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
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.
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.
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.
https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
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.
While I'll be likely be riding my ICE bikes for decades because one of the things I do on them is trips with 1000 or 1500km days, truth is the vast majority of my riding is sub 25km round trips from my place. Most of my friends places, a lot of the places I shop or socialise, and the office (which I pretty much never go to any more) fit inside that range. And most of those trips take place on roads with a 60kmh or slower speed limit. _Maybe_ a few short sections of 80kmh.
For all of those short trips, I probably don't even need 2kWHr worth of battery, maybe only 1. The electric motorcycles available around here seem to start at 7 or 8kWHr, and go up to over 20.
The downside to that is the smaller the battery capacity, the smaller the short term peak power it can deliver. The sort of cell chemistry and construction typical in those sort of bikes seem to be limited to 10 or 15C peak discharge, so while their 8kWHr battery can peak at 80kW or just over 100hp, if they downsized the same pack to 1kWHr it'd probably only deliver 10kW peak power.
On the other had, alternative cell chemistry and construction can look way better. I have a few LiPo drone battery packs rated at 60C continuous and 120C peak. A 2kWHr pack of those would give me 120kW continuous and 240kW peaks. Quite likely though at the expense of much greater risks of catastrophic fire. I've had a few of those pack catch fire while charging and one that self combusted in an almost explosion like fashion when I slammed the drone into a concrete pole at about 120kmh. I can totally see why an electric motorcycle manufacturer with warranties and safety reputation and legal/regulatory obligations wouldn't want to accept that risk.
I'd love an electric motorcycle that's "fun" enough to ride, and gets 25km or so reliable range. But it'd need to be at least a bit price and "fun" competitive with my little bikes, a 117kg 125cc ~25kW two stroke and a 138kg 250cc 24kW fourstroke. I have no doubt it'd be possible, perhaps even easy to build an electric bike with the same "fun" power to weight ratio, but right now not down to the sort of price that'd make me take on a project like that.
Maybe what you want is a large electric bike like a Surron or similar?
It really can't be offset by that (with current tech). All existing electric motorcycles are both overweight and very limited on range.
Good, even some great, stuff out there, today.
Cost is a challenge.
These things go 175 miles, up to 450+ miles if you have money.
> These things go 175 miles, up to 450+ miles if you have money.
Only the heaviest models, ridden extremely conservatively.
Buyers don’t know they exist, if they’ll struggle to register them, or how to work on them!
The heaviest ones seem like the same weight as a 600cc or 1000cc crotch rocket - am I missing something big?
> The heaviest ones seem like the same weight as a 600cc or 1000cc crotch rocket - am I missing something big?
Livewire One is 560 lb! Energica Ego was 570! 600s and liter bikes aren't anywhere close to that -- low 400s lb for 600s, and 430-440 lb for a liter bike.
Sounds terrible for every other user of paths currently.
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.
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.
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.
Thus, less energy to transmit to a pedestrian
But it's really a moot point because there are essentially zero motorocycles travelling on sidewalks, bikepaths, and trails where pedestrians are going to be concentrated, while it's a free for all for e-bikes.
In general, motorcycle/pedestrian accidents are pretty rare. Statistically, motorcyclists are most likely to injure or kill themselves rather than bystanders.
There are lots of gas powered motorcycles in the bike lanes where I live. Not legal, but nobody enforces it.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/pedestrian-dead-aft...
In this case it was a bicycle and not an ebike. That said, anecdotally, many ebikes I see regularly travel faster than the people powered versions
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.
If we’re talking about high powered e-bikes, I don’t want them on the sidewalk either. Once they exceed the current regulations they’re in the moped/motorcycle category.
> There's not much else to take away, and the rules right now are unreasonable enough that cyclists always break them.
So what’s your suggestion? Let people ride electric motorcycles on sidewalks? Change the laws so that high powered e-bikes don’t have to follow the rules of the road?
I don’t think the current laws are unreasonable. I live in a place where people routinely ride their e-bikes on the sidewalks and it’s absolutely awful, especially with young children. Every time we go somewhere I have to hold their hands and yank them off the sidewalk at least once to dodge another e-bike zooming past. I can only hope enforcement catches up and starts impounding bikes from people breaking the law and issuing large fines, because I don’t know how else to stop this.
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.
So, literally any bicycle?
Anybody moving significantly faster than the flow of traffic is endangering the rest of the users.
