Live data from Hacker News

Tiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower

supercarblondie.com

281–290 of 616 posts

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

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 star…

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…

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.

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

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

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

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

#283
post #258

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)…

There's indeed a huge number of applications where lower weight electric motors could be useful.

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

#285
post #221
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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.

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

#286
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah, the tax should be based on car weight per passanger

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

#287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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!".

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

#288

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.

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).

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

#289
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…

What's the difference between 18 elephants stacked versus a building with 20 stories? They are just different analogies.

[deleted]
Post reply on HN