Current electric cars are much more advanced than those on the market 10 years ago, but that doesn’t mean they still have a lot of room for improvement and development. The focus is usually on the battery, but there are other components that could be much better, such as the motor.
At the recent event of the Vienna Automobile Symposium held in Austria, one of the main powertrain suppliers, Vitesco has presented the fourth generation of its platform for electric cars, which has the distinction of using quite a revolutionary block that could change the course of the industry. landscape.
Electric motors used in the automobile industry are a type of electromagnet, they are based on the magnetism that is produced by the passage of an electric current and for this they have to use materials with magnetic properties known as rare earths. Known as
This has many consequences, starting with the fact that they make the product quite expensive and ending with the fact that these are elements that are ultimately difficult to deal with, which also create ecological problems.
In this case, the new Vitesco electric motor dispenses with chemical elements such as rare earths and neodymium, which are very common in currently used propellers, and opts for a different configuration: it uses a rotor without permanent magnets. uses and instead has a different stimulus. Permanent.
The technology has been called an ‘Externally Excited Synchronous Machine’ (‘EESM’) and it uses coils to create the magnetism needed for the motor to work, energizing them by passing an electric current through the outer shell.
What are its benefits? The first is that it is cheap, as rare earths are not used. And the second is that it is a more efficient engine, since there is no permanent magnetic field slowing the rotor down, the car’s inertia can be better used to propel it.
The only drawback is that it requires an external control module which makes it take up a bit more space than a conventional electric motor.
