The terminology can get confusing. I many contexts, a "brushless DC motor" is actually a 3-phase AC motor. The idea is that you can think of the motor and mot

The terminology can get confusing. I many contexts, a "brushless DC motor" is actually a 3-phase AC motor. The idea is that you can think of the motor and motor controller (often called an inverter) together as a DC motor because the input to the motor controller is DC. Series-wound DC motors used to be fairly common for EV conversions, and they're still a reasonable choice if you want something that's very cheap and very powerful, and don't care about brush maintenance, efficiency, regen, or being able to reverse easily. (The White Zombie for instance uses a pair of SWDC motors.) Normal people just use AC motors these days.