Bikes should be allowed on shared use pathways and all sidewalks larger than 2m should by default also allow bikes.
Mopeds should be banned and fines should be big, to discourage that kind of use.
I propose that in order to be able to leave your house people should have to have a valid reason, have done a course, and apply for a single-use permit.
Because, obviously, people can’t be trusted to do the right thing, ever, and one death in the community, for any reason, ever, is too many.
Fairly sure the Netherlands is a more advanced democracy than the "my freedumbs" US is at this point.
And Dutch infrastructure is also better.
Why would an extremely powerful ebike be any less dangerous than extremely powerful gas motorcycle?
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.
The goal is to protect the regular cyclists and pedestrians who they currently share paths with while trying to not make them TOO unsafe.
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.
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!
Would I have as a kid blasted around at 40mph if I could have? Goddamn right. That's actually my point - I'm not dead or permanently damaged, just the recipient of quite a lot of road rash. Worst injury I ever had on a bike was a broken trapezium, as an adult, for something totally not speed related (~13mph, yes), when a tree fell in front of me and I braked and flew across the handlebars. Game that out doing even 20mph and that's a different outcome.
Classic case of, "I've been there, done that, and this situation is nuts".
And never mind the 45 kph scooters (that regularly do half as much) using the same bike path.
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.
Where do you live - over here(North of England) most kids ride bikes, especially to school. And not ebikes either - actual regular pedal bikes.
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.
Bicycles have long needed a dedicated infrastructure as they are neither cars nor pedestrians.
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.
Therefore, we should count our blessings that it’s not more common, rather than allowing devices that enable 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.
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.
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 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)
How is this "not really"?
Most of them do have a (relatively small) grocery section, but are primarily dedicated to non-consumables like clothes, children’s toys, furniture, electronics, etc.
Whereas a typical supermarket (e.g. Safeway, Fry’s, Albertsons, Whole Foods etc.) might have a relatively small section of all of the above, but are primarily dedicated to food.
Most people are not buying groceries there, they go to actual supermarkets - near me Jewel-Osco, Mariano's, Aldi, Whole Foods, Kroger - none of which sell guns. Grocery stores do not sell guns by any common definition of the term "grocery store". You've got a corner case off of which your talking point is built. Corner cases do not make good foundations of arguments.
My advice: Come to the US and do some grocery shopping before making more such arguments.
And I'll pass on visiting the US why y'all have armed police running around tackling people & disappearing them, and are demanding social media passwords only to refuse entry if you've been critical of Dear Leader. Sort your shit out, then maybe.
Walmart would be called a superstore or box store.
I'm fine calling walmart a supermarket.
As I said, even though I'm reluctantly willing to entertain this, it's an incredibly niche talking point. Except for this one corner case which is only kinda-sorta true, people cannot buy guns at grocery stores. That's nonsense, and your talking point is nonsense.
Apparently, just this year, a total of 366 people have been killed and 1,668 people have been wounded in 374 shootings, as of October 31, 2025.
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."
It is authoritarians that want gun control the most because they want a monopoly on force through the military and police.
Now hold my beer...
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.
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.
That’s enough power to potentially do that to a full size car frame.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
Unless you used the motors to power fans instead, then you could use that for downforce and propulsion, and get well belown 2 seconds, theoretically.
F1 cars with fans to run them upsidedown but with remote drivers for their safety maybe?
has four electric motors
Lighter motors for mobile robots could also be cool.
It does seem like with this advancement, and the size of these axial flux motors that maybe, all wheel drive vehicles will be the default. As well as sub 3 second acceleration, which can make vehicles safer, for example getting out of the way of an incoming object. Of course it could also make them less safe because that vast of acceleration is kind of dangerous.
But I do wonder if the weight reduction (over 30%) of lithium sulfur batteries paired with these is really going to make a great recipe for all sorts of quiet, long lasting, powerful electric vehicles and robots!
The Model 3 manages < 140 Wh/km, and many seem to be under 150/160/170.
This is on a 2022 Long Range Model 3.
For example, by making the flywheel in a clutch lighter, you reduce the amount of torque it takes to spin the flywheel. Saving 10 pounds there is not a 10/3000lb difference.. it could be a huge percentage of total power output.
For a typical EV, I think that works out to a factor of around 2.
Of which there can be two, or even three.
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.
