even if motors were literally weightless and mass-less, EVs would weigh more than ICE cars.
It's like making a more efficient CPU for your phone when all the power is eaten up by the cell-modem, screen and RAM. People wonder where the practical battery life gains are and theyre miniscule in practice
I don't see the weight reduction being very significant.
If we take a Tesla model 3, I believe it weighs 1611kg, and the motor shows up at 80kg if you google it (no idea if this is correct). This YASA motor by comparison weighs 14kg. So, this would drop the vehicle weight by 66kg out of 1611, so that's a 4% saving.
This motor is well more than twice as powerful as the Model 3 motor, so it could eliminate the entire weight of the second motor in the higher performance models. That’s 146kg, the weight of two adults, an 11% reduction.
The Ferrari 296 GTB weighs about 1500kg and the sports version 1300kg. For the cars YASA produces motors for it's much easier to increase the power to weight ratio by reducing weight than increasing power. I imagine an important design point for all of its components is to reduce weight.
Also as mentioned by another comment, Mercedes produces Formula 1 power units, and engineers would kill for a savings of a few kilograms in Formula 1. Those savings are not easy to come by.
I agree insofar as the motor is not a Big Ticket Item, opposed to ICE cars where the engine block is going to be 10% or more.
Tesla (I know) claimed a 30kg (?) weight loss on their Cybertruck (I know) just from moving their 12V systems to 48V, allowing for lighter cables at lower currents. Not all such potential is untapped, and my hunch is that there is more to be had with structural battery integration, battery cooling, and high voltage wiring.
Depends on your definition if significance, but I think they do. Every kg of useless weight you do carry, lowers your range. But sure, on its own it is not a magic game changer for heavy electric cars.
For light weight vehicles on the other hand, it might be.
If you put several small motors on each wheel you might get some extra weight gains in the form of less transmission needed. Cables weight less than metal structural bars. But yes you are not going to be 500kg lighter.
Weight reductions on an electric car are self-reinforcing. If you reduce the weight of a component, the battery can become (slightly) smaller, which again reduces weight. At a certain amount of reduction this will allow you to make the whole structure lighter, which will again allow for a smaller battery.
Also not considered is that the announcement is for 740bhp motor. The Tesla model 3 has a vehicle output of about 400 hp. I’m not sure of all the design specs, but it seems clear to me that a smaller version of these motors could suffice to drive a 3 equivalent vehicle at 1/2 the output and still be more than sufficient. So let’s say maybe 15lbs each, vs current equivalent 70lbs each. It’s not major total weight impact, but with battery advancements it will compound.
I think people are overlooking that the announcement is for a performance motor meant for the performance market at the moment because that is what the backers of YASA are most interested in because it has the highest margins and prestige. Also not mentioned is the efficiency from the simpler production line.
My impression from what I know is we are looking at an impact equivalent to direct injection engines; not revolutionary, but a major advancement of one component that has significant and consequential effects.
> Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's
Not really. EV's are very heavy from non-motor weight. A Model Y weighs ~4300 lbs. A motor that is 75 lbs lighter is a 1.7% savings. That's not nothing, but I wouldn't say "significant". You can do better by swapping for fancy wheels or eliminating some of the glass roof.
And really this is true up and down the electric vehicle world. Weight-sensitive applications are always going to be completely dominated by battery weight. Making the motor smaller just isn't going to move the needle.
Basically this is good tech without an application, which is why it's having to tell itself with links like this.
It’s great anywhere you want more power but are limited by space and/or weight for performance reasons. Aerospace, e-bikes, electric race vehicles, electric motorcycles.
But yeah, EVs seem weird except for racing reasons perhaps.
What I can’t figure out is how they dissipate the heat - double digits kw per kg is crazy.
The YASA axial flux motors benefit from much shorter windings and direct oil cooling which gives an unparalleled performance proposition.
A 200kW peak-power radial motor, run continuously, might typically give 50% of peak power between 80 and 100kW, as a result of thermal limitations. In contrast, a 200kW YASA motor runs continuously at 150kW thanks to the improved high-thermal-contact cooling that oil offers.
The first step to dealing with heat at high kw, is to not generate the heat you have to dissipate in the first place. Which means chasing smaller and smaller efficiency gains, because that reduces heat generated.
The more of the energy going into moving the vehicle, the less heat the motor has to handle.
Sure, but at 50kw/kg at 99% efficiency is still 500w/kg, which is cray cray. Like ‘glowing red hot shortly’ type of crazy with just passive cooling.
And there is no way this is 99% efficient.
So my question still applies. Even 98% is 1kw/kg, or 1kj/sec. or around 3C rise per second assuming the mass is 100% nice clean copper (it isn’t). Everything else will be worse.
Not even counting increasing losses with temperature, it will be a molten puddle pretty quick at that rate without some major active cooling.
I was waiting to see in the comments EXACTLY this question: There is no way to dump this heat. 1000hp? Yeah, maybe for a few seconds, even with oil coolant pumping through there. Then how to dump the heat from the oil. And further thinking, if they ever get this to be a hub motor, how in the world are they going to pump coolant through 2-4 hub motors and then to a radiator that can dump that rate of heat rise, especially since oil is a lousy coolant (relatively speaking).
Those could be answered by large radiators or the like - when outside the ‘has to be dense’ path. The issue the motor has is exactly that it needs to be dense - and has a lot of power going through it.
Liquid cooling at least for now should work - as long as it stays below the flash point of the liquid I guess.
Again, no, because the motor needs to be powered and the battery is vastly larger than the motor already in any of those applications. Even in RC planes, which fly for 5-6 minutes at a time, the battery is 5x or more the weight of the motor, wiring and controller logic.
> This is awesome. Lighter motors also make electric flight more viable
The next innovation we need is Aerial refueling[1] for electric planes. High density swappable batteries and high altitude wind/solar plants that can swap batteries mid air. Perhaps some billionaire will develop a large fleet of these to service all flights! If no western billionaires, we just have to wait for China to develop this tech.
A sufficiently compact electric motor enables mounting it in the nose-wheel of commercial aircraft, allowing it to be driven around like a golf cart. This means the plane can taxi without the use of its engines, just the power from the APU. [1]
Also planes would not have to wait for a tug to pull back from the gate, which improves turnaround times for the airline.
You could also spin up the landing gear wheels prior to landing to massively reduce the amount of rubber transferred from tire to runway on touchdown. Rarely done today because of the weight and complexity of adding motors, but letting the ground spin up the wheel is pretty expensive both for tire wear and runway maintenance
Surely it would be easier to recharge rather than swap batteries? I wonder if in the future war will be like a turn based strategy game as everyone wait for drones to recharge before making a move.
Mid-air: yes. A boom with a charging cable or even beamed energy would be much easier.
On the ground: swapping batteries is faster, and batteries are cheaper than planes or drones. You want the expensive part back in the air as soon as possible so you don't need as many of them. On the whole this probably also simplifies logistics: in civilian aviation airport space is limited, in wartime it's easier to transport one hundred drones and two hundred battery packs to the frontline than to transport two hundred drones
That's a future thought when it comes to electric aircraft - remote/emergency refuelling. I know they have tested lasers, and even sent a megawatt in 30 seconds over a distance of a few miles, though current convention of the laser back into usable power is around 50% efficiency. All gets down to a needed leap in electricity production and wished the World would get together on fusion reactors and knock it out the park over a mad race to be the first and lock down patents.
A typical regional aircraft needs about 3MW of power to keep in cruise, and has about 50 square metre area, so 60kW per square metre. Even with 50% efficiency you're talking over 100kW/m^2
A laser over 10W has safety implications. This is 50,000 lasers all shining on the same plane.
Given your collectors are only going to be say 50% efficient, you're likely going to dumping enough wasted energy into the wings to melt the aircraft - not sure what dumping 3MW of heat energy into a plane would do over an hour, but I suspect it would stat to melt in a few seconds if you're lucky (otherwise your passengers would start getting very toasty)
At 3MW for an hour that's not a great amount of electricity that's needed - at 10c/kWh it's $300 an hour. You don't need fancy things like fusion to generate that. In the UK alone Solar is currently (in November) generating 600 times that - plus domestic installations.
>In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.
In Bay Area that is small investment in a startup which would be able to lease a small office
>Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio...
that would help VTOL a lot. Unfortunately YASA motors are priced for supercars and availability seems to be low. Until some factory in China starts making similar ones, there are not much chances on getting hands on such a motors.
The other aspect is that a smaller motor with the same power generally has higher efficiency, by necessity, since it has less heat dissipation. So higher power and higher efficiency and lower size/weight all go together. It’s a great synergy.
All else held equal, I think so, yeah. If you have the same temperature differential, the same manner of heat dissipation, and a smaller surface area then that should mean smaller heat dissipation, yeah?
Obviously if you go from eg. a large air-cooled motor to a smaller water-cooled motor, then the smaller motor could potentially dissipate more heat, but that's a different scenario.
Okay cool downvote me but it's true, most of the weight is batteries and asking a smaller device to do more work will create more heat and wear components faster. It's not a new phenomenon.
You could almost replace the disc brakes with these and have hub motors for free (in terms of unsprung weight). Depends on the torque and safety margin on the 700KW level of performance. For emergency safety you could have a mechanical short to let the motors dump energy into a big heating element as a last resort (risking wheel lockup) but this would truly be drive-by-wire braking.
This discussion is all about vehicles with large batteries, but how about hybrids? With light enough and efficient enough motors, all kinds of designs might become practical:
- Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter, and they don’t need large batteries.
- e-bikes with tiny batteries?
- Hybrid aircraft? What if there was a battery large enough for takeoff and landing, a small motor (or pair for redundancy) for cruising and to recharge the battery, and motors and fans or propellers wherever is best from an aerodynamic perspective.
The size of this motor is moderately interesting, but the power density doesn't really matter for most of the things you just mentioned. Almost every one of them is limited by the amount of batteries you can put in for both weight and power output reasons.
What do you mean? Modern LFP cells have quite high power density. LTO is even higher.
An e-bike with a 100Wh battery and a 300W motor would be extremely useful if it were light enough: you could carry it up stairs, onto trains, etc easily, and it would give plenty of boost to navigate traffic for short distances and make it easier to go up hills. The idea would be that most of the energy would come from the rider. 100Wh of modern LFP cells doesn't weight very much, but you still need to carry around the motor and the structure to support the motor.
In an airplane, you need a lot of power to take off, and weight is a big deal.
As the other poster mentioned, they're not even on the same planet as the current power density of the combined engine + fuel in an aircraft.
There are two things you are missing in these examples:
1. The motor won't scale down to a 2lbs and a few hundred watts. That's just not how it works.
2. The weight of the battery pack is partially about energy density, but it is also about the ability to discharge, which takes more batteries to make up for it. Let's say you wanted one of the motors in the article giving your device a "boost" of 500hp (sure, we can scale it back, but roll with me), your battery needs to output 400kW instantaneously. If it was a 48v pack, which is 13 cells in series, they would need to deliver 8,333 amps. Most cells are rated for something like 20a, so you need to put more in series to get the voltage high enough to get that to a reasonable number. A 400v car architecture is 112 lithium cells in series for example.
This is before packaging considerations, the increase in complexity of the base system, etc. When you look at the overall system, you're just not gaining that much. Cars are actually uniquely good for hybridization and electrification.
I'm super excited to fly an electric plane, but a lightweight motor isn't what's gonna make that possible. My current plane carries 561 kwh of energy in a 100 pound/ 17gal gas tank.
Even if you say the engine is only 30% efficient, I am still carrying an absolute shitload of energy compared to what I could get out of 100 lbs of lithium batteries.
The actual motor only weighs 84 lbs.
So I have a weight budget of 184 lbs (call it 200 just to be safe), and current capability is a peak output of 50hp (37 kw) and a cruise endurance of 3 hours at 40 hp / 30 kw. So just to math it out, lets say I will need about 90kwh of battery to come close to my current gas capabilities. At an extremely generous 5 kg per kwh, I need a battery that weighs more than my entire airplane's max gross takeoff weight. The weight of the engine is completely irrelevant when the battery weighs 450kg.
> Hybrid aircraft? What if there was a battery large enough for takeoff and landing, a small motor (or pair for redundancy) for cruising and to recharge the battery, and motors and fans or propellers wherever is best from an aerodynamic perspective.
Would this be better than a conventional design? I don’t know, but availability of very high power-to-weight motors would help.
Possibly in some designs. It comes down to a weight issue. The entire weight of the hybrid system needs to be less than the weight saved by installing a smaller ICE engine.
Take a modern small aero engine like the Rotax 912. It comes in an 80hp version that weighs 122 pounds and a 100 hp version that weighs 144 lbs. Hard to beat that kind of power/weight.
They are designed for drastically shorter flight times. Of the airframes I am aware of that are actually flying right now (pipistrel and the beaver) both of them have a range of approximately 1/5 that of the same airframe with a gas engine.
The Pipistrel is probably the best example since it is actually available for sale in both ICE and electric. The ICE version of the airframe has 5.5 hours of cruise fuel good for 650 NM. The electric version has a payload that is 60% less, a ceiling of 12k feet compared to 18k feet, and an endurance of 56 minutes.
Basically, they are sacrificing range and payload. It isn't that electric planes can't possibly fly, its that ICE powered planes have a pretty hard to overcome advantage until battery power density increases by an order of magnitude. There are already mass market brushless motors that could replace most aircraft engines at a lower weight.
The problem is that gasoline holds 30x or more energy than a battery by weight. It doesn't matter if I can get replace 100 lbs of ICE engine with 1 lb of electric engine, because the real issue is that I would need a literal ton of batteries to replace less than 100 lbs of gas.
While I see Toyota-style hybrids as designed for efficiency, there's also the performance hybrids like the new Porsche 911 T-hybrid where an electric motor spins up the turbocharger to eliminate lag while another integrated into the gearbox adds power. There is no "EV mode" so it doesn't need a large battery.
Arguably the most important characteristic of a sports car is light weight, so lighter motors would be immediately useful there.
> Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter
The hybrid electric motor in a Toyota is already pretty comparable in weight to the motor in TFA, but obviously much less powerful. You can see the main hybrid motor of a RAV4 at [0]. If memory serves both the Camry and RAV4 hybrid models are only 2-300 lbs heavier than their gas counterparts.
At this point why don't we get rid of the k prefix and write 59W/g?
Edit:
I was half joking, but various answers mention kW being standard for motors, kg being the SI unit for mass etc. All true, but as used here in a combined unit, which means "power density" it still would make sense IMO. It's not like the "59" tells you that it's a strong motor and hence you want kW to compare it to other motors. You can't, it's just a ratio (power to weigth). W/g just reads much nicer in my head. Or we could come up with a name, like for other units. Let's call it "fainpul" (short fp) for example :)
"The kilogram, symbol kg, is the SI unit of mass. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10−34 when expressed in the unit J s, which is equal to kg m2 s−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ∆νCs.[1]"
The base SI unit for power is the watt. The base SI unit for mass is the kilogram. Yes, this is dumb, but it's the way it is.
Amusingly, given the other thread in here with people sniping each other over the metric system, I'm obliged to point out that kg, not g, is the fundamental unit of mass in SI, because even metric can't get away without some silliness.
Ha! I didn't know that.
This blondie is definitely, definitely the more, um, traditional(?, oof) genus and species of American 'blondie' (no offense to blondes, I promise, as my disdain is in the direction of protection of blondes rather than broad criticism)
Not sure about that, but if you ask me, a really small dog only weighs up to 7 pounds - or otherwise said, this motor weight as much as four fat Chihuahuas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chihuahua_(dog_breed) )
Lol. I was confused by it also. I have no idea how much is 28 pounds, and I could imagine how a small dog can be anything from 1 kg to 10 kg. It happens that the motor weight is ~13kg, but I'm still not sure that 13kg dog counts as "small".
The questions I have mostly centre around how much precision of power delivery it has - it is an all or nothing proposition, can it deliver 0.1% smoothly for real world use, and what is the MTBF / duty cycle / failure mode? I would imagine the last thing anyone would want is a locked wheel, or only one wheel delivering that much power. I know this is unlikely, but as someone with a 22-year-old ICE vehicle I do tend to take the long view on these things and want to know how they will fail as much as how they work. Same applies to the Tesla motors - is there much information on failure modes publicly available?
Ok so whats the catch with the technology? Its more powerful, smaller, all readily available materials. Some kind of strange shape, longevity challenge? Difficult to make so costs are tough to bring down?
Just noticed that they are owned by mercedes benz- they will kill it accidentally. Corporate wont be able to roll it out. They will try and capture all the value and kill its potential
Axial flux motors are difficult and expensive to make.
Motors need to be made of laminated steel sheets to reduce parasitic eddy currents. The laminations need to be thin in the direction of the direction of the flux. For radial flux motors you just punch out a shape and stack a bunch of sheets up. For axial flux you have to wind a strip: https://15658757.s21i.faiusr.com/2/ABUIABACGAAgmviFqAYozvPw-...
Each layer of that strip has a different cut in it, so its much more complicated to make. The shape and manufacturing method typically impacts efficiency; YASA avoids that by spending more money. Efficiency is an unavoidable requirement of high power density- heat is the limiting factor, and going from 98% to 96% efficient means double the heat.
The mechanical demands on the motor are also much higher- radial flux is balanced since the magnetic force pulls the rotor from opposite sides. Axial flux motors are usually one-sided, so the magnets are trying to pull the rotor and stator together with incredible force. That also makes vibrations worse. Extremely strong, expensive bearings are required to handle it. With permanent magnet rotors you need a jig to lower the rotor into place; they can't be assembled by hand. That also makes maintenance more difficult and expensive.
>> Each layer of that strip has a different cut in it, so its much more complicated to make.
You can roll a spool of that material and then machine the shape out of it. I've seen this done for axial flux motors. There are other approaches as well, and the cost differences get even smaller if you throw automation at the production process. I used to believe axial flux motors were one of those oddities that won't win in the end, but now that I work with them I'm not so sure. They are at least competitive with radial flux machines.
Can you (or anyone) explain where the power density improvement comes from with axial flux? When I work through the first-order math it seems like it should come out the same as radial flux. Is it just that the geometry allows better cooling from the coils? Or the use of grain oriented steel?
It would almost have to be very efficient -- they're saying it can do something like 500HP continuous, and it doesn't have enormous fins all over it for cooling.
Exactly my thought as well. You can have all the horsepower you want but if it doesn't convert the electricity efficiently, it's not going to be useful for normal consumer cars.
Peak power is a number that can be manipulated. You just dump short circuit current into a winding. Even if that peak lasts for 1 microsecond, you can "claim" eye-watering horsepower numbers.
I wonder if we defined peak as sustained peak over 100 milliseconds, or some more meaningful number, what that would do to the claims. You aren't really generating meaningful torque over 1 microsecond.
