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Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

supercarblondie.com

211–220 of 616 posts

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#211
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

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 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?

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#213
post #8

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.

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#214
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#215
post #198
post #6

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…

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.

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.

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#216
post #180
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#217

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 t…

>> 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.

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#218
post #54
post #6

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…

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.

Re: Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

#220

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 wei…

Is it really easy to forget?
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