But that’s still a lot less rotating mass, and might make multiple motors attractive again.
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.
Shaving a couple percent off the total vehicle weight would still be a very good thing, but improving batter energy density by 10% or so would be a bigger deal for most EVs.
There might be some niche applications where the battery weight isn't the biggest issue -- like very short-range, light-weight vehicles that need to have enormous amounts of power for some reason.
I could see motors like this being used in power tools if they can be scaled down. A light-weight plug-in electric chainsaw would be pretty awesome.
These already exist, in both plug-in and cordless / battery powered.
At 30 amps and 220 volts, that would be about 8 horsepower. I think most motors that size rated for that much continuous power would be rather heavy.
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...
> 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.
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
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.
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.
OP mentioned flight. But the part that got argued back and forth over the next 7 comments was about EVs. Aurornis never said a word about anything but EVs.
I took this out to the shop floor yesterday and asked the guys what they could do with 10 fewer pounds in the leafs we have around, and believe me - I'm so much less excited about being vindicated in this thread, than I am about the ideas they came up with. Mostly nonsense, but there's some interesting stuff in there that I can't wait for them to try out!
I guess it's just not worth it to pay way more for a motor just because it provides a pretty-insignificant weight reduction.
The 737-800 has a maximum takeoff weight: 174,200 pounds (79,010 kilograms).
What’s 10lbs got to do with anything?
Tesla still doing a gearbox? Their marketing has been telling me they got rid of those. Typical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
In states of Australia registration is more expensive depending on the amount of doors and cylinders your car has. This doesn't seem to stop big cars being popular though, the #1 selling car in Australia is the Ford Ranger (which is BIG in Australian car standards). We're working on getting F150s sized vehicles even more heavily taxed, they aren't seeing wide adoption here and they're pretty highly criticised.
In cities like Rome you can see many small cars due to the nature of their streets and parking.
For highway driving these cars are a bit less comfortable but honestly modern Kei cars aren't even that bad. The Fiat 500 isn't a Kei sized car but it is also a very reasonable highway and city car, it can happily do both.
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.
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.
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.
(I agree with the spirit, just calling out that there are going to be edge cases galore with a scenario like this)
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.
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.
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 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.
That's not ironic. That's just caring more about the looks and you like that look. And looks > handling for that person
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.
It was an absolute shock the first time I braked in the Volvo, not to mention trying to take a corner.
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 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.
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.
There are probably a range of application where in-wheel makes perfect sense.
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?
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.
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.
Ref: https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/blog/2018/06/how-does-your-...
I'm always interested to hear about the latest in lighter and possibly more powerful and torque-y e-bike motors.
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'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.
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...
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.
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.
https://electrek.co/2023/04/27/saab-engineers-develop-secret...
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.
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.
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...
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 more of the energy going into moving the vehicle, the less heat the motor has to handle.
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.
Liquid cooling at least for now should work - as long as it stays below the flash point of the liquid I guess.
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.
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.
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.
Cutting the motor weight probably matters more for smaller vehicles than bigger ones though.
That is ever more special
As others have noted, battery remains a major factor in overall mass, and motor placement (in-wheel vs. driveshaft) is a concern in ground-transport.
In aviation, battery limits overall range, but a high-power, low-range, lower-mass vehicle could be useful for short-hop flights, manned or unmanned, especially where payload considerations are paramount.
Mobile-power applications (tools, transportable equipment) might also benefit from high power-to-weight, especially if this means that overall weight limits could be more readily met (e.g., total vehicle weight, total carried weight), or additional equipment (or battery) could be provided.
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
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.
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.
The other assumption I probably should have stated is that the two motors are made of similar materials with similar temperature limits. We know the ambient temperature and we know the maximum temperature of the materials used. So for a component made of those materials, existing in that ambient temperature, with an additional heat load proportional to the waste heat in the motor...
The ability to shed heat (assuming similar forced fan cooling, as we were) determines the amount of power we can deliver to the device without increasing its temperature.
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.
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.
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.
So yeah, weight reduction on EVs is great.
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.
That's why a modern Camry makes almost 200 HP
Suppose we have a motor that weighs half as much, but produces double the output power, but consumes 4x the input power (so, it is half as efficient).
How would that lead to a smaller battery?
Wouldn't we need the component to use less power if we wanted to shrink the battery, rather than just weigh less?
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.
For light weight vehicles on the other hand, it might be.