I sort of wonder how well these things can be scaled down.
Wheel hub motors are obviously bad, for harshness reasons, but if you could have a motor like this weighing 1-2 kg, and put one on each wheel, that'd be okay.
Power-wise this would be okay if things are linear. 26 kW per wheel sustained power output is more than enough for a light car. The question is what torque a scaled-down machine can be expected to have.
I'm wondering if it would make sense to integrate the rim, motor and wheel bearing into a single assembly to save weight and cost. That combined with the weight and packaging benefits of not having half shafts and differentials might make it worth it. Plus there can be additional benefits, like the extra maneuverability that ZF Easy Turn and Hyundai's e-Corner have demonstrated.
30kW sustained/60 kW per wheel peak power is easily enough even for large passenger vehicles. Sustained could take 3 ton vehicle up a 10% grade at 120 km/h.
Thanks. Do you also happen to know the power density of the motors in the average EV car? Because the article uses "nr of Tesla Model 3" as a unit, which is meaningless without further details about it power density.
It's easy to forget that most of the weight in an electric car is the battery. It's ICE cars where a lot of the weight is in the motor.
That being said, could this be adapted so that a 2.8lb motor produces 100 hp? That would allow putting a small motor in each wheel, thus completely eliminating axels, driveshafts, and allow recapturing the space they used to occupy. It also wouldn't significantly impact unsprung weight.
Second, don't forget that you're trading one complexity for another. Eliminate a drive shaft and you still have to get power to the wheel somehow, which means now you're running high power electrical cable in a very dynamic environment with exposure to the elements. On top of that, you need to cool the electric motor, so you're probably running some kind of fluid out to it. Not that it isn't a solvable problem, but it probably doesn't reduce the weight much, if at all, when the system is all added up. You'll find that while you eliminate an axle, you still need to mechanically connect the two wheels together (look at the rear subframe on an FWD car) for strength, which also reduces the weight loss. Then the steering on the front... etc.
Until a more significant change than this motor (where maybe a 2.8lb motor could produce 100hp without needing active cooling), we're better off with "inboard" motors still.
People used to say they would only get a Tesla if it was offered with a manual transmission.
It's easy to laugh at, but there are still many people who haven't shifted, in their mind, to the differences.
Even after driving EVs for over a decade, I still need to shift. My habit is to turn the car off and close the garage inside the car. My new EV only controls the garage if it's on, so I had to get used to closing the garage with the car on. There's still a part of my brain that screams "but carbon monoxide" every time I do it.
First motor I saw in this category was much larger because it had massive mount points to attach it to the car so the torque would go to the wheels and not to destroying the motor.
This one has a narrow ring meant for 3/8” bolts? I guess if you’re buying a 1000 hp motor you can afford titanium carriage bolts.
I suspect this may end up in Mercedes Formula 1 power units, so that may not be off-base. Use whatever ridiculous materials you can to keep the weight and size down.
It is great that Mercedes-Benz now owns a highly performant electric engine. But is this just an impressive lab breakthrough, or can it work in the real world for their cars? Which means enduring from freezing to high temps, hours of sustained driving, and years of that (or equivalent endurance testing).
It's not a lab model (according to the article), but it's likely aimed at performance cars. For consumer cars, 150 KW / 200 HP is enough and efficiency is more important than weight.
Of course, when consumer car efficiency increases, they won't necessarily get higher ranges because the manufacturers will instead try to downsize the battery.
> "There has been significant progress in the construction of molecular motors powered by light and by chemical reactions, but this is the first time that electrically-driven molecular motors have been demonstrated, despite a few theoretical proposals," says Sykes. "We have been able to show that you can provide electricity to a single molecule and get it to do something that is not just random."
"something that is not just random" ==> Probably a long way away from something in production. I wouldn't hold off on any urgent transportation needs waiting on this tech.
There have been rumors for quite some time that Mercedes has the best power unit for the upcoming 2026 regulation set. It's entirely possible that this is part of that picture.
"Sustained power output between 350 and 400 kilowatts" is also a bit interesting since that is basically right in line with what people expect out of the 2026 electrical component of the power unit.
Axial flux motors are so next level. Very little power needed per rpm. I’ve built a few tiny ones for FPV and they are a joy to work with. I’ll die a happy man if I never have to coil again.
It's cool, but I think deploying motors without rare earth materials will be more impactful. The Nissan Ariya was ill-fated for other reasons, but it had a EESM motor that is easier to cool, more efficient at speed, and cheaper. That's where motor tech is headed. Power density just isn't terribly important in current applications, at least not past current sota.
EV motors are not that heavy. Ok it is 1/4 of a tesla motor but would that make much of a difference compared to the rest of the car since the weight of an EV motor is in single % of the entire weight.
Sounds like it could be more important for drones?
I do not know why people still think Tesla is a unique company. They are a regular car company now. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, they disrupted the market and the reward is a standalone, viable car company. That is a huge achievement. But their disruption and uniqueness is gone. The rest of the car industry woke up and all are producing many more EV variants and EV cars in total.
Their website claims "4 X more torque and double the power densities of current technologies".
A bit handwavy, but given the inherent torque advantage of electric, I doubt torque is an issue. If anything, a lot of EVs would probably do better with a touch less torque.
Why do we even need to drive cars, why dont we all just have trailers and then an automated robot could pull it around. Decouple the drive train from the cabin.
With all the extra coupling hardware and surface area required, the reason is performance and weight. Modern cars are all about material minimization. It's easier to add a bump to the cabin and put a motor in that volume than it is to make another mini car.
I think it would only make financial sense if it were like swappable batteries: you rent it all.
One of my fundamental criticisms of Elon musk performance as a CEO. The vast stock market price and valuation should enable these sorts of transactions.
It would enable Tesla to diversify operations move into applying its technology on a mass-market basis to hybrids without "damaging" the "purity" of the Tesla brand.
It would enable more marques to target specific economic bands, international markets, etc.
But no we basically have a car company that makes two cars.
They started working on autonomy around when Google started (2013 or so?). And fully focused on it for half a decade now. It's not that hard to understand, he's been repeating the mission statement forever. Same with SpaceX.
Yet Another Sale Abroad. Not a criticism of the YASA team. It’s hard to scale a company in the UK and foreign investment is a good thing in general. But still frustrating that the UK was unable to offer the kind of investment that Mercedes could to keep a company British.
Axial flux motors are such an obvious and simple to build design that I don't understand why they aren't used more commercially. I've mainly seen do-it-yourself projects to build them for home windmills etc.
- divergence -
This is perhaps my greatest frustration with wealth inequality. Billionaires like Elon Musk (not to single him out of the thousand others) sometimes fund innovative projects initially, but seem to get lost in the weeds doubling down on evolutionary tech, while missing obvious opportunities in fringe tech and old ideas that were suppressed.
For example, the Tesla turbine could have been used for an onboard generator, and what better opportunity than to build a hybrid Tesla car using it? Its main drawback is that it gets fouled by combustion products (with secondary drawbacks in low torque, noise, etc). So why not use natural gas, propane or hydrogen? Why not use an external combustion system that heats air and runs it through the turbine in place of using a larger (due to low compression) Stirling engine? Why not mount the turbine in sound dampening material or a vacuum? These are all trivially overcome engineering challenges. Yet we can't buy a cost-effective mass-produced Tesla turbine or even a Stirling engine of any appreciable power online.
As we see more and more of these missed or suppressed innovations by moneyed interests, I can't help but come to the conclusion that wealth inequality is the largest force stopping widespread prosperity, especially the kind brought by automation to provide basic resources. We can claim that so much progress has been made possible by crony capitalism, for example the computers we are writing and reading this comment on, but I believe that they exist despite concentrated wealth, not because of it.
And I'm worried that access to fee-based AI will widen the wealth gap even further. Because people with money will be able to pay AI to do their jobs and get paid, while people without money may be forced to do those jobs by hand performatively under ever-increasing pressure as the cost of AI only decreases due to economies of scale and Moore's law. So that the main goal for moneyed interests could become to deny access to capital to the working class so that they can be exploited. Even though it would be far easier and more beneficial to more people to distribute the costs of some minimal level of AI to everyone in the world.
I dunno, the more I see these exciting innovations that could practically be built for cost of materials (28 pounds of copper costs less than $150 and is the most expensive component) yet never reach widespread adoption - while other inferior products that use more material flourish - it makes me question if our market-based economy even works anymore. I'm not saying that older (antiquated?) alternatives like socialism/communism would work better today, just that there may be a post-scarcity 21st century economy where patents that could increase equivalent personal wealth by orders of magnitude are put into the public domain. Not for money, but as automated and open source goods/services/resources having equivalent value to what money would have provided. The closest I can get is stuff like solarpunk, which still hasn't caught on for reasons I don't understand.
Edit: before I get flamed too badly for this comment, I should add that neodymium magnets could perhaps cost more than copper, and/or be a scarcer resource. If I were working on this type of motor, I would try to get similar performance from non-rare-earth magnets and aluminum wire, as well as explore hybrid motors that achieve say 80% of the power and efficiency using only 20% of the rare stuff. On that note, we are long overdue for mass-produced graphene and carbon nanotube wire. We need a definitive answer as to whether they are safe enough to use commercially, or if they are a dead end like asbestos. I don't understand why billionaires don't put more money into getting this sort of first-principles "real work" done. If I won the internet lottery, I would set up a foundation with an endowment to tackle these pressing problems and invite hackers through grants, sort of like what MacKenzie Scott is doing.
I wonder if Americans don't have a mental image for measurement units so that they alway use some physical object as a reference. Sure, its useful to use a common object as a reference but I don't see that much often in other places.
Most people usually understand what it means something to be 20 meters, 5kg or 2 liters intuitively. Like, when I hear that something is 60m tall I intuitively think if it as 20 story apartment building and don't benefit from the extra info about how this is like 18 elephants stacked on each other.
I'm also European and don't get these olympic swimming pool or whatever comparisons. I'd have to look up how many m3 of water they contain or what's the length/depth in meters are to make sense of it.
Newspapers in my country don't make these silly comparisons.
But yeah, to be fair, when hearing about Starship I had to look up our TV tower height to identify whether Starship is taller or not. It disappointed me that it's not.
Yeah, height is easier to grasp when correlating in terms of x story apartment buildings.
When using football fields as a unit of length you should use American football fields rather than soccer fields because American football field sizes are more standardized.
For American football professional, college, and high school games are all played on the same sized field, which is 100 years long.
Compare to soccer, where they can even have different sized fields in the same professional league. The English Premier League wants to standardize on 105 m x 68 m but several clubs are still using other sizes: Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), and Nottingham Forest (105 x 70).
For international play FIFA has a standard, but it is a range: 100-110 m x 64-70 m.
There are parts of a soccer field that are precisely specified and so could be used as a standard of length.
Some examples are the radius of the circle around the center mark (9.144 m), the penalty area (40.23 x 16.46 m), distance from penalty mark to goal (10.97 m), goal area (18.29 m x 5.47 m), distance between goal posts (7.32 m), and the height of the crossbar (2.44 m).
The reason none of them are nice integers is that they were actually originally standardized in Imperial units. In those the aforementioned measurements are 10 yards, 44 yards x 18 yards, 12 yards, 20 yards x 6 yards, 8 yards, and 8 feet, respectively.
I don't know the first thing about football, only that it has the words "foot" and "ball", none of which apply to the American variant who is played with hands and a (geometric) lemon[1] :p
I figured FIFA/UEFA who both standardised on 105m, sensibly factored ±5m to account for Heisenberg uncertainty when approaching relativistic speeds. This is very well depicted - complete with curvature of space, train paradox, spooky action at a distance, time dilation, and other relativistic oddities - in a documentary I watched when I was young; if only I could recall the original name...
Yes I'm always a bit dumbfounded by this behavior as well.
They always use weird stuff and I never have the intuition of the actual size, especially since the definition can vary depending on context.
In this case, what is actually considered to be a small dog? To me it would be something that is close to the size of a cat but since it's about 13kg, it can't be that small, so that's more like a medium dog (I'm not certain, but I have a feeling that if you lay out things statistically this is what you would end up with).
On the other hand, 13kg is very easy to get, that's just 13 liters of water, and it's quite easy to make a mental image for both volume and weight "feeling" that way.
American units feel so impressive and random, it is the reason they always add those weird comparisons but often they make it even worse.
Americans do not do metric. Americans can’t even balance a checkbook. Hence the small dog reference for mental “clarity”. We’re dumb. Just look at the news…
I think it may be fair? This guy[1] explains how surplus of corporate profits are a mirror image of household/govt debt. Which is a direct transfer of wealth from everyone to the super-super-rich (not the 1%, but the 0.1 - 0.01%)
[1] The chart below shows how this works. The blue line at the top shows the “surplus” of corporations: corporate income minus expenses and net investment. We know this as corporate “free cash flow.” The red line shows combined “surplus” of other sectors: government, households, and foreign trading partners – in excess of their consumption and net investment. It’s negative, so in aggregate, they’re running a deficit. That deficit is the mirror image of the corporate surplus. This isn’t an accident. It’s just accounting (I’ve excluded a few tiny items for clarity): https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc251028/
And with your bank balance instantly available on the computer in your pocket, and transactions posted in near-real-time, why would you need to worry about balancing it?
Which is why all the dumbest Americans insist that "Why didn't they teach us how to balance a check book?", while, well, they were taught that, and every single check book comes with clear and simple instructions for its use
They were also taught how to calculate loan details and the extreme power of how interest grows, but they were too busy crying "Oh this is lame, when am I ever going to use this?"
There's a cult of proud ignorance in the US. People will brag about being uneducated, illiterate, or unable to follow simple instructions.
"Balancing the check book" refers to the process of running your own log of check transactions using something like https://cdn.wallethub.com/wallethub/images/posts/14483/check... and ensuring that it matches the occasional official balance statement from your bank occasionally.
Don't want to make assumptions about what you know so forgive any overexplanation...
It is about ensuring that you manage your account balance, so as to not write checks that your account balance cannot actually fulfill. Writing a check that you can't actually pay because your checking account is too low is called "Bouncing" a check, and generally costs you money at your bank and the place that you wrote the check, and will often result in those places being less likely to accept a check from you.
A secondary purpose was to ensure that your bank did not pay out a check that you have no record of writing. The check system has almost no protection, so anyone who had ever gotten a check from you could theoretically attempt to create fraudulent and forged checks against your account. You would check your record against the banks to check for this.
You would do this constantly, as in writing down every check you write, and once a month or so, actually doing the math, comparing your record of checks against the bank's record of checks.
I would also consider it a euphemism for "Financial literacy" in plenty of people's heads.
It is without a doubt the simplest possible mathematical task you can have as an adult. It is literally addition and subtraction, and logging every check. Every single American who attends public school until 4th grade has been taught the required knowledge for this task: Addition, subtraction, and the concept of negative numbers.
People say "Schools should teach balancing a check book" as some sort of cry that they think schools should focus on "practical" skills rather than, say, persuasive essay writing or reading literature or learning art.
Those people are demonstrating that they are too stupid to even understand what they have been taught. These same people will sit in math class and argue about how they "will never use this", in reference to things like calculating interest. They will often also say "Schools don't teach critical thinking", openly and proudly ignorant of the hilarity of someone who can't follow very basic instructions that anyone can find in five seconds and often come with the checkbook complaining about not being taught how to think.
Similarly, Americans will complain that school didn't teach them how to "do their taxes", which is hilarious, because for 95% of Americans, your federal taxes are a couple of pages and about 14 lines of numbers you have to fill in, most of them are numbers you copy from another piece of paper, and the rest have literal worksheets to follow.
Most people joke about how VCRs used to constantly have the "12:00" blinking clock because nobody would set them because it's "too hard". As a literal child who fixed this exact issue, it was a single page of instructions, and they were trivial. But for the majority of Americans who like to speak up, it seems like they are totally incapable of following even the most basic of instruction.
Frankly, stupidity is not a moral failing. Nobody chose to be born stupid. But ignorance, especially fixable ignorance, IS. America has a serious problem of people being openly ignorant and thinking their ignorance should be anything other than an opportunity to improve. I think the biggest problem in the USA is how much respect and attention people who demonstrably refuse to learn and are ignorant of pretty much everything get. That's why, for example, you have people insisting that rail transport is impossible in the US because it's too big, despite the fact that we literally built a cross country rail network using public funds when the country was dramatically less populated than now, or how government inherently mismanages healthcare despite about 100 examples of government mismanagement producing better outcomes than we get.
Sure but don't they have a mental image for 80 feet for example? Why articles will almost always include something like "that like 50 chairs put next to each other" when length is mentioned.
If you were to say 100 yards, we could. That’s a football field (American football played with your… hands).
Because people in the south don’t even know the imperial system… it’s bad. They say things like “Take the road there yonder and when you see the white church, turn right, go a ways until you get to the dirt road…”
Anything outside of what they have with them, they don’t have a clue or can’t imagine it accurately. Small dog reference, there’s millions of Americans with a small dog so most just looked to their pooch when this came up. Same as if you were to say something like 50 cars. They would look outside to their Toyota Corolla and imagine 50 of them. It’s like talking to grown toddlers sometimes but that have full grown emotional states not under control. Not everyone is like this but a good 50-60% of Americans are. Just look for the Lululemon.
I know that 1kg is about 2.2lbs but that still doesn't give me the "mental clarity" of what 20kg is unless I do the conversion.
At the gym I use the pound plates and not the kilo ones. I intuitively know what the difference between 135 and 225 lbs feels like, and I don't have that same intution for kg.
All that said, I don't find the "small dog" types of analogies for weight very useful. Why not just use the same number of characters (or less) to give the weight in the other popular unit?
It helps to understand that the only freedom Americans only cared for (and the only freedom they have left from the looks of it) is the freedom to choose standards of measurement and vocabulary. This will provide historical context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk (Washington's Dream - SNL)
Huh? Britons get locked up for social media posts. Most of the world doesn’t have guns. And among the first world we’re the only ones free to go bankrupt from medical bills!
Our problems don’t stem from lack of freedom, they stem from too much of it.
You have the sort of view of America that I can only imagine comes from somebody who has never been here. I don’t know what you mean by batteries, I’m not aware of any we don’t have available.
We have the second most electric vehicles after China, and nearly all new power generation being built here is renewable. I’m not sure how you managed to turn this into some anti-American rant, but at least do a better job of it, it’s very easy.
If I were a self-respecting journalist, I would've used 3.26 gallon milk jugs. Small dog automatically goes to which breed? Chihuahua (fits in a toddlers purse) or Border Collie or Golden Retriever or Saint Bernard (needs an SUV/minivan)? 4 different classifications based on size!
