Current electric cars are much more advanced than those on the market 10 years ago, but that does not mean that they still have enormous room for improvement and evolution ahead. The focus is usually on the batteries, but there are other components that could be much better as well, such as the motors.
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 particularity of using a block with quite revolutionary that can change the landscape of the industry.
The electric motors used in the automobile industry are a kind of electromagnet, they are based on the magnetism that is created when electric current passes and for this they have to use materials with magnetic properties, which are known as rare earths.
This has several consequences, starting with the fact that they make the product considerably more expensive and ending with the fact that these are elements that are ultimately difficult to deal with, which also generates ecological problems.
In this situation, the new Vitesco electric motor dispenses with rare earths and chemical elements such as neodymium, which is very common in the propellers currently used, and opts for a different configuration: it uses a rotor without permanent magnets and separate excitation, instead of permanent.
The technology has been called ‘Externally Excited Synchronous Machine’ (‘EESM’) and what it does is use coils to create the necessary magnetism for the motor to work, energizing them by passing the electric current through the outside of the outer casing.
What advantages does this have? The first is that it is cheaper, because rare earths are not used. And the second is that it is a more efficient engine, since there is no permanent magnetic field that slows down the rotor, the inertia of the car can be better used to circulate.
The only drawback is that it needs an external control module which makes it take up a little more space than a conventional electric motor.