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.
Also planes would not have to wait for a tug to pull back from the gate, which improves turnaround times for the airline.
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.
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
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.
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!
It makes it easy to compare ratios: for example the aspect ratio of a movie (say 2.39) to my screen (2.33) and see that I can expect a good fit. My screen is a bit "more square", so there will be slivers of black borders on top and bottom.
Instead of 24" screen with a 16:9 ratio they should just be sold as 53 x 30cm.
Look at the silliness with folding displays where the difference in diagonal seems marginal until you open up a folding phone and realize that diagonals are just a silly way to measure things.
Same reason you wouldn't use m²/s³ even though that's also technically correct.
Kilo is an SI prefix.
"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...
Could the motor in question be shrunk down to 1kg, producing 59kW? Probably.
Could it be shrunk down to 1g? No.
No, it tells you nothing about the absolute size of the motor, but for the rest of us, the context clues are there to gain additional information. Someone else constructing something that obfuscates this with a micro-motor doesn't make this useless.
Significant figures exist for a reason. You are ignoring that here and creating precision that does not exist. The kilo-prefix absolutely communicates scale information to most readers.
Similarly it is useful to talk about household electricity consumption in terms of kWh/day, despite that also being a ratio that can reduce down.
The goal here is communication, not theoretical mathematical optimality that is actually worse in every real way.
The YASA link is primary, links to test data and back story, and has more detail substance and authority.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://yasa.com/news/yasa-and-lamborghini-high-performance-...
Technically a hybrid but probably not what you had in mind?
But how many footballs a small dog weighs?
Which kind of football: the British or the US-American one? :-)
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
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.
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.
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.
"That cell phone is amazing! So small!"
"And it only weighs four ounces" the man replies proudly. "I sell them, if you're interested. They're $500, but you can talk for over 8 hours."
"I'll take it!" the other replies, and hands over the cash.
The man pulls a small box out of his jacket and says, "Here's your phone and cable," then picks up one of the briefcases, struggling with the weight, "And here's your battery."
All to say, claiming the lightest most powerful electric motor without at least mentioning how big/heavy the cooling system is seems wrong.
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.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
MW Motors eventually made a version where the electric motors were moved from the wheel hubs to a more conventional arrangement, so presumably they felt that it was some sort of problem, but they still make the original version and I've never been in one, so I can't be sure.
Basically all EVs have small and light motors compared to ICEs or compared to the battery. Shaving off ten pounds there is irrelevant.
Sounds like it could be more important for drones?
Not sure why the negatives in this thread (maybe too many folks hold TSLA stock?), this is properly awesome (r)evolution.
Of course, when consumer car efficiency increases, they won't necessarily get higher ranges because the manufacturers will instead try to downsize the battery.
I would appreciate a 1 oz motor that can put out 1 hp on an ebike.
That would be craaaazyyyy!! I'm imagining drag cars literally blowing liquid metal out the back when they brake hard..
You need the long axle to apply the power to.
You never heard of them as they are only producing 30 a year.
So, no rare-earth magnets? And it will be cheaper than existing motors?
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?
I see lots of press from Yasa & Donut motors, but afaik no public pricing & relationships with select partners only.
Never underestimate the swabians.
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.
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?
"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.
e.g. high RPM, or high torque options over existing generators?
(Sources: https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens... and https://yasa.com/technology/)
I think it would only make financial sense if it were like swappable batteries: you rent it all.
"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.
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/
Mercedes‑Benz Group AG (MBG.DE) – ~ US$62 billion
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.
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.
What would make you think we wouldn't sell our tech crown jewels also? (throwing in our grandparents and children to sweeten the deal).
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.
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.
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 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]
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.
[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?
I'm in my 40s. Never did it, never going to.
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.
I can of course look up but interested in continuing the conversation.
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.
I thought checks were things of the 80s or something, in other parts of the world you mostly either have the money or not, so the act of balancing checks wouldn't exist.
Interesting. Is it still that common to use checks as opposed to just a debit card?
She's just very conservative with money and relied on inertia to maintain a balanced budget and was averse to change that may cause her to mismanage money, as we were very poor.
Check writing lasted far too long here in the US, for whatever reason, but was somewhat killed in the early 2000s when dramatic increases in gas prices led to gas stations no longer accepting checks as they got so many bounced ones.