Americans are very weird when it comes to metric. They often quote mobile phones as having something like "a six inch screen size but now only 12mm thick" - pick a measurement system people !
After switching to the metric system ('70-80s) some things are still measures in imperial units. If you slice some ham at a counter in a grocery store, it's in grams. You then turn around and get a pound of apples and a gallon of milk. Nuts are in grams, and soda is in liters. Also the body weight tends to be in pounds. Tools are both metric and imperial. Speeds and distances though, thank god, are metric.
All this is just kinda there and everyone's OK with it, but it is an epic mess if you think about it.
The link you're quoting, the one posted, is a second hand US report.
The primary company link is from a UK subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz and is (almost) fully metric (the fundemental units US weights are officially defined with respect to (for more than a century now)).
Earlier in the summer YASA achieved 550kW (738bhp) from a 13.1kg version of its new axial flux prototype motor, equating to an unofficial power density world record of 42kW/kg
Now latest testing of an even lighter 12.7kg version on a more powerful dynamometer has shattered this record, with a staggering 750kW (>1000bhp) short-term peak rating, resulting in a new unofficial power density record of 59kW/kg
Just those pesky trad bhp units left hanging like a chad in a Florida election . . .
That seems unlikely, a proper Brit would know that a stone is defined for body weight (14 avoirdupois pounds), Wool (14, 15, or 24 pounds depending on wool class), Wax (12 pounds), Sugar and spice (8 pounds), or for Beef and mutton (8 pounds).
( Of course Scottish Britains used 16 Scottish pounds for a Scottish stone ).
The point being that 'precious' metals used a different weight measure altogether .. (common lead often used a 12 pound stone).
Prior to the Revolution, in France alone there were allegedly 250 thousand various units in use! (All sorts of units, not just length.)
It didn't help that pre-Revolutionary France was a political Frankenstein stitched together from dozens of regions with completely different history (Celtic Brittany, Flemish Dunkirk, Germanic Alsace, Provencal South, Catalan Roussillon, Italian Nice) and thus very different local standards of everything, including measurements and law.
Unification of units removed a massive constraint on international trade and engineering. Except the US and Myanmar, of course... it is so frustrating to order anything from Myanmar e-shops, I must say. But Myanmar is at least promising to move on.
Feels like a vanity metric, electric car companies don't boast about their cars having X horsepower. Not many people care about horsepower because either way there are speed limits on the road.
I think electric motors should focus on other vectors.
Car companies, both electric and non-electric, frequently advertise rated horsepower of their vehicles, even non-performance vehicles. In the US, horsepower is one of the key metrics for a vehicle overall.
Every car listing, review and so on mentions either the bhp or kW, along with the 0-100km/h or 0-60mph which is functionally the same as listing the horsepower to weight ratio.
Yeah, but 0-60 doesn’t really matter much for EVs at this point. Even big suv/trucks are hitting supercar numbers from a few decades ago.
Cornering / handling matters. So does tire wear, and how powerful the regenerative braking is / how many motors there are. (ABS and traction control via electric powertrains is much more responsive than via brake pads).
> It can also sustain between 350 and 400 kilowatts (469–536 horsepower) continuously, meaning it’s not just built for short bursts, as it can deliver massive power all day long.
Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio... a lot of things will automatically get better.
YASA was founded in 2009, a spin out from Oxford University following the PhD of founder and still CTO, Dr Tim Woolmer.
"Over the decades that followed both of these technologies were explored. But despite the potential for weight reduction, smaller size, shorter axle length and increased torque, it was the difficulty in manufacturing the axial flux technology that limited its commercial viability, because the motor could not be made by stacking laminations, as with radial machines."
"The breakthrough innovation came by segmenting the axial flux motor in discrete "pole-pieces", so the motor could be manufactured using Soft Magnetic Composite material.
SMC can be pressed at low cost into a wide variety of 3D shapes. This removed the need for the complex laminations, overcoming the major manufacturing challenge of the axial flux machine."
"In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.
The opening of this facility boosts YASA’s manufacturing capacity, setting new benchmarks in e-motor technology and quality, and enabling production to scale beyond 25,000 units per year."
This is awesome. Lighter motors also make electric flight more viable
> Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio... a lot of things will automatically get better.
EV motors are already lightweight. The electric motor in a vehicle like a Tesla Model 3 already weighs less than you do. Reducing that one component by 75% would be a weight savings equivalent to about a half of a passenger.
Not a significant efficiency improvement for vehicles that weigh over 3000lbs (or double that for many EVs).
Every little bit helps, but this isn’t a game changer.
This, or a miniaturized version thereof could change the game for light electric vehicles - imagine an electric motorcycle that weighs substantially more like an electric bicycle.
Right now it takes about 10-15lbs of motor to produce a 3KW motor for an electric bike, this motor is about 10 times that in power density afaict.
The Livewire electric motorcycles use something like 100-200 lbs of motor to produce 1/4 as much power, 75kw, so that’s an improvement of 8-16x.
Electric pedal bikes are already at the limit of what their chassis’s support even with small motors.
10kw+ is comparable to starter gasoline motorcycles in the US (or midsize motorcycles elsewhere) capable of going on the highway. At that point, you need to start scaling everything, like brakes, tires, and the size of the chassis.
The livewire has a motor large enough to drive a car.
Does this motor design scale down? It's not clear from the article - the article focuses more on the relative efficiency gains over the previous model.
A 30lb 1000hp motor doesn't necessarily mean that they can also produce a 3lb, 100hp motor. It would be cool if it did, but I doubt that it does because usually component strength doesn't scale linearly.
That being said, these are still valuable for traditional EVs. Even if they are only a modest weight savings in the grand scheme of modern vehicle weight, their ability to improve packaging options will be a boon. One thing the industry has dicovered is that the generic "skateboard" platform doesn't make for the best vehicles, in terms of packaging.
I'm more fascinated by the question of whether it scales up... imagine much smaller and more efficient electric engines for cruise liners and cargo ships.
The article and the press release it was derived from says nothing about "more efficient", just smaller.
https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
Your average cruiseship already has an electric engine, they just have massive generators onboard to power it.
The problem for electric motorcycles is the battery weight.
There’s no area in the world that allows e-bikes with more than 750w motors. A 3kw motor is illegal (cf Surron), unless you are talking about an e-moped requiring registration.
They are not allowed, but still commonly owned and used.
The law needs to catch up. There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to. They can't be treated like bicycles because they're too fast but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles. We need a new category for light motorcycles.
The real problem, IMO, is that the law is generally not deferential enough to cyclists and already forces them off sidewalks, onto the street, and to follow traffic laws designed for cars. There's not much else to take away, and the rules right now are unreasonable enough that cyclists always break them.
I think what I would like to see are explicit requirements for insurance and licensing for powerful e-bikes, but made significantly cheaper so that people will actually bother. Requiring helmets for the insurance would also make it much more straightforward. We can require them to take the street or a dedicated bike lane and fully mandate that they have to be walked on sidewalks.
> The law needs to catch up. There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to.
I'm not so sure about that.
I don't want a 6000kw Sur Ron riding in the bike lane with me. The whole point of the bike lane was to make a safe space for riding a bicycle. I want the bike lanes to be safe enough for children to ride their bikes in, and having something that powerful in it is not conducive to that goal. They are by and large too fast and too unlike a bicycle for bike lanes. Having things that powerful there is going to dissuade a lot of potential (non electric) cyclists. My girlfriend already gets too freaked out by how fast some of the legal e-bikes in the bike lane go.
Certainly they shouldn't be on the sidewalk. But what does that leave? Just the road. If that's the case they probably need to just adhere to whatever standards the state has for scooters or mopeds. Which probably means some kind of license, maybe registration, and possibly insurance.
But that type of e-bike manufacturer doesn't want to make a light electric scooter that's road legal, they want to make a thing that skirts regulations by being "for off road use only".
And the buyers by and large don't want to deal with license and registration, and certainly not insurance.
Just because people are doing an illegal thing a lot doesn't mean that the law needs to find a way to make it legal.
I think what they mean is these e-bikes pushing 60mph should be legal but reclassified as something closer to a motorcycle. The problem with keeping them illegal is people tend to treat them like bikes when they should be on the road.
> but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles.
What a ridiculous statement.
I don't think there's any inherrent difference, but until the laws catch up the "powerful e-bikes" are clearly more dangerous. Riding a traditional motorcycle requires a license, passing a driving test, and following the rules of the road - none of which are true for e-bikes.
But I'd love to hear why you think the opposite.
>They can't be treated like bicycles because they're too fast but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles.
As a former rider, why? Cars were the most dangerous part, in my experience.
Something that stuck with me from my motorcycle safety course, the speed at which hitting a wall is 50% fatal is 30 mph. Doesn't take highway speeds.
> There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to.
They are called motorcycles. At > 4kw they are that (here). So either you get them registered a such, get a license and insure them, or downgrade them to under 4kw, get a license and insure them as a moped, or downgrade them to 2kw and pedal assist only and register them as a pedelec. All other options is 250w continuous (you can get away with about 500w peak) and pedal assist only.
You are also not insured if you drive an illegal bike on the road.
> aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles.
Opinions differ. I have seen far more accidents with powerful e-bikes than I have seen with motorcycles, and yet there are many more motorcycles.
> They can't be treated like bicycles because they're too fast but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles.
Why would an extremely powerful ebike be any less dangerous than extremely powerful gas motorcycle?
Any ebike that goes faster than 25kmph in Europe and whatever it is in NA should not be allowed anywhere were pedestrians can go.
The real solution people don't want to accept is that ALL non arterial roads in ANY urban/suburban/rural environment should be limited to 30kpmh (and equivalent in NA). And by limited I mean traffic calmed: 1 lane per direction, narrow lanes, raised street crossing, raised intersections, European style roundabouts, the works (Dutch style) - so that people actually respect the speed limit because they don't want to bang their car.
Once that happens, bike stay in bike lanes (or multi use paths with pedestrians) and everything else can go on the regular non arterial roads and stuff that's registered (mopeds and up) and go on any road.
But my "solution" requires major political adoption and probably decades of sustained vision in investment. In places with good governance it will happen naturally and everywhere else will slowly be left behind.
> Any bike that goes faster than 25kmph in Europe and whatever it is in NA should not be allowed anywhere were pedestrians can go.
So, literally any bicycle?
As a cyclist, motorcyclist, and potential e-bike owner, I'd actually be in favor of making it any bicycle.
Anybody moving significantly faster than the flow of traffic is endangering the rest of the users.
Fixed.
Oh nooo i have to put a sticker on it, and only allow my control to go to some arbitrary value when the cops are watching
There is a big issue in the US currently with people buying electric motorcycles that look like e-bikes.
What is the issue? I've seen people on those bikes and they look fun to ride.
I see kids blasting around at high speeds without helmets.
Kids treat them like fast bikes you do not have to pedal. Wiping out on a bike at 13mph is a very different proposition to wiping out on a bike at higher speeds.
I saw just a couple nights ago some kid doing what appeared to be about 40mph on an eBike. Wind in his hair, not pedaling, just blasting it. I am sure new regulations will come to speed limit them, but at the cost of dead and disabled young people.
ETA: I went to go look up laws requiring speed limiters on bikes, and the top hit was about how you can disable them:
https://goebikelife.com/how-to-remove-ebike-speed-limiter/
Article states typical eBike speed limiters are 20-28mph. That is the kind of sustained speed Olympic cyclists can maintain for some period of time, and much faster than kid's toys need to be capable of. And these are the mandated limiters!
A kid died right in front of my door on one of those. They call them fatbikes around here and they're super dangerous to operate. Way too much torque and speed for kids (and, fairly, most adults) to handle responsibly.
On a decent hill you can get a regular bike going >60mph. A dirt bike will let you ride off road at nice speeds over random terrain (no licensing required when not on public roads). In the realm of bikes, these are not an outlier. Limiters are easily overcome and speed limits are barely enforced on cars, let alone bikes. When you get a bike like this you deal with the danger and wear protective gear just like you would with any other bike (motorized or not).
> On a decent hill you can get a regular bike going >60mph.
This is not the same as being able to go > 60 mph anywhere, at any time, simply by pressing a button.
> When you get a bike like this you deal with the danger and wear protective gear just like you would with any other bike (motorized or not).
This only deals with the danger to the rider - it doesn't address the danger to pedestrians.
>>On a decent hill you can get a regular bike going >60mph.
Yes, I've done this before by riding all the way up a local mountain on a road bike, clad in lycra, then on the way down I went over 60mph. It was terrifying and the physical fitness required to get up there in the first place required months of riding to actually do it. Meanwhile literal kids ride these on pavements, in between people, in cities where pedestrians walk - it's simply not acceptable. And I do own and ride an ebike(limited to 15.5mph) legally.
And here is the problem. They are already supposed to be speed limited if it's an e-bike. It's easy to tell the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle, but the difference between an e-bike and electric motorcycle is far more subtle. And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes.
> And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes.
Because they have pedals which nobody uses. In theory, it's pedal assist, but kids aren't really pedaling eBikes, they are using them like electric motorcycles.
You might think: Hey, how can you tell the difference between somebody using an eBike with pedal assist if so many of them look just like regular bikes?
I don't really see young people pedaling bikes at all of any kind. It's adults who don't have cars, or adults who are exercising pedaling bikes.
>>I don't really see young people pedaling bikes at all of any kind. It's adults who don't have cars, or adults who are exercising pedaling bikes.
Where do you live - over here(North of England) most kids ride bikes, especially to school. And not ebikes either - actual regular pedal bikes.
Chicago suburbs. Cultural difference, mayhap.
> I saw just a couple nights ago some kid doing what appeared to be about 40mph on an eBike. Wind in his hair, not pedaling, just blasting it.
Saw an ebike zip past me at about 40 MPH in a wheelie, little motor screaming, splitting a lane in traffic. (El Camino Real, Silicon Valley). If anything happens ahead of them, they're toast. Can't stop and can't evade.
Electric bikes offer new opportunities for built-in cigarette lighters in the space. These kids...
Kids these days
I just want to point out that your country sells guns in the supermarket.
And believe it or not, a good proportion of us are not happy about that either.
Not really...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAmericans/comments/184oag8/can_y...
That assertion seems to be a disconnect of language. But - Selling firearms in Wal-Mart is bad enough, but it does tend to be more rural Wal-Marts than suburban (and not at all urban).
Said firearms are under lock and key in the same way they would be at gun stores. There are many gun shops in the same areas where Wal-Mart sells firearms. At least - where I live, which is a blue state. All bets are off for Texas.
Right, so they sell guns at a super market? Walmart is a super market and like you say, they sell guns.
How is this "not really"?
> All bets are off for Texas.
We have everything locked up too just as you describe. We just have a lot of places to buy them, it's not like Wal-Mart here has a bin in the middle of the isle full of AR's next to the bin of Pokemon stuffies. Only pellet and BB guns are found on the shelf.
I don't know why I'm being pedantic, guns here are insane for many reasons but not because of this one. What bothers me is once you do buy it, you can just carry it anywhere you want now. Like random guys in MAGA hats holding what looks like a machine gun on a street corner is no longer an unusual sighting. It's weird, when I was a kid, my dad had rifles mounted to his truck rear window and it was common. Then, there was what seemed like a zero tolerance decade or two when guns were only on the news (gang violence) or in a gun safe (for hunting only). Then the pendulum swung to the wacky side of guns everywhere.
My kids school recently hosted a "gun recycling day" recently, with good intentions I think, but obviously once it occurred the parents were riled up with "you seriously invited people to bring their guns to the school! Where are the guns? Did they get moved off campus? etc" It's technically a private school and the event was hosted by the affiliated church, but still, pretty tone deaf to have that kind of event on the same property as a couple hundred elementary students
I live on the edge of the suburbs in a Blue state, at least where I live (and further on towards the city) open carry gets you the attention you're looking for from the police. People don't tend to do it.
I am not sure about further out. I know people in Michigan who keep a piece in their glovebox. I've seen in the movies what you talk about - the gun rack in the truck cabin. None of my rural relatives ever did that, not even in Michigan which is pretty gun-friendly away from cities.
> I don't know why I'm being pedantic, guns here are insane for many reasons but not because of this one.
Yeah, I mean. In Illinois at least, the guns get into the hands of the bad guys overwhelmingly because of straw buyers. Not because of "the gun show loophole". A small number of guns are obtained through theft. Mostly it's straw buyers, at least when it comes to guns used in crimes.
My family is filled with outdoorsy people (myself included), and although the numbers don't paint a picture of legal CCR owners being problematic, the wide array of people I've known who do carry makes me wonder how the hell it isn't a bigger problem. All manner of unhinged weirdos, some of whom pretty openly muse about the opportunity to shoot the kind of person they don't like. (Lots of normal people too - but plenty of weirdos)
So what? Not everyone wants to live in a communist hellscape where everything is regulated to death.
Yeah! We want V8s and powder, we want diesel fumes and school shootings in our land of the freee just as God intended it to be.
Yeah! Like the NRA says, "From my cold dead hands!"
And like the NRA also says, "Unless you're attending an NRA convention, in which case please leave your firearms at home or use one of our provided lockers, because gun-free zones are a communist hellscape except here, and please pass through this metal detector too."
My neighborhood is full of kids on these things. The safety dynamics of driving around have changed completely. Small children flying on and off road at high speeds. It's crazy.
Okay, but is it difficult to extrapolate the weight saving benefits of a "legal" power e-bike motor?
He said motorcycle. That's a market of hundreds of millions to one billion customers.
Listen, your world may not allow you to sell an e-bike with a 1000hp motor on it. But my world allows me to put a 1000hp motor on an e-bike and not tell anyone.
Now hold my beer...
There's a difference.
I've noticed that people seem to believe as long as they bought something it should be safe. If you're smart enough to build something, I have to hope you're at least smart enough to realize that there might be consequences.
Take your beer back, I'm going for a rip next.
So that you can flip over in an uncontrolled wheelie at an even lower fraction of the throttle? Even if there was infinite energy throughput (aka power) at zero mass, the main limiter for power per total system mass would still be the battery. In any practical setup, even in super short runtime designs, getting, say, twice the power would not all that dramatic a runtime hit if it was achieved by scaling the same motor technology and paying for the extra mass with a little battery capacity. Unless of course you want to actually use that power increase for any meaningful fraction of the runtime, then you'll obviously drain the battery fast. But a zero-mass power increase would not change that a lot either.
Increasing power density (of the motor) just isn't worth much when it does not happen to coincide with an increase in efficiency (and then the battery mass saved for achieving the same range will quite literally outweigh the mass saved by a smaller engine for achieving the same power)
The good news is that those striving for power density aren't really at liberty to completely ignore efficiency in the process because cooling is a key issue for them.
Honestly he’d probably just pretzel the frame underneath him, assuming he gunned it.
