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For an electric car, the hardest part to design is the battery. It's really expensive, and really heavy. If you spend a ton of engineering effort to make your e

For an electric car, the hardest part to design is the battery. It's really expensive, and really heavy. If you spend a ton of engineering effort to make your engine 50% smaller and $500 more expensive, all you've done is lowered your profit margin for a tiny decrease in weight. If you instead put the same engineering effort into the battery and manage to make it 5% smaller, you get a bigger weight reduction for the car, and it's probably accompanied with a lower price. Optimizing things that aren't a bottleneck is almost never a good use of resources.

bigfudge 5y ago
PerhPs a smaller firm like this can’t optimise the battery though because it’s too capital intensive to do so?
- elihu 5y ago
  Yeah, that makes sense. EVs need motors and someone has to make them. Manufacturers will buy whatever has the best specs for the least cost that matches the vehicle. Some companies will naturally specialize on motors, even though motors are basically good enough already. If this smaller motor is also cheaper because it uses less material that would be a win, but I suspect that's probably not the case. They also don't mention efficiency in the article, and that can be more important than size/weight.
rektide 5y ago
Agreed that we shouldn't mis-optimize. I wonder how much Tesla pays for their motors. I wonder how much they'd save if they only needed 1/3rd as much material. This kind of material-minimizing innovation seems like it could go a long way. It feels like if someone wanted to mass produce power-dense electric motors, they could radically reduce the cost of a motor by simply using less materials. If they can get to scale. If they can sell them like crazy, which they should, since they should be cheaper to make, as the material inputs are so much less. Koenigsegg of course doesn't care about production costs. It's expected that every item that goes into the car is going to be built via the most exorbinant processes possible. But the underlying idea of using far less material to make a motor sounds extremely attractive to me.

bigfudge 5y ago

PerhPs a smaller firm like this can’t optimise the battery though because it’s too capital intensive to do so?

elihu 5y ago
Yeah, that makes sense. EVs need motors and someone has to make them. Manufacturers will buy whatever has the best specs for the least cost that matches the vehicle. Some companies will naturally specialize on motors, even though motors are basically good enough already. If this smaller motor is also cheaper because it uses less material that would be a win, but I suspect that's probably not the case. They also don't mention efficiency in the article, and that can be more important than size/weight.

rektide 5y ago

Agreed that we shouldn't mis-optimize. I wonder how much Tesla pays for their motors. I wonder how much they'd save if they only needed 1/3rd as much material. This kind of material-minimizing innovation seems like it could go a long way. It feels like if someone wanted to mass produce power-dense electric motors, they could radically reduce the cost of a motor by simply using less materials. If they can get to scale. If they can sell them like crazy, which they should, since they should be cheaper to make, as the material inputs are so much less. Koenigsegg of course doesn't care about production costs. It's expected that every item that goes into the car is going to be built via the most exorbinant processes possible. But the underlying idea of using far less material to make a motor sounds extremely attractive to me.