The benefits of writing a check: 100% offline. If someone is willing to accept a check from you, there's zero interaction with a third party at transaction time.
Checks take longer to process, so you can take advantage of that by spending money today that you will not have until tomorrow, with zero interest. This also allowed a kind of fraud called "Kiting" where you keep cycling bad checks to artificially increase some balances temporarily, but that was less possible by the 80s I think, as even then forms of electronic settlement existed.
They feel meaningful. It's effort to put together and requires effort to manage your account so you treat it as a bigger event, reducing impulse to spend. Credit card companies sold merchants on the ability to induce more spending, and Debit cards have the exact same feature.
You can give someone a blank check to spend for something without having to do any work with third parties "authorizing" their spend. Good for parents or small businesses, and quite dangerous.
Checks are sociologically neat. Literally just a piece of paper, but they keep up the bargain often enough that we were able to use writing on paper as an entire financial system. They also required an amount of trust and familiarity between transacting parties that isn't really normal anymore. The guy in charge of the local grocery store is some overpaid desk jockey with an MBA tweaking excel spreadsheets of spend and revenue until the graph goes up and to the right enough. 40 years ago that guy was my dad and he knew everyone in the town by name.
I have written a check three times in my life. Setting up a way to accept a debit card is way more difficult than just cashing a piece of paper once a month, so landlords are a big consumer of real checks nowadays.
Some farmers might throw in a reference to an acre length that is referencing the 660 foot length of a standard acre (660 feet x 66 feet, or 1 furlong x 1 chain), which is just another way to say 1/8th of a mile.
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.
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?
Our problems don’t stem from lack of freedom, they stem from too much of it.
No guns, but they have solar panels, batteries, EVs, etc.
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.
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...
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
You can tell, because a proper Brit would have given it as 2 stone, not 28 pound.
( 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.
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.
I’d say 25-50 lbs would be medium, small below that and large above.
> Large boulder the size of a small boulder is completely blocking east-bound lane Highway 145 mm78 at Silverpick Rd
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.
To me using only a single system of measurement is the same as only ever using a single number base. Yeah it helps to have a standard number base everyone can use like base 10, but that doesn't mean we should try to eliminate other number bases from our vocabulary or understanding because they obviously have situational advantages.
Also from my personal bias I much prefer fractional measurements and people go apeshit if you use fractional metric units but don't blink an eye at fractional imperial or other 'non-standard' measurements.
- 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.
It might not make sense to younger people, but for me growing up in the 1980s, there were many decades of tech stagnation where basically all alternatives to internal combustion engines were suppressed. And the people who made vast fortunes didn't care about disrupting the status quo, so we were forced to live with substandard tech and pay a premium for the privilege. It wasn't until Elon Musk disrupted the car industry with Tesla starting from 2004 that anything changed, which we take for granted now. I really idolized him before he lost his wunderkind status by falling for political propaganda like a mark. Maybe that's my own projection, I don't know anything anymore.
Whereas today, tech is evolving so rapidly that we don't have time to invent much before the singularity hits in the 2040s. We're facing a different existential crisis now, one of finding meaning when so much happens through manifestation outside of our own actions, instead of facing the void that we can't contribute due to the realities of the time it takes to afford the cost of living (a theme from Fight Club). So my points are maybe anachronisms now, frustrations from an era that no longer exists.
Why I got triggered by this motor: 1000 hp at 28 pounds is enough to lift a large car or truck. The rule for helicopters is about 5 pounds per hp (more with a longer prop that has a higher aspect ratio - edit: the Mars Ingenuity drone gets 3.6 lbs per hp in at atmosphere 1% as dense as ours). So 4 of these motors would make a quadcopter the likes of which we've never seen before. It's almost Star Wars tech IMHO. We're talking extremely high ceilings like 50,000 feet or more. Drones that fly at 400, 500 mph or more, even close to the speed of sound.
And we could have had this tech a long time ago, because it's not especially complex. It's just that nobody devoted the small investment for the research. Same for lithium iron batteries, especially LiFePO4, which could have arrived in the 1980s or 1990s because they're so easy to make. Possibly even the 1960s: the SR-71 flew in ..1964! But we had other priorities.
Anyway, it's a great accomplishment and I'm happy for them. I just mourn what might have been had the geopolitical situation been different.
On what battery?
I think electric motors should focus on other vectors.
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 costs 10,000 Wh to power this car.. for 12 seconds.