That’s enough power to potentially do that to a full size car frame.
Not a game changer but I wonder if ligher motors allow you to do things like have one motor per drive wheel, removing the need for differential gearboxes?
Then you can do clever things with traction control without having to use the ABS system to brake the drive wheels.
Or dramatically change the turning circle on big cars and vans. Maybe even reduce the size and weight of the braking system by taking on some of that role.
All for the same weight budget.
I believe that some EVs already have 1 motor per wheel such as the top of the line Rivians that are advertised as quad motor.
https://www.mbusa.com/en/vehicles/model/g-class/suv/g580w4e#...
has four electric motors
Putting the motors in the wheel is bad for a separate reason: Unsprung weight.
Every ounce you have in the hubs that don't float on the suspension reduces certain suspension attributes. You end up with a crappier ride and poor performance.
Yes, I agree. I was careful about how I worded this to avoid saying anything about the motors actually being in the wheels for this reason.
Although, I guess at some point in the future if we can get the weight down low enough and the strength of the motor high enough we could replace the existing braking system with a motor for the same weight penalty we already pay.
In an ideal world all the energy from breaking would be used for regen anyway.
I'm not sure how close we are to that but it's an interesting thought experiment thinking about the trade offs we might be able to make in future.
Deceleration requirements are going to be harder than acceleration, one would think so how would you apply full brakes with the same motor?
I mean if your have a 750kw motor for each wheel, then they're probably always spinning when you floor it, so you also have enough torque to fully use your tires for stopping purposes
EDIT: Quick maths show that decelerating at 1g (basically what the best sport tires can do) in a 2000kg car at 300kph requires absorbing ~1500kw, so conveniently two of these motors.
If the motors are light enough, though, that might be acceptable... especially if they can make an even smaller version for that application. (You probably don't need 750 kW on each wheel - even for a supercar that'd be excessive.)
Exactly this, which is why I'd expect automakers to use the short axles and CV (constant-velocity) joints which are already well-developed technologies for 4-wheel independent suspensions
I see no reason the small motors can't be mounted inboard from the wheels on the underside of the chassis, as are a rear differential or front transaxle in an ICE car.
Having such a small and lightweight power package opens up serious design and performance opportunities. Plus, even without major redesign to take full advantage, every reduction in weight rolls through the system, providing immediate improved acceleration, cornering, & braking or similar performance using smaller tires, brakes etc..
Maybe fine for non-performance vehicles, especially considering you can remove driveshafts and brakes.
Exactly. Main problem is battery energy density. Cars can drive about 20 kilometers on 1 liter of gasoline. In comparison, Tesla's 4680 cells are at about 272-296 Wh/kg and CATL's Kirin Battery at about 255 Wh/kg. A bit efficient EV often uses 200 Wh/km, so for 1 kg of battery the electric vehicle can only reach 1-2 km. An order of magnitude difference. Theoretically, batteries could go to 1000 Wh/kg some day, which would mean about 5 km per 1 kg of battery assuming all else remains equal.
https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/energy-consumption-electr...
The Model 3 manages < 140 Wh/km, and many seem to be under 150/160/170.
I'm at 115,000 km, at 133 Wh/km since the last (inadvertent) trip reset. The previous one (for the life of the vehicle) was at a similar number.
This is on a 2022 Long Range Model 3.
That’s still around 2 km per kg of batteries.
Oranges to apples so long as electron mass is fixed and reserve currencies fluctuate.
For EVs no but it's huge for flight if it could be scaled down. Paramotors and ultralight planes are on the verge of being competitive with gas they just need a bit more energy density per pound in the system.
If you're putting motors in wheels, lower weight means reducing the weight/capacity of adjacent systems.
Lighter motors for mobile robots could also be cool.
I would expect that lighter motor components would potentially allow weight reduction in load bearing components. Not an advantage for SUV-type cars, but for light and ultralight vehicles it could add up to more weight saving and longer ranges.
You still have to handle the torque of the smaller motor. 30kg is maybe 2% of the vehicle weight.
> The electric motor in a vehicle like a Tesla Model 3 already weighs less than you do. Reducing that one component by 75% would be a weight savings equivalent to about a half of a passenger.
Of which there can be two, or even three.
Then for drones ?
The difference is when you take into consideration rotating mass, and the distribution between the stator and rotor.
It drops a buck fifty per motor. That IS a game changer.
It can make cars cheaper, or longer range, or faster, or any number of other designs based on what the manufacturer is looking for.
But to OP's point about flight - stacking 6 Tesla motors is not an option. Stacking 6 of these YASA motors? Much less weight.
Looks like it’s about 45 kg for a Tesla and 13 kg for this one. It at twice the horsepower. So maybe 8-10kg for a down rated model. IIRC, axial motors need their diameter to retain their efficiency advantage so a down rated one would likely be lighter but close to the same external dimensions.
But that’s still a lot less rotating mass, and might make multiple motors attractive again.
> It drops a buck fifty per motor. That IS a game changer.
You’re reading their marketing material. You have to think of this like all of those PR releases you’ve seen over the years about new battery technology that is 4X smaller or new hard drive tech that is 10X more efficient. The real world improvements aren’t going to be as big as their one lab test.
A Model 3 motor is already well under 150lbs, unless you start including ancillaries like the inverter and power transmission parts.
They’re not dropping “a buck fifty” from typical EV motors.
I'm not reading anyone's marketing material. If you want to dispute the shipping weight, feel free to correct this website whom I assume charges for shipping based on weight [0]. I'm sure they'd love to know they have it wrong.
According to purchasable equipment, the Model 3 engines weight ~175 lbs. If that's wrong, that's on them for claiming it. Subtract 28 lbs from that and you're at 147 lbs. That is very close to 150 lbs.
[0] https://evshop.eu/en/electric-motors/295-tesla-model-3-drive...
That’s a drive unit, which is more than the motor. Read the description:
> This kit includes the Tesla motor, inverter, gear box, power cables and drive shafts.
Drive shafts, gearbox, power cables, inverter. Also includes the mounts, which is likely not factored into the lab calculations for this marketing material.
You cannot drop 150lbs from the Model 3 motor because it doesn’t even weigh 150lbs.
You're missing the forest for the trees. Dropping 10 lbs per motor is HUGE. Dropping 30 is amazing. Whatever is dropped, it's significant. Pretend that it isn't all you want, but anyone doing production work knows how important this is.
I'm happy to compare apples to apples when we can do that, and if you want me to say I was wrong about the Tesla motor size I'm happy to say that I was just going by what was available on the internet and skipped the details. But I did so in service of a point which you still haven't actually engaged with beyond "Nu uh!".
> Dropping 10 lbs per motor is HUGE.
Auto makers could drop 10lbs, 100lbs or even more from every EV right now by choosing more expensive materials, more expensive manufacturing processes, or simply cutting back on amenities.
10lbs is not significant in the grand scheme of things. The real question is how much it costs, what are the tradeoffs, and how practical is it.
> But I did so in service of a point which you still haven't actually engaged with beyond "Nu uh!".
That’s not a fair take on what I’ve been posting at all. I said every little bit helps, but pointed out that motor sizes are already small.l
10 lbs per motor in an aircraft is huge. And the fact that they can do it WITHOUT having to use more expensive materials or manufacturing or amenities is the thing that is huge about it.
It's a fair take on your responses because talking about a SINGLE motor is missing the point. You're not engaging with the actual point that OP made, you're trying to dispute OP by engaging in your own point about what difference this would make in single-motor cars, instead of what difference it will make in general.
> 10 lbs per motor in an aircraft is huge.
That's cool but the conversation was about cars. It's a welcome but tiny improvement for cars. Even after you multiply by 2 or 4, especially because the more motors a car has the smaller they are.
No, it's literally - by the discussion partner's own estimation[0] - cutting the motor size in half. That's not a tiny improvement, it's a half-weight reduction for the motor. It's not as big as I naively estimated from a google search, but it's still half the weight. That's the kind of thing engineers chase as a benchmark and rarely every actually achieve. It's great.
But also, I reject your attempt to reframe the discussion as strictly car focused. OP specifically mentioned flight. Which doesn't necessarily mean it was all about aircraft - the article is about cars after all. But it certainly doesn't mean that the conversation was strictly about cars, either.
[0]: I've googled this claim and I'm willing to accept it, but the only sources for it I could find were subtractive estimations from youtubers whom had pulled apart the motors. Even additional claims from forums and whatnot seemed to trace back to one of those video sources. It would be nice if Tesla would deign to discuss some specificiations themselves, but if there's an actual official source, I have yet to see it. And, for what it's worth, the motors that I've seen referenced were all for the rear motor that I understand to be the smaller motor in Teslas. Either way, I don't doubt the 70 lbs estimate is far off, so it's moot.
Smaller motor can be one per wheel which means a shorter drive shaft, less rotating weight which means more torque to the road under acceleration and deceleration.
Tesla still doing a gearbox? Their marketing has been telling me they got rid of those. Typical.
Range in EVs is impacted very little by weight
Exactly. I was very surprised to find out a fully loaded 40 ton electric truck only uses ~100kw / 100km ( https://www.youtube.com/@electrictrucker ) when my 2 ton Volvo averages 20-22kw/100km on road trips.
Superfastmatt did a test recently where he proved to himself that the front area of the vehicle and trailer is the dominant factor on mileage, not the weight towed or friction.
For a guy trying to drive 300 mph though maybe he should have been able to do that with math instead of sketchy road tests.
kWh not kW.
I wish more people on the road realized the extent to which weight reduction improves all aspects of the driving experience... it really does compound unlike any other change that you can make to a vehicle. IMO heavy vehicles are a scam and the antithesis of the direction we should be moving.
I agree with you however I believe weight and safety are in a complex relationship right now, which has nothing to do with performance and handling.
Unfortunately I feel much less safe in a Fiat 500 when a significant portion of cars in the road weigh nearly 3 tonnes and perhaps can't even see me. I suspect most people are in SUVs because they're the pragmatic trade off between safety and convenience, not because they were hoping for excellent performance.
Yup, it's an arms race to see who can buy the biggest vehicle so that they can see over the second biggest vehicle and survive a collision with it.
But small cars are only unsafe because of that discrepancy between the largest and smallest cars, and it's not just weight, but height difference. It's possible to survive crashes at very extreme speeds in very light cars if they are designed to work that way (see: F1 crash g-force). Not so much if you literally get run over.
The culture needs to change. A vehicle is not a living room. The driver's seat is not a sofa. You don't need a TV in the dashboard. You don't need 8 seats when 7 of them are unoccupied 90% of the time. You don't need to go into debt to buy a land yacht.
So yeah... you're right, but it's a bummer that we've arrived at this situation.
And that’s why any vehicle over 2 tons should require a commercial driver’s license. Let plumbers and tree removal services drive them and not 19 year olds whose parents want their child to survive a fatal crash at the expense of everyone else in a twenty foot radius of the wreck.
Your intuition is correct.
Americans’ Love Affair with Big Cars is Killing Them (https://www.economist.com/interactive/united-states/2024/08/...) - The Economist.
> In a crash, the fatality rate of the occupants of the heavy pickup truck is about half that of the compact car. But they are also far more dangerous to the fatality rate of people in other cars.
> The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically. For every life that the heaviest 1% of SUVs and trucks save, there are more than a dozen lives lost in other vehicles.
Unfortunately car safety is only evaluated in terms of safety for the occupants. Not safety of society.
Well, hood and grill shapes are mandated for pedestrian safety but everyone else is fucked.
Well, for an about 1 meter tall obstacle (like a kid), some of these large SUV shapes have ~10 - 12 meters of a blind spot to spot this obstacle.
There is another small vehicle around, which usually has a lower stopping distance, and a smaller blind spot in front of the vehicle at around 7-9 meters under somewhat more adverse conditions than regular highway traffic. That's the Leopard 2 tank.
That vehicle also has less problems to find a parking spot.
If a pedestrian gets hit by a tall vehicle, where the bumper is at waist level or above, then the pedestrian goes under the vehicle. This is what causes most of the fatalities these days. Breaking your legs is bad, but getting run over is the end.
Then how is the Cybertruck legal on US roads? It's got sharp edges both front and rear
There's a reason it isn't legal in basically any other countries and this is a big part of it.
Classic prisoner's dilemma.
Everyone who can will naturally choose "defect" unless there's some sort of external coordination mechanism.
Not everyone, but far too many.
I wonder if larger/heavy non-commercial vehicles were taxed at a very high rate, would more people choose Fiat 500 sized cars?
In reality, any 'vehicle' which does not meet both passenger car safety and passenger car fuel economy standards [1] should only be allowed to be licensed as a "commercial" vehicle and should pay "commercial" rate (higher) taxes (and maybe even require a "commercial" stamp on one's drivers license to operate). If the states had done this when SUV's first appeared on the scene, we might not have nearly every car on the road being a hulking monster SUV today.
[1] which no SUV's nor trucks used as passenger cars, do because they are classed as 'utility vehicles' and have lower safety/fuel economy standards -- which is why the auto-makers went whole-hog on making/selling them, it got their CAFE averages down artificially.
It’s going to have to be sorted at the DMV.
You take a defensive driving course, I’ll let you drive a tank down the road. But my neighbor’s kids should not be behind the wheel of a death dealer. Those vehicles were meant for skilled laborers, not Sally who is on her phone while driving.
Maybe... I think it would definitely help. I think just driving a smaller car that puts you in control might cause a lot of people to switch. I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe comparatively in breaking, merging, changing lanes, parking, etc. etc. I think most people just have little experience to compare it to anymore.
I also think it's odd that people don't already choose other options w/o a tax in place, considering the price of a bigger vehicle is almost always just going to be higher because of materials and a bunch of other factors.
>I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe
Which two cars? I've gone from a 911 to a BMW X5 and the X5 was just as fun for what it was. They are completely different cars, I'm not sure what you would expect and why you judge others.
That's a totally different comparison. I'm sure the X5 is fine for what it is, but most people are driving around in ~30k USD SUVs. That's the type of vehicle that I'm referencing. I'm comparing it against my 2012 VW GTI w/ a lot of mods. Both vehicles cost about the same new. They have similar interior cargo space. My GTI is worth less than 15k USD. I'm not judging just based on fun, it's true that a nimble car can get you into trouble, but in my experience it also often gets you out of trouble.
Tax SUVs out of existence.
A basic BMW 5 series is over 2 tonnes, with the top spec model tipping the scales at 2.5 tonnes. I mean I agree with the general sentiment but it's not just SUVs that need to go on a diet. Everything is getting heavier and heavier and heavier.
I see the same trend. My thoughts: 2 tonnes of shit sells for more than 1 tonne of shit. 650 HP entices a lot more people than 1,200kg. I usually have to dig to find the weight of the vehicle. It's a consumer education problem more than anything imo.
yeah, the tax should be based on car weight per passanger
That will just make the gigantic SUVs with 7 or more seats dominate even more.
car weight / min(number of seats, number of people in the family)
This metric disincentivizes carpooling -- everyone should drive a light single-seater to minimize their tax.
(I agree with the spirit, just calling out that there are going to be edge cases galore with a scenario like this)
Do people car pool anymore?
Ironically, they've been taxed into existence.
Not really. Small cars are still on sale in US. SUVs are popular in EU as well.
It's ~all battery weight, though. This doesn't really move the needle.
Weight is not the only thing that matters though. You also need to consider center of gravity and wheel base. A YJ Jeep Wrangler and a Honda Fit both weigh around 2700 lbs and they even have similar wheel bases but the driving experience between those 2 is night and day. A Honda Fit can take a turn at speed without feeling like you're going to go flying. You'll feel like you're able to flip making a turn going 20 mph in a YJ.
This is why the first performance mod that most people put on their cars is an adjustable coil over suspension. Dropping the car down by an inch or 2 changes has just as much of an impact as shedding some weight.
Ironically, most people put lift kits on Jeeps but that also usually comes with widening the wheel base and putting on larger wheels/tires.
Lifting an off road vehicle isn't ironic at all, nearly every characteristic that makes a vehicle good on road makes it bad off road and vise versa.
Increased height makes for increased ground clearance and improved break over angle. Sway bars are another suspension component that's great for reducing body roll on road at speed, but reduces articulation and ground contact off road. Differential lockers also negatively impact turning radius, and cause tire chirp, wear, and oversteer under throttle on road, while increasing traction off road.
What's silly is daily driving an off road vehicle on road, especially if you never take it off road.
You are correct, ideally you would do both. My car is lowered on coilovers, I also have front and rear sway bars, but weight reduction is so much more than just handling.
I didn't realize that Jeep was so light... pretty nice actually, but yeah, that's just an application mismatch. People buy Jeeps that will never see even a dirt road in their lives. Then they get on a dirt road once or twice and say, "Look what it can do!" Sure... a rally car would be much better. In order for the Jeep to come into its own you need to be doing something that requires ground clearance... that's basically their singular purpose: rock crawling (which almost no one does).
The Jeep YJ he is talking about is an 80s design, and some models topped 3200lb by the end of the run. So he is comparing the weight and handling of a car from the 80s to a car from the 2000s at the earliest (although the curb weight he cites means that the fit he is talking about would have to be a later model, from 2015 or later).
The modern Jeep Wrangler, and the one that would be contemporary to the Honda Fit weighs in at 4,000 lbs in the 2-door base model or significantly more depending on options.
If you compare a YJ to a Honda Civic of the same era, you see that the 1986 civic was 1800 lbs up against a 1986 YJ at 2800 lbs.
Good catch. I didn't even realize... I was shocked because I assumed it was a modern Jeep. Your data is much more in line with what I would expect.
> Ironically, most people put lift kits on Jeeps but that also usually comes with widening the wheel base and putting on larger wheels/tires.
That's not ironic. That's just caring more about the looks and you like that look. And looks > handling for that person
It's not at all about looks, it's about a different kind of handling, for off road, that's mutually exclusive with on road handling.
Yes, some people choose to emulate off road appearances, such as with fake bead locks and then only ever drive their vehicle on road. That doesn't discount the fact that there are a great many explicit choices you can make in designing and building a vehicle that sacrifice on road performance for off road performance.
Absolutely and on top of that far lower pollution from tyre and brake dust, and less damaging to the road top surface.
Driving Volkswagen e-up for the first time was a very unique experience to me. My brain needed to adjust that a car can be that nimble and responsive due to its small size/weight and instant torque from the electric motor.
I went from a 2021 Opel Mokka (4.2m long, 1350kg) to a 2024 Volvo EX30 (4.2m long, 2000kg).
It was an absolute shock the first time I braked in the Volvo, not to mention trying to take a corner.
