This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Lol:
The new YASA axial flux motor weighs just 28 pounds, or about the same as a small dog.
However, it delivers a jaw-dropping 750 kilowatts of power, which is the equivalent of 1,005 horsepower.
I feel like we'd need peak horsepower output of a small dog to truly understand this.
If it's a Corgi, I would estimate the power output at .1 horsepower max. But if it's a small dog the size of a large dog, then that's something entirely different.
A dog's power output comes from its muscle mass, which for a healthy dog is about 45% of its total body weight. This gives our 28-pound dog roughly 12.57 lbs (or 5.7 kg) of muscle.
Studies of animal muscle show that the peak power output of vertebrate muscle tissue during a short, explosive burst (like a jump or the start of a sprint) is around 100 to 200 watts per kilogram of muscle.
Now we can estimate the dog's peak power:
Converting these figures to horsepower (1 horsepower = 746 watts):
So, a small 28-pound dog might be able to generate a peak power of around 0.75 to 1.5 horsepower for a very brief moment.
So this YASA motor is somewhere between 670 and 1,340 times more powerful than the dog it's being compared to in weight. That's some jaw-dropping power output.
I tried to sanity-test the math here running the same calculations on a 700 kg horse, of which around 50% mass is muscle.
700 kg x 50% = 350 kg
Low:
350 kg x 100 W/kg = 35,000 W
35,000 W / 746 ≈ 47 hp
High:
350 kg x 200 W/kg = 70,000 W
70,000 W / 746 ≈ 94 hp
Despite what the term "horsepower" would seem to suggest, a horse can actually output more than one horsepower. Estimates put peak output of a horse around 12-15 hp. By those numbers, even the low end estimate above is around 3-4x too high. We're gonna need more dogs.
We're gonna need more dogs.
I accept your terms.
1 dogpower obviously. /s
Americans will use ANYTHING to avoid metric.
What if we compromise on fractional thousandths of a kilodog?
1/1000 of a kilodog is just a dog bro
Had an ex-friend who was a motorhead arguing that electric motors will never beat ICE because they lack comparable torque. Look, I'm no mechanic, but I never got my head around that.
"You mean they don't have enough torque to run a US destroyer?! Someone should call the Navy."
Seriously, if you've played with even a tiny electric motor, provide DC, it goes, instantly. What could he have possibly been trying to say?
I think he was trying to admit he doesn't know shit about electric motors.
My parents had an original Prius and it was a weedy little car that made those two hippies really happy. If that was his only experience with electric cars I can see why he’d think that.
But the new ones are fucking rockets. I just don’t understand why they need all that. Can they make a cheaper one that’s got 300 horsepower?
. I just don’t understand why they need all that.
Power sells, they can give that insane 0-60 sprint for very low cost, so it gets people to buy their product instead of a 6 liter V8.
What could he have possibly been trying to say?
I mean, the general appeal of ICE engines is the fuel, not the engine. Gasoline is generally more energy dense than lithium.
Nah, his complaint was lack of torque. Very strange, never got it. Figured he was repeating fossil fuel propaganda. But he was a motorhead!
And yes, energy density is the thing no one talks about when raging against fossil fuels. A gallon of refined gasoline packs insane energy. I've run my 5-gallon, crappy Harbor Freight generator all night into the morning, powering the camp, heaters and all, never came close to emptying it. Contrast that with a monster LIPO4 battery that died in 48-hours only powering LED lights. (Gotta admit, something weird happened there.)
"EVs lack comparable torque to ICE" - guy in my rearview mirror
He was trying to say that he spent too much time in a media bubble disconnected from reality.
I wonder if we'll ever get enough standardization across EVs so people can start doing the electric equivalent of an LS swap.
I could see this being done on a Slate truck, along with an auxiliary EV battery bolted in the back.
It's more about the batteries than the motor. You can make a motor that sucks down as much power as you want. The battery can't necessarily provide that without damage.
Hopefully solid-state batteries (once their production manages to ramp up to consumer vehicle scale) could allow for higher capacity and power delivery without the limitations or safety risks of current battery tech.
I mean, I guess. Power output isn't what I'm really hoping for on new battery tech. What we have is perfectly capable of 0-60 times that only thoroughbred performance street cars can meet (like Ariel Atom territory), and the top speed is plenty.
Once you're putting down 500hp, tires start to become a limiting factor. The torque that goes behind that number can stress the limit on all but the largest tires with the stickiest compounds.
Safety, range, and weight reduction of new battery tech are great, though.
Yep, I have an EV and the way my partner drove it just eats through tires. We're talking about $1.5k, 50k mile warranty tires being replaced at 20-25k because someone liked to pretend they're a fucking astronaut on launch day.
Not bitter.
Ah good thing the batteries are not the heavy part of the system otherwise this would be awkward.
This motor weighs 12.7 kilograms and has 1000hp. How much does a comparable motor weigh?
This looks small enough to be installed within the wheel hub itself. Imagine a car with four motors, one inside each wheel. The entire floor pan could just be one thin battery, and everything above it could be passenger and storage space.
That's how EVs started! Sorta.
This is from a Porsche in 1900:
And some 2000s EVs tried it. But it's impractical.
It increases unsprung weight, e.g. weight not cushioned by suspension. Bad for ride/handling/steering feel.
All that vibration is HARD on the motor. Read: unreliable.
Motor is more exposed to temperature/dust. Again, reliability.
In reality, a decent suspension needs a lot of room under the body anyway. An axle to get the motor in the body is dirt cheap on the rear, and still pretty cheap on the front, and you could just mount this thing sideways to make it flat...
That would be a lot of unsprung weight.
Handling and ride quality are dramatically and negatively impacted by every bit of weight that is not held up by the suspension. That's why higher performance cars will have lightweight wheels. Rather than steel wheels you see on lower performance cars.
It's better to just put all the heavy drive components inboard on the chassis and run drive shafts to the wheels.
You see motors in the hubs of bicycles, because they really don't go that fast. So even if the bike has a suspension, it's not that big of a deal. Motorcycles on the other hand would need to keep any heavy parts inboard.
My eScooter weighs 42 pounds.
A 28 pound motor that's 750 kW?
Holy fuck.
That's power density straight out of science fiction
28 pounds = 12.7kg, for those wondering.
Until someone tests it independently, this should be considered BS.
Once I figured out it was an axial flux prototype motor this whole article made sense.
Nerd
cant wait for corporations to crush the competition with some bullshit yet again and then complain that we're at peak EV tech anyway
The size is less of an issue than the power usage.
Does it also use 1000% more power to get that strength?
The only real benefit in that case would be robot mech suits.
I was going to shit all over this thing, but if it can do ~500hp continuously that's awesome. Wonder what kind of efficiency it has and what the cooling requirements are. That low weight puts us back into unsprung wheel motor territory, especially if it scales down well.
