The engine of the future: free of rare earths and more efficient than ever

When you think about the improvements that the electric car can still undergo, the focus is usually put on the price of the vehicles, the autonomy of the battery or the scarcity of charging points and not so much on the propulsion system itself. A company has created the engine of the future, free of rare earths and more efficient than ever.

That company is Vitesco, one of the main suppliers of propellants that a few days ago presented its new engine at the Vienna Automobile Symposium. This is the fourth generation of its platform for electric cars, equipped with a new motor with quite revolutionary characteristics and which could represent a turning point in the motor industry.

The engine of the future: free of rare earths and more efficient than ever

The current motors used in electric cars are a kind of electromagnet, based on the magnetism that is created by passing electric current and, for this, they have to use materials with magnetic properties, known as rare earths.

The problem with rare earths is that, due to their characteristics, they make the product significantly more expensive and, furthermore, they are elements that are difficult to deal with and generate ecological problems.

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However, Vitesco’s new engine does without these rare earths and other chemical elements such as neodymium, which is very common in the propellants currently used. Instead, it uses a rotor without permanent magnets and separately excited, instead of permanent.

This new technology, which the German company calls the ‘Externally Excited Synchronous Machine’ (‘EESM’), uses coils to create the magnetism necessary for the motor to work, exciting itself by passing electrical current through the outside of the outer casing.

Two advantages and one disadvantage

This new, more efficient, rare earth free motor offers several advantages. The most obvious and that we have already pointed out is that it is cheaper, since it does not use rare earths. This could help make future electric cars cheaper.

Secondly, since there is no permanent magnetic field that slows down the engine, it can take better advantage of the vehicle’s inertia when driving, making it a more efficient engine than current ones.

But not all were going to be advantages and there is also a drawback: it needs an external control module that makes it take up a little more space than a conventional electric motor.