> I wish more people on the road realized the extent to which weight reduction improves all aspects of the driving experience
This is a blanket statement and completely untrue. Good driving experience is directly correlated to TRACTION, not just weight. And traction isn't just a function of weight - it also is affected by center of gravity, friction between the wheels and the road. Traction is what gives you the perception of being in control of the car.
I used to own two cars of the exact same model - one petrol and one diesel. The petrol is lighter in weight, about 100+ kgs lighter than the diesel variant. And the driving experience on that is slightly scary especially on roads with strong winds. In fact, it is so light that if you drive over tiny puddles or rumbles strips, the car will sway sideways. The diesel always feels more planted because it is front-heavy, thus adding more traction to the front wheels (both are FWDs). I always prefer the diesel for longer drives because of the heft and confidence it provides.
I get what you're saying, but tire technology has improved traction so greatly in the last decade that we can definitely take the slight loss in maximum theoretical traction for the massive benefits in other areas. There is also the question of what "maximum traction" is... what scenario are we talking about? Straight line acceleration from a dig or skidpad turning at a high speed? If we're turning at all then the momentum (which increases w/ mass) of the vehicle is what pulls it off course and causes the tires to break traction.
I also drive a FWD (a quite spicy one) and I break traction all the time, not because of weight, but because of torque. You can modulate torque, not weight. The biggest traction increases that I made on my FWD were when I put on sticky summer tires, the second was subtly changing front control arm geometry and bushings, and the third was adding stiffer engine mounts.
Agreed on getting tossed around in a light car though, not much can be done about that... other than making the roads better and lowering the center of gravity.
> In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.
It’s a little sad to me that fundamental innovations in electromechanical engineering like this get just a few million in investment, yet if this had been yet another derivative software startup with “AI” in the pitch, they’d probably have 10x+ or more investments being thrown at them.
Seems to me everyone wants to invest, instead, into something that can be "web scale" with low marginal cost, that is, natural monopolies. There is not enough anti-trust enforcement.
They should have named their company "YASAI" (pronounced as "Yes AI") and just watched the investments roll in ...
Or maybe it's not as important as they make it sound.
Factories take time to build. "Investors" want a get rich quick scheme.
Welcome to the UK and its innovation hostile environment. We don't have the US culture of throwing VC money at things and seeing what sticks.
This is less UK vs US, more hardware vs software.
But EVs are already heavy because of the battery. I suppose percentage-wise the motors don't make much of a difference (?)
The issue with this type of motor is that it is part of the unsprung weight since it is inside the wheel. This is probably why savings here matter a lot more (or at least in a very different way) than the battery weight.
Ok, now I understand why this motor is only used in supercars - installing four (or even only two - according to https://www.mercedes-benz.de/passengercars/technology/concep..., even the AMG GT-XX has "only" three of them) hub motors with twice the power of a Tesla Model 3 in any other car would be ridiculous. So, the actual challenge is to make this motor even smaller while keeping the same power to weight ratio, so it can also be used for regular cars? That is, if they want to build something for the mass market, not only for an exclusive clientele?
But why limit only to cars? Can this be used for motorcycles, e-bikes, electric buses, train wheels, e-unicycles, electric golf carts, etc?
There are probably a range of application where in-wheel makes perfect sense.
Donut Labs markets a whole suite of axial flux motors. Sized from scooters through to large trucks. But no public pricing.
I don't think their motors are axial flux, they're just large and narrow to fit inside wheels. Or at least all the images on their website depict radial flux designs.
And thrusters for boats as well, IIRC.
Motorcycles I could imagine.
Do e-bikes really need significantly more power than they have? They already run arguably dangerously fast for their application. Is efficiency not the primary target there?
e-bikes don't necessarily need more power but they could benefit from a smaller and lighter motor. If it becomes small enough to "disappear" in the pedal assembly for example, it would allow more design/parts commonality with normal bikes and fit more people's aesthetic criteria.
The lower weight would be definitely welcome, my ebike is comically heavy compared to a normal one and sometimes I have to carry it up flights of stairs (some German railway overpasses, grr).
Also in scooters it could fit in the wheel (since the wheel is tiny and has to spin quite quickly - no reduction gear needed vs a bike with 26-28" rims) allowing a simpler design and cost savings. But maybe in scooters they're already using in-wheel motors, I'm a bit ignorant there.
There are some advantages to hub motors in an e-bike, and if the motor and an appropriate gearing system could be made light enough the disadvantages would be reduced.
Oddly, a very large majority of current fully suspended e-bikes with rear cargo racks have those racks unsprung, which suggests that most e-bike manufacturers don’t actually care about the handling of anything other than their pure e-MTBs.
While more power may not make sense, less weight is an easy way to get more efficiency. And if you can keep the same power at a lower weight, that's a win.
The motor to battery weight ratio on e-bike is much more than for cars. Having a lighter motor would improve the efficiency.
Hmm. I am NOT an expert (though I ride and have owned 3 traditional motorcycles). IIUC, reducing unsprung weight is really crucial for handling -- which is why so-called "inverted" forks / front shock absorbers became basically the standard.
bicycle weight ratios are completely different from even motorcycles. a bike wheel can quickly become heavier than the frame for example.
They don’t need this motor, but if it can be scaled down… at over 10kW/kg sustained, one could wish/hope to get 200W at 50g (disclaimer: I have no idea how this scales with size). Combine that with 1kg of a 600Wh/kg battery (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45797452. Again, I have no idea how realistic that is), and you have a bicycle that’s only a little heavier than a non-electric one, but gives you a boost for 3 hours (more if you use it sparingly. If you’re cycling at leisure, 100W already is a lot of power)
For reference, an average commuter cyclist has a power output of about 200W, a world-class racer can do about 600W.
Ref: https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...
Yes, all else equal, we want lighter motors in vehicles.
I'm always interested to hear about the latest in lighter and possibly more powerful and torque-y e-bike motors.
If engine can be produced cheaply, can it be limited "in software"? It's like saying people shouldn't use Rasberry Pi to blink an LED.
Yeah, you kind of shouldn't use a Raspberry Pi to blink an LED, though. Great "Hello World" project. But there are so many ways that are cheaper, lighter, smaller and more reliable (and don't require a lengthy boot-up).
Yeah, my first thought was racing EUC’s, lol….
End User Credentials ? Everyone Uses Cars ? Engineered Universal Conscience? (Since you seem to assume we all share your thoughts & context...)
I don’t see anything inside the article that says it’s designed to be inside the wheel. I’m not sure where they got that from.
From Wikipedia on Axial Flux Motors: >"Mercedes-Benz subsidiary YASA (Yokeless and Segmented Armature) makes AFMs that have powered various concept (Jaguar C-X75), prototype, and racing vehicles. It was also used in the Koenigsegg Regera, the Ferrari SF90 Stradale and S96GTB, Lamborghini Revuelto hybrid and the Lola-Drayson.[9] The company is investigating the potential for placing motors inside wheels, given that AFM's low mass does not excessively increase a vehicle's unsprung mass.[10] "
The fact that you CAN put it in the wheel doesn't mean it MUST to go in the wheel.
Yes but the wikipedia article is referencing YASA, the company in the featured article.
They’re investigating the potential for them to be placed inside wheels, but they aren’t at the moment, so my point stands.
I think they misspoke when they said "in" the wheel, but supercars can have a separate motor for each wheel, and the closer they are to the wheel the better the torque as it's not also driving a longer shaft. The smaller the motor, the closer you can get.
I guess if you can make the motor and a suitable reduction box lighter than the equivalent bearing and driveshaft combination you could make the suspension arms mechanically simpler.
By using motors at each wheel you'd eliminate the need for a differential, saving a good 40-50kg or so. Of course, if you kept the drive shafts and put the motor and reduction box in the middle, you'd be able to use inboard brakes and save a lot of unsprung weight!
it would be really interesting if it became possible to do electronic only breaks. I'm sure the regulatory system isn't there yet, but it would let you shave a whole bunch more parts and complexity
I wonder if that would be legal, or if there is a regulation about where you can put your brakes?
There are cars with inboard brakes, although not recently. From a packaging point of view putting them out at the wheel makes sense, since there's a lot of space you're not using otherwise.
It's hard to fit inboard brakes to front wheel drive cars because there's so little space but Citroën managed it with the 2CV and various derivatives, and the GS/GSA/Birotor family. They had an inline engine with a very compact gearbox behind, with the brake discs (drums, on very early 2CVs) right on the side of the gearbox.
You got lower unsprung weight and possibly more usefully the kingpin was aligned with the centre of the tyre, so when you steered the tyre turned "on the spot" rather than rotating through a curve.
Some old Jags and Alfas had inboard discs on the rear axle, which was of course rear wheel drive. They were a bit of a pain to get at.
Super pro comment, should be much higher.
I’ve generally assumed that brakes are in the wheel because they’re not all that massive, they get decent cooling airflow in the wheel, and they can produce enormous amounts of torque.
Interesting! But yes in axel in this case then
I get your skepticism and I know nothing about the field, but if the round thing in the press release picture isn’t designed to fit in a wheel, I’m confused. https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
Not necessarily, cf: https://lammotor.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/YASA-400R.jp...
From https://lammotor.com/yasa-axial-flux-motor/
the shape is due to the change to the motor layout: https://www.thedrive.com/news/why-axial-flux-motors-are-a-bi...
It’s currently designed for the axel for now as far as I’m aware.
Well, Tesla also started with the higher end of the market. That's where people are willing to pay more.
I might be wrong, but I don’t think these motors are intended to be used inside the wheel. That would add a ton of additional requirements in terms of physical durability as well as constrain optimal torque and RPM of the motor design.
I believe the Aptera was originally going to have motors in the wheels... My understanding is the the first version will forego that, as there were challenges i guess, but i think they still to eventually do that.
Why would it have to be unsprung? They are not unsprung in the vehicle shown in the article.
> This is probably why savings here matter a lot more (or at least in a very different way) than the battery weight.
Wouldn't that make it worse or just ... different. Before this the unsprung weight wouldn't have had a motor in there and now it does. Increasing the unsprung weight doesn't seem a like a good thing.
What current mass production EVs use hub motors? It seems a lot more sensible to have the motors inboard, mounted to the chassis, and drive the wheel(s) with axle shafts. It seems in my searching this is how nearly all EVs are currently designed and produced.
YASA doesn't call it a hub motor specifically but that's one place where it helps to save as much weight as possible. And for the cars most likely to have 1000+HP weight matters too. A Tesla motor weighs 100-200lbs, so saving that much weight down to 28lbs on a supercar is highly desirable.
I think large drones will be another place where a downsized version of this motor will make a huge difference, assuming the power scales nicely with size.
See also the Saab Emily GT project. Even with an older, heavier gen of these axial flux motors they found significant performance gains by controlling each wheel via its own motor.
https://electrek.co/2023/04/27/saab-engineers-develop-secret...
I didn't want to put the usability of the motor into question or go into a complete evaluation of advantages/disadvantages :) This was just an explanation that weight trimming the motor might be very much worth the effort - even if it somewhat "insignificant" compared with savings that are possible in battery weight.
Where does it say it’s inside the wheel? Not sure about that
He’s holding the motor in the picture. That format is in-wheel BLDC.
In-wheel application is possible, but it's important to understand that the pancake shape is only a consequence of the axial flux design and Yasa doesn't make motors in other "formats". Yasa motors shaped like this have been used in several supercars and all of them have been in-board on the axles, not in-wheel.
I don’t believe it is in this case.
That format is the standard format for axial flux motors...
I believe caring about unsprung weight only matters for handling not efficiency
It compounds. If you have a lighter more efficient motor you need a smaller battery for the same range, that combined weight loss means you meed lighter brakes etc etc, and because the car is now lighter you size of your motor you need is less.....
They claim, this compounding effect works out to basically double the effective weight saving from battery and motor.
ie if you start with saving 50kg on motor, and 50kg on battery, you end up saving 200kg over all. Still only about 10% of a typical electric car.
https://youtu.be/3qjB6GnhloY?si=yqlz7Evuyf5VaghO&t=446
> If you have a lighter more efficient motor you need a smaller battery for the same range
Nitpick: You can have a lighter motor, but you're never going to have a significantly more efficient motor because existing EV motor systems are already 95% efficient or better. The electric motor is an old and refined technology.
Suppose you go from a 95% efficient electric motor to a 99% efficient motor. How much more efficient is it? You might say 1.04x (or actually 99/95 efficient). Except, that's not the whole story - electric motors need cooling, and you've just dropped the heat output five-fold (going from 5% heat to 1% heat). Lower heat output means less venting needed and thus better aerodynamics.
I'm not an expert - but the axial flux design while old is been largely ignored due to manufacturing problems that have now been overcome ( so most of the dev has been on the radial flux variety ).
And apparently axial flux motors have shorter magnetic flux paths which reduces losses.
ie the efficiency gain is due to the switch from radial to axial flux - not some incremental gain on radial flux.
Having said that the efficiency gains are relatively small - 1-2%.
However again there is a compounding effect, in that the reduction of loss of energy as heat, leads to requiring less cooling - and/or the motor is able to operate a full efficiency over a wider power output range ( as heating the copper increases the electrical resistance ).
https://www.stanfordmagnets.com/advantages-and-disadvantages...
What's a bit of a shame is they are no longer an independent company ( ie wholly owned owned by Mercedes ) - so that might mean we are less likely to see these motors combined with solid state batteries any time soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation
Yea that's the thing right, the battery is so very much of the weight that optimizing the other parts are "meh" at this point. What is cool is that the 600Wh/kg solid state batteries seems like they are really finally here soon :) i.e removing 200-300kg from a car in one go will be a game changer.
No wonder electrics don't sell well in the US. People weigh more, you're basically saying that leaving grandma at home, is a "game changer".
>> removing 200-300kg from a car in one go will be a game changer
> No wonder electrics don't sell well in the US. People weigh more, you're basically saying that leaving grandma at home, is a "game changer".
Even in the US, your average grandma weighs less than 2-300kg :D
[This post to prevent ulterior posting of "yo mama" jokes]
Range being worse with a fully loaded car than with a lightly loaded car isn't exactly news, and not exactly limited to electric cars. I can clearly feel my old diesel struggling more when I'm driving 3 friends and with loads of heavy stuff in the back than when I'm alone. That makes the gas bill more expensive.
You probably know already, but ICE cars only convert about 20–30% of fuel energy into motion, while EVs are often +90% efficient. So when an EV has to work harder (extra battery weight or colder weather), you notice the drop in range more.
In an ICE, the same load is less visible because most energy gets wasted as heat. This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
> You probably know already, but ICE cars only convert about 20–30% of fuel energy into motion, while EVs are often +90% efficient. So when an EV has to work harder (extra battery weight or colder weather), you notice the drop in range more.
There's a kernel of truth here in that Otto engines suffer lower efficiency at part load, however I suspect the real reason is that gas car range is "good enough" and refilling is fast, so one doesn't tend to obsess about remaining range.
> This is also why cold weather seems to affect EV range more.
That's because a) some batteries suffer degraded performance at low temperature, and b) ICE cars use the plentiful waste heat for cabin heating whereas an EV needs a heat pump or even resistive heating of the cabin air.
> That's because a) some batteries suffer degraded performance at low temperature, and b) ICE cars use the plentiful waste heat for cabin heating whereas an EV needs a heat pump or even resistive heating of the cabin air.
You are making my point here actually. Combustion engines suffer from the exact same, but because they waste so much energy as heat already, less “extra” energy needs to be spent on that.
I don't think there's a contradiction here. Electric cars suffer degraded range when it's cold (in part) because they're so much more efficient that they don't produce enough waste heat to heat the cabin. And batteries are so much less energy dense than diesel and gasoline that the extra power draw reduces their range to a meaningful degree.
Part of your point is right, part is wrong.
Yes heating impacts range in an EV, but it's not really an efficiency thing, it's because you can't get it "free". If an ICE didn't let you harness the heat, you'd see a similar percent drop in range.
And for extra weight, it's just not true. Making a motor work 10% harder at 90% efficiency, compared to making an engine work 10% harder at 20% efficiency, both of these are going to reduce your range by 9%.
The unexpected benefit which I've noticed when switching from a small, light car to a heavier, medium EV car is that the latter doesn't drive/feel any worse when fully loaded. Makes the trips that much more pleasant.
That's true only if your very large "grandma" must at all cost sit on your batteries at all times.
If we could indeed leave "grandma" home, that would make things better.
And they don't sell well in the US because of oil lobbying and think tanks whose sole goal is to make you buy more oil.
Well, the world's most popular electric car brand (BYD) is also virtually banned in the US. That doesn't help with adoption.
True! If only grandma wouldn't insist on bringing 250kg of weapons and ammunition with her everywhere I'd get much better range in my EV, but alas this is the USA.
250kg grandma = ~20 small dogs
250kg weapons = ~20 small dogs
Instead of technological advancements of EV motors, we can immediately use existing pharmaceutical tech (Ozempic, GLP-1) to immediately deliver weight reduction to cars. However, this will be immediately offset by the increase in weight of weapons carried, thanks to Jevons Paradox.
Quite frankly I would like to hang out with that grandma. Load it up, I’ll take the range hit.
Manufacturers may just keep the battery size and market the improved range instead? Smaller cars in urban and suburban environments have always had lots of benefits, but since many of them are collective in nature, it has largely fallen on tragedy of the commons, and we got larger cars with larger hoods instead.
Why not both? For a two-car family, having a good road-tripper and a light sporty car can work out pretty nicely.
Not true. Tesla themselves said the way they got the Model 3 to be so efficient was by optimising every single part exhaustively. It’s expensive at design stage but results in the most efficiency gains across the fleet - so worth it (especially something like the motors)
Hub motors are problematic because they increase the sprung weight of the wheel, which loses more traction when hitting bumps. Dangerous while cornering or braking. Scale down a motor like this to 300 HP and you could have an amazing AWD vehicle.
This video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WU9Ptibu2WQ&t=179s claims that SMC materials have much higher losses at low frequencies than laminated materials, up to around 400 HZ when they very rapidly pull ahead.
So as the core of a step down transformer for consumer electronics, SMCs would be worse than a laminated core (stack of sheet metal pieces punched with a press, stacked and wound with the windings). But in a motor operating at 100s of rpms, no problem. And as I understand it, in high torque motors the magnetic fields pulse far more often than once per revolution because the windings are many and small, so that several can pull on the armature at any orientation.
Tesla Model Y's battery is 771 kg. The motor in Model Y weights about 45 kg, about three times as much as the motor in the article. By reducing dual motor configuration weight from 90 kg to 28 kg, we reduce total powertrain weight by 7%.
The new motor is also much more than double the power output of the Model Y motor, so the second motor and its wiring could be eliminated completely.
No, because that second motor gives you AWD. Sure that's a feature you could go without...
But torque and power were never the limiting factor for an EV. You would only benefit on a track, and if you're taking a model Y there...
That's a great point I neglected, thanks. I bought a M3 with dual motor option mainly for the AWD.
You’d need to add back in an all wheel drive powertrain. A typical drive shaft is 20 to 50 pounds (9 to 23 kilograms)
The motor is high torque, so I’d expect the drive shaft to be on the heavier end of that.
I’m not including the other power train components, but it’s easy to imagine it all adding to more than the weight of a second engine + wiring.
Also, having one more complicated power train is probably less efficient than two simpler ones, which implies a bigger battery.
And shouldn’t it be possible to make the battery smaller with a more efficient motor?
It is not indicated anywhere that this particular motor is more efficient than older ones in terms of the electric force conversion.
This new motor is more powerful, that's it.
Nothing was said about cooling or voltage requirements. The latter is important because higher voltage is more dangerous to work with or be near.
Ah ok, that makes sense
The battery could be made smaller by whatever amount is needed to carry the marginal motor weight the advertised distance.
This is a negligible improvement to most things about an EV. Motors are already extremely power-dense.
There is a single exception, and it's a big one. Direct-drive, wheel-hub motors are not well-regarded right now, specifically because they increase unsprung weight (the part of the car more closely coupled to the road surface than the passenger) and this impacts handling substantially. So instead we backport a bunch of the mechanical infrastructure that transfers power from a traditional ICE engine to the four wheels. We're paying that bill already, on almost all production EVs. Quadruple the power density and simple, 1-moving-part wheel hub motors look like a lot better case versus central driveshafts and mechanical linkages.
> Direct-drive, wheel-hub motors are not well-regarded right now, specifically because they increase unsprung weight
It will always be lighter to not have the motor in the wheel.
> So instead we backport a bunch of the mechanical infrastructure that transfers power from a traditional ICE engine to the four wheels.
No, we do it because it's smart and efficient for freeway-capable vehicles.
Wheels get banged up in use. They're easy to replace for different applications. They're exposed to 200 kph salt spray at hundreds of RPM. They are not a great place for motors.
I'm more excited about light electric vehicles. (Bikes, tuk-tuks, what-have-you).
...with 1,000 horsepower. =:-)
In fairness, ICE engines have been able to provide too much horsepower for those use cases for a long time.
Cutting the motor weight probably matters more for smaller vehicles than bigger ones though.
That wasn't so much a criticism of the electric motor, which it sounds like they can scale down, as the Neanderthal part of my brain lighting up. Mongo like power to weight ratio.
> According to YASA, this is achieved without using exotic or expensive materials, so the design could actually be scalable once the demand kicks in.
That is ever more special
Batteries are the bottleneck.
Even if motors were literally weightless and mass-less, EVs would weigh more than ICE cars.
It's like making a more efficient CPU for your phone when all the power is eaten up by the cell-modem, screen and RAM. People wonder where the practical battery life gains are and theyre miniscule in practice
Better for robotics as well.
Only the absolute weight of a motor counts, because consumers of passenger vehicles do not require 1000 hp.
How far does YASA's tech allow the motor weight to scale down, for applications where you don't need the power?
Can you make it 2.8 pounds instead of 28, if all you need is 100 hp? Likely not.
I don't see the weight reduction being very significant.
If we take a Tesla model 3, I believe it weighs 1611kg, and the motor shows up at 80kg if you google it (no idea if this is correct). This YASA motor by comparison weighs 14kg. So, this would drop the vehicle weight by 66kg out of 1611, so that's a 4% saving.
I assume that means it would be more like an 8% savings on the dual motor variants? At what point does it become significant?
This motor is well more than twice as powerful as the Model 3 motor, so it could eliminate the entire weight of the second motor in the higher performance models. That’s 146kg, the weight of two adults, an 11% reduction.
As pointed out elsewhere, this neglects AWD which is an important part of the dual motor models' value proposition.
saving 30 kg of weight on a 2000 - 2500 kg car won't lead to "significant efficiency gains"
The Ferrari 296 GTB weighs about 1500kg and the sports version 1300kg. For the cars YASA produces motors for it's much easier to increase the power to weight ratio by reducing weight than increasing power. I imagine an important design point for all of its components is to reduce weight.
Also as mentioned by another comment, Mercedes produces Formula 1 power units, and engineers would kill for a savings of a few kilograms in Formula 1. Those savings are not easy to come by.
I agree insofar as the motor is not a Big Ticket Item, opposed to ICE cars where the engine block is going to be 10% or more.
Tesla (I know) claimed a 30kg (?) weight loss on their Cybertruck (I know) just from moving their 12V systems to 48V, allowing for lighter cables at lower currents. Not all such potential is untapped, and my hunch is that there is more to be had with structural battery integration, battery cooling, and high voltage wiring.
Depends on your definition if significance, but I think they do. Every kg of useless weight you do carry, lowers your range. But sure, on its own it is not a magic game changer for heavy electric cars.
For light weight vehicles on the other hand, it might be.
If you put several small motors on each wheel you might get some extra weight gains in the form of less transmission needed. Cables weight less than metal structural bars. But yes you are not going to be 500kg lighter.
Weight reductions on an electric car are self-reinforcing. If you reduce the weight of a component, the battery can become (slightly) smaller, which again reduces weight. At a certain amount of reduction this will allow you to make the whole structure lighter, which will again allow for a smaller battery.
So yeah, weight reduction on EVs is great.
Also not considered is that the announcement is for 740bhp motor. The Tesla model 3 has a vehicle output of about 400 hp. I’m not sure of all the design specs, but it seems clear to me that a smaller version of these motors could suffice to drive a 3 equivalent vehicle at 1/2 the output and still be more than sufficient. So let’s say maybe 15lbs each, vs current equivalent 70lbs each. It’s not major total weight impact, but with battery advancements it will compound.
I think people are overlooking that the announcement is for a performance motor meant for the performance market at the moment because that is what the backers of YASA are most interested in because it has the highest margins and prestige. Also not mentioned is the efficiency from the simpler production line.
My impression from what I know is we are looking at an impact equivalent to direct injection engines; not revolutionary, but a major advancement of one component that has significant and consequential effects.
The e-motor is often “overpowered” in EVs (compared to ICEs) to make regenerative braking efficient, i.e. capture meaningful energy from braking.
And because almost everyone is a sucker for the "Stomp on the pedal and it goes fast" marketing strategy and demonstration.
That's why a modern Camry makes almost 200 HP
It's also just a lot easier and cheaper to make an electric motor "overpowered" by 25% or even 50+% than an internal combustion engine.
> Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's
Not really. EV's are very heavy from non-motor weight. A Model Y weighs ~4300 lbs. A motor that is 75 lbs lighter is a 1.7% savings. That's not nothing, but I wouldn't say "significant". You can do better by swapping for fancy wheels or eliminating some of the glass roof.
And really this is true up and down the electric vehicle world. Weight-sensitive applications are always going to be completely dominated by battery weight. Making the motor smaller just isn't going to move the needle.
Basically this is good tech without an application, which is why it's having to tell itself with links like this.
It’s great anywhere you want more power but are limited by space and/or weight for performance reasons. Aerospace, e-bikes, electric race vehicles, electric motorcycles.
But yeah, EVs seem weird except for racing reasons perhaps.
What I can’t figure out is how they dissipate the heat - double digits kw per kg is crazy.
The first step to dealing with heat at high kw, is to not generate the heat you have to dissipate in the first place. Which means chasing smaller and smaller efficiency gains, because that reduces heat generated.
The more of the energy going into moving the vehicle, the less heat the motor has to handle.
Sure, but at 50kw/kg at 99% efficiency is still 500w/kg, which is cray cray. Like ‘glowing red hot shortly’ type of crazy with just passive cooling.
And there is no way this is 99% efficient.
So my question still applies. Even 98% is 1kw/kg, or 1kj/sec. or around 3C rise per second assuming the mass is 100% nice clean copper (it isn’t). Everything else will be worse.
Not even counting increasing losses with temperature, it will be a molten puddle pretty quick at that rate without some major active cooling.
I was waiting to see in the comments EXACTLY this question: There is no way to dump this heat. 1000hp? Yeah, maybe for a few seconds, even with oil coolant pumping through there. Then how to dump the heat from the oil. And further thinking, if they ever get this to be a hub motor, how in the world are they going to pump coolant through 2-4 hub motors and then to a radiator that can dump that rate of heat rise, especially since oil is a lousy coolant (relatively speaking).
Those could be answered by large radiators or the like - when outside the ‘has to be dense’ path. The issue the motor has is exactly that it needs to be dense - and has a lot of power going through it.
Liquid cooling at least for now should work - as long as it stays below the flash point of the liquid I guess.
Again, no, because the motor needs to be powered and the battery is vastly larger than the motor already in any of those applications. Even in RC planes, which fly for 5-6 minutes at a time, the battery is 5x or more the weight of the motor, wiring and controller logic.
> This is awesome. Lighter motors also make electric flight more viable
The next innovation we need is Aerial refueling[1] for electric planes. High density swappable batteries and high altitude wind/solar plants that can swap batteries mid air. Perhaps some billionaire will develop a large fleet of these to service all flights! If no western billionaires, we just have to wait for China to develop this tech.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_refueling
A sufficiently compact electric motor enables mounting it in the nose-wheel of commercial aircraft, allowing it to be driven around like a golf cart. This means the plane can taxi without the use of its engines, just the power from the APU. [1]
Also planes would not have to wait for a tug to pull back from the gate, which improves turnaround times for the airline.
[1] https://www.wheeltug.com/
You could also spin up the landing gear wheels prior to landing to massively reduce the amount of rubber transferred from tire to runway on touchdown. Rarely done today because of the weight and complexity of adding motors, but letting the ground spin up the wheel is pretty expensive both for tire wear and runway maintenance
Apologies for the turbulence, we're just flying through a thunderstorm to top up the batteries
Or laser power beaming from a satellite, or a ground station.
Not very feasible, but an option that has been thought through.
I guess there’s a system that’s gated to track dependent technologies, to track improvements and what they’ll enable.
Surely it would be easier to recharge rather than swap batteries? I wonder if in the future war will be like a turn based strategy game as everyone wait for drones to recharge before making a move.
Mid-air: yes. A boom with a charging cable or even beamed energy would be much easier.
On the ground: swapping batteries is faster, and batteries are cheaper than planes or drones. You want the expensive part back in the air as soon as possible so you don't need as many of them. On the whole this probably also simplifies logistics: in civilian aviation airport space is limited, in wartime it's easier to transport one hundred drones and two hundred battery packs to the frontline than to transport two hundred drones
That's a future thought when it comes to electric aircraft - remote/emergency refuelling. I know they have tested lasers, and even sent a megawatt in 30 seconds over a distance of a few miles, though current convention of the laser back into usable power is around 50% efficiency. All gets down to a needed leap in electricity production and wished the World would get together on fusion reactors and knock it out the park over a mad race to be the first and lock down patents.
A typical regional aircraft needs about 3MW of power to keep in cruise, and has about 50 square metre area, so 60kW per square metre. Even with 50% efficiency you're talking over 100kW/m^2
A laser over 10W has safety implications. This is 50,000 lasers all shining on the same plane.
Given your collectors are only going to be say 50% efficient, you're likely going to dumping enough wasted energy into the wings to melt the aircraft - not sure what dumping 3MW of heat energy into a plane would do over an hour, but I suspect it would stat to melt in a few seconds if you're lucky (otherwise your passengers would start getting very toasty)
At 3MW for an hour that's not a great amount of electricity that's needed - at 10c/kWh it's $300 an hour. You don't need fancy things like fusion to generate that. In the UK alone Solar is currently (in November) generating 600 times that - plus domestic installations.
I don't see it working like that in Ukraine...
Difficulty for swapping batteries too - how to differentiate between strategic bombings and a refueling accident.
>In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.
In Bay Area that is small investment in a startup which would be able to lease a small office
>Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio...
that would help VTOL a lot. Unfortunately YASA motors are priced for supercars and availability seems to be low. Until some factory in China starts making similar ones, there are not much chances on getting hands on such a motors.
> because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio...
1/4 of something that is a small fraction of the total weight of a car means very little improvement in overall power to weight ratio.
I suspect that gaining 40% of car seat weight would be much more beneficial even if way less sexy.
The other aspect is that a smaller motor with the same power generally has higher efficiency, by necessity, since it has less heat dissipation. So higher power and higher efficiency and lower size/weight all go together. It’s a great synergy.
Is it always true that a smaller motor with the same power has less heat dissipation? It doesn't seem all that obvious to me.
All else held equal, I think so, yeah. If you have the same temperature differential, the same manner of heat dissipation, and a smaller surface area then that should mean smaller heat dissipation, yeah?
Obviously if you go from eg. a large air-cooled motor to a smaller water-cooled motor, then the smaller motor could potentially dissipate more heat, but that's a different scenario.
It will probably lead to cars that fail sooner and are cheaper to build
Okay cool downvote me but it's true, most of the weight is batteries and asking a smaller device to do more work will create more heat and wear components faster. It's not a new phenomenon.
You could almost replace the disc brakes with these and have hub motors for free (in terms of unsprung weight). Depends on the torque and safety margin on the 700KW level of performance. For emergency safety you could have a mechanical short to let the motors dump energy into a big heating element as a last resort (risking wheel lockup) but this would truly be drive-by-wire braking.
This discussion is all about vehicles with large batteries, but how about hybrids? With light enough and efficient enough motors, all kinds of designs might become practical:
- Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter, and they don’t need large batteries.
- e-bikes with tiny batteries?
- Hybrid aircraft? What if there was a battery large enough for takeoff and landing, a small motor (or pair for redundancy) for cruising and to recharge the battery, and motors and fans or propellers wherever is best from an aerodynamic perspective.
- Power tools.
The size of this motor is moderately interesting, but the power density doesn't really matter for most of the things you just mentioned. Almost every one of them is limited by the amount of batteries you can put in for both weight and power output reasons.
What do you mean? Modern LFP cells have quite high power density. LTO is even higher.
An e-bike with a 100Wh battery and a 300W motor would be extremely useful if it were light enough: you could carry it up stairs, onto trains, etc easily, and it would give plenty of boost to navigate traffic for short distances and make it easier to go up hills. The idea would be that most of the energy would come from the rider. 100Wh of modern LFP cells doesn't weight very much, but you still need to carry around the motor and the structure to support the motor.
In an airplane, you need a lot of power to take off, and weight is a big deal.
As the other poster mentioned, they're not even on the same planet as the current power density of the combined engine + fuel in an aircraft.
There are two things you are missing in these examples:
1. The motor won't scale down to a 2lbs and a few hundred watts. That's just not how it works.
2. The weight of the battery pack is partially about energy density, but it is also about the ability to discharge, which takes more batteries to make up for it. Let's say you wanted one of the motors in the article giving your device a "boost" of 500hp (sure, we can scale it back, but roll with me), your battery needs to output 400kW instantaneously. If it was a 48v pack, which is 13 cells in series, they would need to deliver 8,333 amps. Most cells are rated for something like 20a, so you need to put more in series to get the voltage high enough to get that to a reasonable number. A 400v car architecture is 112 lithium cells in series for example.
This is before packaging considerations, the increase in complexity of the base system, etc. When you look at the overall system, you're just not gaining that much. Cars are actually uniquely good for hybridization and electrification.
I'm super excited to fly an electric plane, but a lightweight motor isn't what's gonna make that possible. My current plane carries 561 kwh of energy in a 100 pound/ 17gal gas tank.
Even if you say the engine is only 30% efficient, I am still carrying an absolute shitload of energy compared to what I could get out of 100 lbs of lithium batteries.
The actual motor only weighs 84 lbs.
So I have a weight budget of 184 lbs (call it 200 just to be safe), and current capability is a peak output of 50hp (37 kw) and a cruise endurance of 3 hours at 40 hp / 30 kw. So just to math it out, lets say I will need about 90kwh of battery to come close to my current gas capabilities. At an extremely generous 5 kg per kwh, I need a battery that weighs more than my entire airplane's max gross takeoff weight. The weight of the engine is completely irrelevant when the battery weighs 450kg.
Quoting myself:
> Hybrid aircraft? What if there was a battery large enough for takeoff and landing, a small motor (or pair for redundancy) for cruising and to recharge the battery, and motors and fans or propellers wherever is best from an aerodynamic perspective.
Would this be better than a conventional design? I don’t know, but availability of very high power-to-weight motors would help.
Possibly in some designs. It comes down to a weight issue. The entire weight of the hybrid system needs to be less than the weight saved by installing a smaller ICE engine.
Take a modern small aero engine like the Rotax 912. It comes in an 80hp version that weighs 122 pounds and a 100 hp version that weighs 144 lbs. Hard to beat that kind of power/weight.
Very curious about this because there are electric planes in testing, so how do they do it?
They are designed for drastically shorter flight times. Of the airframes I am aware of that are actually flying right now (pipistrel and the beaver) both of them have a range of approximately 1/5 that of the same airframe with a gas engine.
The Pipistrel is probably the best example since it is actually available for sale in both ICE and electric. The ICE version of the airframe has 5.5 hours of cruise fuel good for 650 NM. The electric version has a payload that is 60% less, a ceiling of 12k feet compared to 18k feet, and an endurance of 56 minutes.
Basically, they are sacrificing range and payload. It isn't that electric planes can't possibly fly, its that ICE powered planes have a pretty hard to overcome advantage until battery power density increases by an order of magnitude. There are already mass market brushless motors that could replace most aircraft engines at a lower weight.
The problem is that gasoline holds 30x or more energy than a battery by weight. It doesn't matter if I can get replace 100 lbs of ICE engine with 1 lb of electric engine, because the real issue is that I would need a literal ton of batteries to replace less than 100 lbs of gas.
I have a trek ebike and it's fairly light if I take the battery off. Could easily carry it up stairs. I don't think the motor is the problem
My first thought too.
While I see Toyota-style hybrids as designed for efficiency, there's also the performance hybrids like the new Porsche 911 T-hybrid where an electric motor spins up the turbocharger to eliminate lag while another integrated into the gearbox adds power. There is no "EV mode" so it doesn't need a large battery.
Arguably the most important characteristic of a sports car is light weight, so lighter motors would be immediately useful there.
> Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter
The hybrid electric motor in a Toyota is already pretty comparable in weight to the motor in TFA, but obviously much less powerful. You can see the main hybrid motor of a RAV4 at [0]. If memory serves both the Camry and RAV4 hybrid models are only 2-300 lbs heavier than their gas counterparts.
0: https://youtu.be/O61WihMRdjM?t=120
There's indeed a huge number of applications where lower weight electric motors could be useful.
A link to the press release https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
> 59kW/kg
At this point why don't we get rid of the k prefix and write 59W/g?
Edit:
I was half joking, but various answers mention kW being standard for motors, kg being the SI unit for mass etc. All true, but as used here in a combined unit, which means "power density" it still would make sense IMO. It's not like the "59" tells you that it's a strong motor and hence you want kW to compare it to other motors. You can't, it's just a ratio (power to weigth). W/g just reads much nicer in my head. Or we could come up with a name, like for other units. Let's call it "fainpul" (short fp) for example :)
59 fp is a new record for electric motors!
Ah like the old MKBHD "screen has an aspect ratio of 18:9. Or 2:1 because I know my fractions"
Because kg is the fundamental unit of mass and kW is typically used for electric motors.
Same reason you wouldn't use m²/s³ even though that's also technically correct.
If "kg" is the fundamental unit of mass, then honestly, why isn't a gram referred to as a "millikilogram"?
Reminds me of the protest in the Shenanigans and Gimmicks part of this project: https://gre-v-el.github.io/Dimensional-Calculator/
You're thinking of grams and watts.
Kilo is an SI prefix.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI_base_unit
"The kilogram, symbol kg, is the SI unit of mass. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the Planck constant h to be 6.62607015×10−34 when expressed in the unit J s, which is equal to kg m2 s−1, where the metre and the second are defined in terms of c and ∆νCs.[1]"
The base SI unit for power is the watt. The base SI unit for mass is the kilogram. Yes, this is dumb, but it's the way it is.
[1] https://www.bipm.org/utils/common/pdf/si-brochure/SI-Brochur...
Amusingly, given the other thread in here with people sniping each other over the metric system, I'm obliged to point out that kg, not g, is the fundamental unit of mass in SI, because even metric can't get away without some silliness.
It gives a sense of the functional size required.
Could the motor in question be shrunk down to 1kg, producing 59kW? Probably.
Could it be shrunk down to 1g? No.
kg is the SI unit for mass, I think that would be why
Comparison with other motors
Much better you should post it and somebody mark the banner ridden one for deletion.
'Supercarblondie' manages to hit everything I dislike about automotive marketing online all at once.
Yeah wasnt blondie the name of a dog belonging to a certain historical figure?
Ha! I didn't know that. This blondie is definitely, definitely the more, um, traditional(?, oof) genus and species of American 'blondie' (no offense to blondes, I promise, as my disdain is in the direction of protection of blondes rather than broad criticism)
A much better link .. and probably not to late to change it via [edit] on submission in your view..
The YASA link is primary, links to test data and back story, and has more detail substance and authority.
The new YASA axial flux motor weighs just 28 pounds, or about the same as a small dog.
But how many footballs a small dog weighs?
Not sure about that, but if you ask me, a really small dog only weighs up to 7 pounds - or otherwise said, this motor weight as much as four fat Chihuahuas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chihuahua_(dog_breed) )
New performance ratio: horsepower:dogweight.
> But how many footballs a small dog weighs?
Which kind of football: the British or the US-American one? :-)
Australian rules.
A small dog e.g. toy poodle is about 7-9lb anyway.
Lol. I was confused by it also. I have no idea how much is 28 pounds, and I could imagine how a small dog can be anything from 1 kg to 10 kg. It happens that the motor weight is ~13kg, but I'm still not sure that 13kg dog counts as "small".
123.5 cubic centi-litres
Not sure about footballs but 28 pounds is about the weight of a child, a bag of rice, or a dumbbell. Hope that helps!
Ah, the weight of a dumbbell, so between 1 and 40 kg.
A dumbbell with 28 pounds written on it?
How much rice do you buy at a time?!
Asian grocery stores carry 25 pound bags of rice and we use about 2 each year. If you eat rice regularly, it’s the way to go.
American football or international futbol? If American, it's twelfteen furlongs.
The questions I have mostly centre around how much precision of power delivery it has - it is an all or nothing proposition, can it deliver 0.1% smoothly for real world use, and what is the MTBF / duty cycle / failure mode? I would imagine the last thing anyone would want is a locked wheel, or only one wheel delivering that much power. I know this is unlikely, but as someone with a 22-year-old ICE vehicle I do tend to take the long view on these things and want to know how they will fail as much as how they work. Same applies to the Tesla motors - is there much information on failure modes publicly available?
Ok so whats the catch with the technology? Its more powerful, smaller, all readily available materials. Some kind of strange shape, longevity challenge? Difficult to make so costs are tough to bring down?
Just noticed that they are owned by mercedes benz- they will kill it accidentally. Corporate wont be able to roll it out. They will try and capture all the value and kill its potential
Axial flux motors are difficult and expensive to make.
Motors need to be made of laminated steel sheets to reduce parasitic eddy currents. The laminations need to be thin in the direction of the direction of the flux. For radial flux motors you just punch out a shape and stack a bunch of sheets up. For axial flux you have to wind a strip: https://15658757.s21i.faiusr.com/2/ABUIABACGAAgmviFqAYozvPw-...
Each layer of that strip has a different cut in it, so its much more complicated to make. The shape and manufacturing method typically impacts efficiency; YASA avoids that by spending more money. Efficiency is an unavoidable requirement of high power density- heat is the limiting factor, and going from 98% to 96% efficient means double the heat.
The mechanical demands on the motor are also much higher- radial flux is balanced since the magnetic force pulls the rotor from opposite sides. Axial flux motors are usually one-sided, so the magnets are trying to pull the rotor and stator together with incredible force. That also makes vibrations worse. Extremely strong, expensive bearings are required to handle it. With permanent magnet rotors you need a jig to lower the rotor into place; they can't be assembled by hand. That also makes maintenance more difficult and expensive.
>> Each layer of that strip has a different cut in it, so its much more complicated to make.
You can roll a spool of that material and then machine the shape out of it. I've seen this done for axial flux motors. There are other approaches as well, and the cost differences get even smaller if you throw automation at the production process. I used to believe axial flux motors were one of those oddities that won't win in the end, but now that I work with them I'm not so sure. They are at least competitive with radial flux machines.
Can you (or anyone) explain where the power density improvement comes from with axial flux? When I work through the first-order math it seems like it should come out the same as radial flux. Is it just that the geometry allows better cooling from the coils? Or the use of grain oriented steel?
I was wondering where the seam is supposed to be in that picture and then it turns there is no seam. It's just one continuous roll.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZVQWgk6tRc
There was a video on this motor recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4OdH0ibOBk made by a phd in the field
That’s an excellent video!
I'm curious as to the efficiency of the motor (basically, how much of the input electric power is converted to motive power).
If it isn't very good, then it might be excellent for drag races, but maybe not so many others.
Also, any power that doesn't turn into torque, is likely to be expressed as heat.
It would almost have to be very efficient -- they're saying it can do something like 500HP continuous, and it doesn't have enormous fins all over it for cooling.
Looking at the picture, it looks like there may be a liquid input (cooling). Even a very efficient motor is going to need cooling (and lubricant).
Exactly my thought as well. You can have all the horsepower you want but if it doesn't convert the electricity efficiently, it's not going to be useful for normal consumer cars.
Just what we need, more powerful automobiles.
I would appreciate a 1 oz motor that can put out 1 hp on an ebike.
Or e roller skates in that case
Outperformance metric is basically power density. The model described is some 13 kg and delivers 750 kW peak, 350+ kW sustained.
(That's 28 pounds, 1000 hp peak, 470+ hp sustained.)
The 40% improvement is actually 36% and is versus the previous model of the same company.
Peak power is a number that can be manipulated. You just dump short circuit current into a winding. Even if that peak lasts for 1 microsecond, you can "claim" eye-watering horsepower numbers.
I wonder if we defined peak as sustained peak over 100 milliseconds, or some more meaningful number, what that would do to the claims. You aren't really generating meaningful torque over 1 microsecond.
Surely they measure output not input?
I sort of wonder how well these things can be scaled down.
Wheel hub motors are obviously bad, for harshness reasons, but if you could have a motor like this weighing 1-2 kg, and put one on each wheel, that'd be okay.
Power-wise this would be okay if things are linear. 26 kW per wheel sustained power output is more than enough for a light car. The question is what torque a scaled-down machine can be expected to have.
I'm wondering if it would make sense to integrate the rim, motor and wheel bearing into a single assembly to save weight and cost. That combined with the weight and packaging benefits of not having half shafts and differentials might make it worth it. Plus there can be additional benefits, like the extra maneuverability that ZF Easy Turn and Hyundai's e-Corner have demonstrated.
30kW sustained/60 kW per wheel peak power is easily enough even for large passenger vehicles. Sustained could take 3 ton vehicle up a 10% grade at 120 km/h.
> That's 28 pounds
or about the same as a small dog
Thanks. Do you also happen to know the power density of the motors in the average EV car? Because the article uses "nr of Tesla Model 3" as a unit, which is meaningless without further details about it power density.
The power density doesn't really matter unless you want to put the motor in the wheel. You need to keep the unsprung mass low.
Basically all EVs have small and light motors compared to ICEs or compared to the battery. Shaving off ten pounds there is irrelevant.
It's easy to forget that most of the weight in an electric car is the battery. It's ICE cars where a lot of the weight is in the motor.
That being said, could this be adapted so that a 2.8lb motor produces 100 hp? That would allow putting a small motor in each wheel, thus completely eliminating axels, driveshafts, and allow recapturing the space they used to occupy. It also wouldn't significantly impact unsprung weight.
First, no, it won't scale like that.
Second, don't forget that you're trading one complexity for another. Eliminate a drive shaft and you still have to get power to the wheel somehow, which means now you're running high power electrical cable in a very dynamic environment with exposure to the elements. On top of that, you need to cool the electric motor, so you're probably running some kind of fluid out to it. Not that it isn't a solvable problem, but it probably doesn't reduce the weight much, if at all, when the system is all added up. You'll find that while you eliminate an axle, you still need to mechanically connect the two wheels together (look at the rear subframe on an FWD car) for strength, which also reduces the weight loss. Then the steering on the front... etc.
Until a more significant change than this motor (where maybe a 2.8lb motor could produce 100hp without needing active cooling), we're better off with "inboard" motors still.
Is it really easy to forget?
People used to say they would only get a Tesla if it was offered with a manual transmission.
It's easy to laugh at, but there are still many people who haven't shifted, in their mind, to the differences.
Even after driving EVs for over a decade, I still need to shift. My habit is to turn the car off and close the garage inside the car. My new EV only controls the garage if it's on, so I had to get used to closing the garage with the car on. There's still a part of my brain that screams "but carbon monoxide" every time I do it.
Really easy, I've just forgotten again.
So, this could be better in hybrid cars?
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675020
First motor I saw in this category was much larger because it had massive mount points to attach it to the car so the torque would go to the wheels and not to destroying the motor.
This one has a narrow ring meant for 3/8” bolts? I guess if you’re buying a 1000 hp motor you can afford titanium carriage bolts.
I suspect this may end up in Mercedes Formula 1 power units, so that may not be off-base. Use whatever ridiculous materials you can to keep the weight and size down.
titanium has a low tensile strength compared to steel. I wouldnt recommend it even on a bike handlebar
Oh but they do. People have been making titanium replacement bolt kits for bicycles since at least 1993.
Doesn’t change the fact that those are tiny bolt holes for holding a 750 kw motor. How are they affixing it to a vehicle?
It is great that Mercedes-Benz now owns a highly performant electric engine. But is this just an impressive lab breakthrough, or can it work in the real world for their cars? Which means enduring from freezing to high temps, hours of sustained driving, and years of that (or equivalent endurance testing).
It's not a lab model (according to the article), but it's likely aimed at performance cars. For consumer cars, 150 KW / 200 HP is enough and efficiency is more important than weight.
Of course, when consumer car efficiency increases, they won't necessarily get higher ranges because the manufacturers will instead try to downsize the battery.
A similar company is based in Munich: https://www.deepdrive.tech/ They have cool testing facilities applying CI/CD practices to testing hardware!
> According to YASA, this is achieved without using exotic or expensive materials, so the design could actually be scalable once the demand kicks in.
So, no rare-earth magnets? And it will be cheaper than existing motors?
You sent me down a rabbit hole.
I have no idea, but:
I searched axial flow motor in wikipedia, and the last link is:
https://newatlas.com/technology/conifer-iron-magnet-electric...
So maybe?
Rare-earth magnets do not fall under “exotic”.
They are expensive.
Especially when China refuses to export them…
They’ll happily export them in car form, but the US can’t have nice things anymore.
This was already on HN a short while ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675020
If used in power generation, would they open new options?
e.g. high RPM, or high torque options over existing generators?
I had the same question - would this make, I dunno, super efficient wind turbines?
28 pounds - that's gigantic compared to this https://now.tufts.edu/2011/09/05/worlds-smallest-electric-mo...
> "There has been significant progress in the construction of molecular motors powered by light and by chemical reactions, but this is the first time that electrically-driven molecular motors have been demonstrated, despite a few theoretical proposals," says Sykes. "We have been able to show that you can provide electricity to a single molecule and get it to do something that is not just random."
"something that is not just random" ==> Probably a long way away from something in production. I wouldn't hold off on any urgent transportation needs waiting on this tech.
12 days ago | 59 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675020
It's very hard to find any supplier who will sell an axial flux motor to the public.
I see lots of press from Yasa & Donut motors, but afaik no public pricing & relationships with select partners only.
I wonder if this tech is already being used in F1, or if it makes sense to do so. The weight savings alone could easily make a championship winner.
There have been rumors for quite some time that Mercedes has the best power unit for the upcoming 2026 regulation set. It's entirely possible that this is part of that picture.
"Sustained power output between 350 and 400 kilowatts" is also a bit interesting since that is basically right in line with what people expect out of the 2026 electrical component of the power unit.
Axial flux motors are so next level. Very little power needed per rpm. I’ve built a few tiny ones for FPV and they are a joy to work with. I’ll die a happy man if I never have to coil again.
Coils are still required for axial flux motors, they're just in a different orientation [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCO633KE7RA&t=510s
Negative, mine do not. I use an air core stator where my “coils” are etched into the PCB. I don’t have to wind anything.
Infinitum?
It's cool, but I think deploying motors without rare earth materials will be more impactful. The Nissan Ariya was ill-fated for other reasons, but it had a EESM motor that is easier to cool, more efficient at speed, and cheaper. That's where motor tech is headed. Power density just isn't terribly important in current applications, at least not past current sota.
That's wild! Tiny motors packing that much power? Sign me up for the future of racing!
Just stick four on a car with fans on and there's your flying car. Not much range though probably.
Current motors seem to suffice just fine:
https://youtu.be/ysE8FMhAPH0
the first thing I thought was building a robot dog with these, they probably already built an evangelion with these they aren't showing us
EV motors are not that heavy. Ok it is 1/4 of a tesla motor but would that make much of a difference compared to the rest of the car since the weight of an EV motor is in single % of the entire weight.
Sounds like it could be more important for drones?
It is important if you want to put the motor in the wheelhub. Too much unsprung mass kills vehicle dynamics.
Drone motors are aircooled though, so I think you actually want the radial configuration.
Saving up even few % of weight while not compromising on comfort/safety is a holy grail for any decent car manufacturer.
Not sure why the negatives in this thread (maybe too many folks hold TSLA stock?), this is properly awesome (r)evolution.
I do not know why people still think Tesla is a unique company. They are a regular car company now. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, they disrupted the market and the reward is a standalone, viable car company. That is a huge achievement. But their disruption and uniqueness is gone. The rest of the car industry woke up and all are producing many more EV variants and EV cars in total.
So can I jet ski from NY to London in a few hours?
> YASA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz, already produces motors that power some of the world’s fastest and most expensive cars.
Never underestimate the swabians.
How much torque can it generate?
Their website claims "4 X more torque and double the power densities of current technologies".
A bit handwavy, but given the inherent torque advantage of electric, I doubt torque is an issue. If anything, a lot of EVs would probably do better with a touch less torque.
Source: https://yasa.com/technology/
I wonder whether it is about the same as a small dog
Why do we even need to drive cars, why dont we all just have trailers and then an automated robot could pull it around. Decouple the drive train from the cabin.
With all the extra coupling hardware and surface area required, the reason is performance and weight. Modern cars are all about material minimization. It's easier to add a bump to the cabin and put a motor in that volume than it is to make another mini car.
I think it would only make financial sense if it were like swappable batteries: you rent it all.
How the heck are they dealing with the heat produced? Water cooling?
Oil cooling. Besides this is a peak power value, so thermal constraints don't matter. Continous power is given around 350-400 kW.
(Sources: https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens... and https://yasa.com/technology/)
Tesla should buy Mercedes, they'd make a good team together.
Surely there is still some merit in having competition in the market place?
Tesla is getting out of the car business
Mercedes should buy Tesla you mean.
Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) – ~ US$1.50 trillion
Mercedes‑Benz Group AG (MBG.DE) – ~ US$62 billion
MBG AG:
Revenue - €153.2 billion (2023)
Production output - 2,491,600
--
Tesla:
Production output - 1,773,443 vehicles (2024)
Revenue - US$97.7 billion (2024)
--
Maybe Tesla is just hillariously overvalued and MBG AG can afford them once the hype bubble implodes.
when the hype bubble implodes.. Tesla doesn't exist anymore. None of their perceived future value is based on automobiles.
Maybe that's why they have never built out a proper service facility network.
One of my fundamental criticisms of Elon musk performance as a CEO. The vast stock market price and valuation should enable these sorts of transactions.
It would enable Tesla to diversify operations move into applying its technology on a mass-market basis to hybrids without "damaging" the "purity" of the Tesla brand.
It would enable more marques to target specific economic bands, international markets, etc.
But no we basically have a car company that makes two cars.
Elon Musk has completely lost interest in being CEO of a car company. Tesla is a whatever's-on-his-mind-today company.
They started working on autonomy around when Google started (2013 or so?). And fully focused on it for half a decade now. It's not that hard to understand, he's been repeating the mission statement forever. Same with SpaceX.
Great! When can I order one packaged in the form of a drop-in limited-slip NA MX5 differential?
Cars are probably fine without that engine. But for drones and robot actuators it should be a huge boon.
Can I get one for my bicycle
Yes: https://goldenmotor.bike/products/gmx-170-series-hypertorque...
Can we build an electric scooter with it?
Yet Another Sale Abroad. Not a criticism of the YASA team. It’s hard to scale a company in the UK and foreign investment is a good thing in general. But still frustrating that the UK was unable to offer the kind of investment that Mercedes could to keep a company British.
We're a country who even sold our water to the highest international bidder ...
What would make you think we wouldn't sell our tech crown jewels also? (throwing in our grandparents and children to sweeten the deal).
Axial flux motors are such an obvious and simple to build design that I don't understand why they aren't used more commercially. I've mainly seen do-it-yourself projects to build them for home windmills etc.
- divergence -
This is perhaps my greatest frustration with wealth inequality. Billionaires like Elon Musk (not to single him out of the thousand others) sometimes fund innovative projects initially, but seem to get lost in the weeds doubling down on evolutionary tech, while missing obvious opportunities in fringe tech and old ideas that were suppressed.
For example, the Tesla turbine could have been used for an onboard generator, and what better opportunity than to build a hybrid Tesla car using it? Its main drawback is that it gets fouled by combustion products (with secondary drawbacks in low torque, noise, etc). So why not use natural gas, propane or hydrogen? Why not use an external combustion system that heats air and runs it through the turbine in place of using a larger (due to low compression) Stirling engine? Why not mount the turbine in sound dampening material or a vacuum? These are all trivially overcome engineering challenges. Yet we can't buy a cost-effective mass-produced Tesla turbine or even a Stirling engine of any appreciable power online.
As we see more and more of these missed or suppressed innovations by moneyed interests, I can't help but come to the conclusion that wealth inequality is the largest force stopping widespread prosperity, especially the kind brought by automation to provide basic resources. We can claim that so much progress has been made possible by crony capitalism, for example the computers we are writing and reading this comment on, but I believe that they exist despite concentrated wealth, not because of it.
And I'm worried that access to fee-based AI will widen the wealth gap even further. Because people with money will be able to pay AI to do their jobs and get paid, while people without money may be forced to do those jobs by hand performatively under ever-increasing pressure as the cost of AI only decreases due to economies of scale and Moore's law. So that the main goal for moneyed interests could become to deny access to capital to the working class so that they can be exploited. Even though it would be far easier and more beneficial to more people to distribute the costs of some minimal level of AI to everyone in the world.
I dunno, the more I see these exciting innovations that could practically be built for cost of materials (28 pounds of copper costs less than $150 and is the most expensive component) yet never reach widespread adoption - while other inferior products that use more material flourish - it makes me question if our market-based economy even works anymore. I'm not saying that older (antiquated?) alternatives like socialism/communism would work better today, just that there may be a post-scarcity 21st century economy where patents that could increase equivalent personal wealth by orders of magnitude are put into the public domain. Not for money, but as automated and open source goods/services/resources having equivalent value to what money would have provided. The closest I can get is stuff like solarpunk, which still hasn't caught on for reasons I don't understand.
Edit: before I get flamed too badly for this comment, I should add that neodymium magnets could perhaps cost more than copper, and/or be a scarcer resource. If I were working on this type of motor, I would try to get similar performance from non-rare-earth magnets and aluminum wire, as well as explore hybrid motors that achieve say 80% of the power and efficiency using only 20% of the rare stuff. On that note, we are long overdue for mass-produced graphene and carbon nanotube wire. We need a definitive answer as to whether they are safe enough to use commercially, or if they are a dead end like asbestos. I don't understand why billionaires don't put more money into getting this sort of first-principles "real work" done. If I won the internet lottery, I would set up a foundation with an endowment to tackle these pressing problems and invite hackers through grants, sort of like what MacKenzie Scott is doing.
Everything but the Metric System: “The new YASA axial flux motor weighs just 28 pounds, or about the same as a small dog.” :)
I wonder if Americans don't have a mental image for measurement units so that they alway use some physical object as a reference. Sure, its useful to use a common object as a reference but I don't see that much often in other places.
Most people usually understand what it means something to be 20 meters, 5kg or 2 liters intuitively. Like, when I hear that something is 60m tall I intuitively think if it as 20 story apartment building and don't benefit from the extra info about how this is like 18 elephants stacked on each other.
I guess you're in the minority here. In Germany, everything Remotely large will be measured in football fields or "Saarlands".
I'm also European and don't get these olympic swimming pool or whatever comparisons. I'd have to look up how many m3 of water they contain or what's the length/depth in meters are to make sense of it.
Newspapers in my country don't make these silly comparisons.
But yeah, to be fair, when hearing about Starship I had to look up our TV tower height to identify whether Starship is taller or not. It disappointed me that it's not.
Yeah, height is easier to grasp when correlating in terms of x story apartment buildings.
Don't forget to mention the inofficial units for fluid volumes being "Badewannen" and "Schubkarren".
Can’t forget the Olympic sized swimming pools!
Whats the speed of light in football field terms?
Approximately 7 708 937 142 soccer fields per half time.
When using football fields as a unit of length you should use American football fields rather than soccer fields because American football field sizes are more standardized.
For American football professional, college, and high school games are all played on the same sized field, which is 100 years long.
Compare to soccer, where they can even have different sized fields in the same professional league. The English Premier League wants to standardize on 105 m x 68 m but several clubs are still using other sizes: Brentford (105 x 65), Chelsea (103 x 67), Crystal Palace (100 x 67), Everton (103 x 70), Fullham (100 x 65), Liverpool (101 x 68), and Nottingham Forest (105 x 70).
For international play FIFA has a standard, but it is a range: 100-110 m x 64-70 m.
There are parts of a soccer field that are precisely specified and so could be used as a standard of length.
Some examples are the radius of the circle around the center mark (9.144 m), the penalty area (40.23 x 16.46 m), distance from penalty mark to goal (10.97 m), goal area (18.29 m x 5.47 m), distance between goal posts (7.32 m), and the height of the crossbar (2.44 m).
The reason none of them are nice integers is that they were actually originally standardized in Imperial units. In those the aforementioned measurements are 10 yards, 44 yards x 18 yards, 12 yards, 20 yards x 6 yards, 8 yards, and 8 feet, respectively.
I don't know the first thing about football, only that it has the words "foot" and "ball", none of which apply to the American variant who is played with hands and a (geometric) lemon[1] :p
I figured FIFA/UEFA who both standardised on 105m, sensibly factored ±5m to account for Heisenberg uncertainty when approaching relativistic speeds. This is very well depicted - complete with curvature of space, train paradox, spooky action at a distance, time dilation, and other relativistic oddities - in a documentary I watched when I was young; if only I could recall the original name...
EDIT: I think it was キャプテン翼.[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_(geometry)
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke5AZhJCPSg
Are we including stoppage time?
What's the difference between 18 elephants stacked versus a building with 20 stories? They are just different analogies.
Yes I'm always a bit dumbfounded by this behavior as well. They always use weird stuff and I never have the intuition of the actual size, especially since the definition can vary depending on context.
In this case, what is actually considered to be a small dog? To me it would be something that is close to the size of a cat but since it's about 13kg, it can't be that small, so that's more like a medium dog (I'm not certain, but I have a feeling that if you lay out things statistically this is what you would end up with). On the other hand, 13kg is very easy to get, that's just 13 liters of water, and it's quite easy to make a mental image for both volume and weight "feeling" that way.
American units feel so impressive and random, it is the reason they always add those weird comparisons but often they make it even worse.
Which is strange, since one of their measurement units is literally based on a body part.
Americans do not do metric. Americans can’t even balance a checkbook. Hence the small dog reference for mental “clarity”. We’re dumb. Just look at the news…
I don't think it's fair to insult all US citizens because of your personal shortcomings.
I think it may be fair? This guy[1] explains how surplus of corporate profits are a mirror image of household/govt debt. Which is a direct transfer of wealth from everyone to the super-super-rich (not the 1%, but the 0.1 - 0.01%)
[1] The chart below shows how this works. The blue line at the top shows the “surplus” of corporations: corporate income minus expenses and net investment. We know this as corporate “free cash flow.” The red line shows combined “surplus” of other sectors: government, households, and foreign trading partners – in excess of their consumption and net investment. It’s negative, so in aggregate, they’re running a deficit. That deficit is the mirror image of the corporate surplus. This isn’t an accident. It’s just accounting (I’ve excluded a few tiny items for clarity): https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc251028/
Statistics my man, statistics. I’m not saying there aren’t smart Americans that can grok a 10kg bag, but that the vast majority can not.
I'm Canadian. I don't know what 10kg feels like until I convert it to pounds.
Do you not have personal experience with people under 40 in America? I would bet $20 over 95% of them don't know how to balance a check book.
Who still uses a checkbook?
And with your bank balance instantly available on the computer in your pocket, and transactions posted in near-real-time, why would you need to worry about balancing it?
95% of them can’t turn a block of flint into a spearhead either. Without skills like these, how will the younger generation hunt mammoths?
Why are you going on about "balancing a check book?"
I'm in my 40s. Never did it, never going to.
I would bet $20 over 95% of them have never needed to balance a check book, and probably never will.
No, Americans are numerically illiterate.
Which is why all the dumbest Americans insist that "Why didn't they teach us how to balance a check book?", while, well, they were taught that, and every single check book comes with clear and simple instructions for its use
They were also taught how to calculate loan details and the extreme power of how interest grows, but they were too busy crying "Oh this is lame, when am I ever going to use this?"
There's a cult of proud ignorance in the US. People will brag about being uneducated, illiterate, or unable to follow simple instructions.
Sorry for the ignorance, what what does "balancing a check book" mean? Is that an euphemism or an actual activity?
I can of course look up but interested in continuing the conversation.
"Balancing the check book" refers to the process of running your own log of check transactions using something like https://cdn.wallethub.com/wallethub/images/posts/14483/check... and ensuring that it matches the occasional official balance statement from your bank occasionally.
Don't want to make assumptions about what you know so forgive any overexplanation...
It is about ensuring that you manage your account balance, so as to not write checks that your account balance cannot actually fulfill. Writing a check that you can't actually pay because your checking account is too low is called "Bouncing" a check, and generally costs you money at your bank and the place that you wrote the check, and will often result in those places being less likely to accept a check from you.
A secondary purpose was to ensure that your bank did not pay out a check that you have no record of writing. The check system has almost no protection, so anyone who had ever gotten a check from you could theoretically attempt to create fraudulent and forged checks against your account. You would check your record against the banks to check for this.
You would do this constantly, as in writing down every check you write, and once a month or so, actually doing the math, comparing your record of checks against the bank's record of checks.
I would also consider it a euphemism for "Financial literacy" in plenty of people's heads.
It is without a doubt the simplest possible mathematical task you can have as an adult. It is literally addition and subtraction, and logging every check. Every single American who attends public school until 4th grade has been taught the required knowledge for this task: Addition, subtraction, and the concept of negative numbers.
People say "Schools should teach balancing a check book" as some sort of cry that they think schools should focus on "practical" skills rather than, say, persuasive essay writing or reading literature or learning art.
Those people are demonstrating that they are too stupid to even understand what they have been taught. These same people will sit in math class and argue about how they "will never use this", in reference to things like calculating interest. They will often also say "Schools don't teach critical thinking", openly and proudly ignorant of the hilarity of someone who can't follow very basic instructions that anyone can find in five seconds and often come with the checkbook complaining about not being taught how to think.
Similarly, Americans will complain that school didn't teach them how to "do their taxes", which is hilarious, because for 95% of Americans, your federal taxes are a couple of pages and about 14 lines of numbers you have to fill in, most of them are numbers you copy from another piece of paper, and the rest have literal worksheets to follow.
Most people joke about how VCRs used to constantly have the "12:00" blinking clock because nobody would set them because it's "too hard". As a literal child who fixed this exact issue, it was a single page of instructions, and they were trivial. But for the majority of Americans who like to speak up, it seems like they are totally incapable of following even the most basic of instruction.
Frankly, stupidity is not a moral failing. Nobody chose to be born stupid. But ignorance, especially fixable ignorance, IS. America has a serious problem of people being openly ignorant and thinking their ignorance should be anything other than an opportunity to improve. I think the biggest problem in the USA is how much respect and attention people who demonstrably refuse to learn and are ignorant of pretty much everything get. That's why, for example, you have people insisting that rail transport is impossible in the US because it's too big, despite the fact that we literally built a cross country rail network using public funds when the country was dramatically less populated than now, or how government inherently mismanages healthcare despite about 100 examples of government mismanagement producing better outcomes than we get.
This is about as thorough as it can be. Thank you. I was definitely referring to financial literacy. Man, Americans…
Sure but don't they have a mental image for 80 feet for example? Why articles will almost always include something like "that like 50 chairs put next to each other" when length is mentioned.
If you were to say 100 yards, we could. That’s a football field (American football played with your… hands).
Because people in the south don’t even know the imperial system… it’s bad. They say things like “Take the road there yonder and when you see the white church, turn right, go a ways until you get to the dirt road…”
Anything outside of what they have with them, they don’t have a clue or can’t imagine it accurately. Small dog reference, there’s millions of Americans with a small dog so most just looked to their pooch when this came up. Same as if you were to say something like 50 cars. They would look outside to their Toyota Corolla and imagine 50 of them. It’s like talking to grown toddlers sometimes but that have full grown emotional states not under control. Not everyone is like this but a good 50-60% of Americans are. Just look for the Lululemon.
I know that 1kg is about 2.2lbs but that still doesn't give me the "mental clarity" of what 20kg is unless I do the conversion.
At the gym I use the pound plates and not the kilo ones. I intuitively know what the difference between 135 and 225 lbs feels like, and I don't have that same intution for kg.
All that said, I don't find the "small dog" types of analogies for weight very useful. Why not just use the same number of characters (or less) to give the weight in the other popular unit?
Europeans don't even know what it means to "balance a checkbook", so they must be dumber.
Yeah but ya’ll have estates…
It helps to understand that the only freedom Americans only cared for (and the only freedom they have left from the looks of it) is the freedom to choose standards of measurement and vocabulary. This will provide historical context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk (Washington's Dream - SNL)
Huh? Britons get locked up for social media posts. Most of the world doesn’t have guns. And among the first world we’re the only ones free to go bankrupt from medical bills!
Our problems don’t stem from lack of freedom, they stem from too much of it.
> Most of the world doesn’t have guns.
No guns, but they have solar panels, batteries, EVs, etc.
You have the sort of view of America that I can only imagine comes from somebody who has never been here. I don’t know what you mean by batteries, I’m not aware of any we don’t have available.
We have the second most electric vehicles after China, and nearly all new power generation being built here is renewable. I’m not sure how you managed to turn this into some anti-American rant, but at least do a better job of it, it’s very easy.
If I were a self-respecting journalist, I would've used 3.26 gallon milk jugs. Small dog automatically goes to which breed? Chihuahua (fits in a toddlers purse) or Border Collie or Golden Retriever or Saint Bernard (needs an SUV/minivan)? 4 different classifications based on size!
Imperial dog or metric dogge?
Americans are very weird when it comes to metric. They often quote mobile phones as having something like "a six inch screen size but now only 12mm thick" - pick a measurement system people !
Canada is even weirder.
After switching to the metric system ('70-80s) some things are still measures in imperial units. If you slice some ham at a counter in a grocery store, it's in grams. You then turn around and get a pound of apples and a gallon of milk. Nuts are in grams, and soda is in liters. Also the body weight tends to be in pounds. Tools are both metric and imperial. Speeds and distances though, thank god, are metric.
All this is just kinda there and everyone's OK with it, but it is an epic mess if you think about it.
The inch thing is because it's a screen: all screens are measured in inches pretty much everywhere, even in the EU
And I hate that. Wish screen sizes were measured in centimeters.
Yep, inches won for screen sizes.
Aaaand for various fittings for plumbers.
the author and the company are British
Is even a 13 kg dog "small"? It certainly does not feel small if you are carrying it upstairs.
It's American small.
While there’s no formal definition, I think it isn’t. It would be considered medium sized. I live with a 4 lb dog.
I’d say 25-50 lbs would be medium, small below that and large above.
The link you're quoting, the one posted, is a second hand US report.
The primary company link is from a UK subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz and is (almost) fully metric (the fundemental units US weights are officially defined with respect to (for more than a century now)).
See: https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
Just those pesky trad bhp units left hanging like a chad in a Florida election . . .> The link you're quoting, the one posted, is a second hand US report.
You can tell, because a proper Brit would have given it as 2 stone, not 28 pound.
That seems unlikely, a proper Brit would know that a stone is defined for body weight (14 avoirdupois pounds), Wool (14, 15, or 24 pounds depending on wool class), Wax (12 pounds), Sugar and spice (8 pounds), or for Beef and mutton (8 pounds).
( Of course Scottish Britains used 16 Scottish pounds for a Scottish stone ).
The point being that 'precious' metals used a different weight measure altogether .. (common lead often used a 12 pound stone).
Such a fun system.
Prior to the Revolution, in France alone there were allegedly 250 thousand various units in use! (All sorts of units, not just length.)
It didn't help that pre-Revolutionary France was a political Frankenstein stitched together from dozens of regions with completely different history (Celtic Brittany, Flemish Dunkirk, Germanic Alsace, Provencal South, Catalan Roussillon, Italian Nice) and thus very different local standards of everything, including measurements and law.
Unification of units removed a massive constraint on international trade and engineering. Except the US and Myanmar, of course... it is so frustrating to order anything from Myanmar e-shops, I must say. But Myanmar is at least promising to move on.
Nitpicking: Nice wasn't part of pre-Revolution France, it joined in the 19th century during the Italian unification.
Is that nicepicking, then?
Bag of potatoes?
If you mean a 13kg bag of potatoes, then I'll allow it.
Sometimes leads to humorous effect https://x.com/SheriffAlert/status/1221881862244749315
> Large boulder the size of a small boulder is completely blocking east-bound lane Highway 145 mm78 at Silverpick Rd
I am heavy motors guy, and this is my EV. She weighs one hundred fifty tons and drives four custom-tooled motors at one thousand horsepower per wheel.
It costs 10,000 Wh to power this car.. for 12 seconds.
But what does this mean for AI...
Feels like a vanity metric, electric car companies don't boast about their cars having X horsepower. Not many people care about horsepower because either way there are speed limits on the road.
I think electric motors should focus on other vectors.
Car companies, both electric and non-electric, frequently advertise rated horsepower of their vehicles, even non-performance vehicles. In the US, horsepower is one of the key metrics for a vehicle overall.
Every car listing, review and so on mentions either the bhp or kW, along with the 0-100km/h or 0-60mph which is functionally the same as listing the horsepower to weight ratio.
Yeah, but 0-60 doesn’t really matter much for EVs at this point. Even big suv/trucks are hitting supercar numbers from a few decades ago.
Cornering / handling matters. So does tire wear, and how powerful the regenerative braking is / how many motors there are. (ABS and traction control via electric powertrains is much more responsive than via brake pads).
> It can also sustain between 350 and 400 kilowatts (469–536 horsepower) continuously, meaning it’s not just built for short bursts, as it can deliver massive power all day long.
On what battery?
I wanna know how they keep it cool, even if it's 95% efficient, that's 15,000 watts of power to dissipate.
Pretty much any modern car battery out there. Many of those allow 350 kW charging, discharging that quickly is even easier.
kW measures output power, not capacity. What battery can output that power 'all day' as they claim?