alt Hacker NewsTiny electric motor can produce more than 1,000 horsepower
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This discussion is all about vehicles with large batteries, but how about hybrids? With light enough and efficient enough motors, all kinds of designs might become practical:
- Toyota-style hybrid drives could be a lot lighter, and they don’t need large batteries.
- e-bikes with tiny batteries?
- Hybrid aircraft? What if there was a battery large enough for takeoff and landing, a small motor (or pair for redundancy) for cruising and to recharge the battery, and motors and fans or propellers wherever is best from an aerodynamic perspective.
- Power tools.
A link to the press release https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
The new YASA axial flux motor weighs just 28 pounds, or about the same as a small dog.
But how many footballs a small dog weighs?
The questions I have mostly centre around how much precision of power delivery it has - it is an all or nothing proposition, can it deliver 0.1% smoothly for real world use, and what is the MTBF / duty cycle / failure mode? I would imagine the last thing anyone would want is a locked wheel, or only one wheel delivering that much power. I know this is unlikely, but as someone with a 22-year-old ICE vehicle I do tend to take the long view on these things and want to know how they will fail as much as how they work. Same applies to the Tesla motors - is there much information on failure modes publicly available?
Ok so whats the catch with the technology? Its more powerful, smaller, all readily available materials. Some kind of strange shape, longevity challenge? Difficult to make so costs are tough to bring down?
Just noticed that they are owned by mercedes benz- they will kill it accidentally. Corporate wont be able to roll it out. They will try and capture all the value and kill its potential
There was a video on this motor recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4OdH0ibOBk made by a phd in the field
I'm curious as to the efficiency of the motor (basically, how much of the input electric power is converted to motive power).
If it isn't very good, then it might be excellent for drag races, but maybe not so many others.
Also, any power that doesn't turn into torque, is likely to be expressed as heat.
You could almost replace the disc brakes with these and have hub motors for free (in terms of unsprung weight). Depends on the torque and safety margin on the 700KW level of performance. For emergency safety you could have a mechanical short to let the motors dump energy into a big heating element as a last resort (risking wheel lockup) but this would truly be drive-by-wire braking.
Just what we need, more powerful automobiles.
I would appreciate a 1 oz motor that can put out 1 hp on an ebike.
Outperformance metric is basically power density. The model described is some 13 kg and delivers 750 kW peak, 350+ kW sustained.
(That's 28 pounds, 1000 hp peak, 470+ hp sustained.)
The 40% improvement is actually 36% and is versus the previous model of the same company.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675020
It's easy to forget that most of the weight in an electric car is the battery. It's ICE cars where a lot of the weight is in the motor.
That being said, could this be adapted so that a 2.8lb motor produces 100 hp? That would allow putting a small motor in each wheel, thus completely eliminating axels, driveshafts, and allow recapturing the space they used to occupy. It also wouldn't significantly impact unsprung weight.
Jeez!
The amount of ads this page has is ridiculous
It is great that Mercedes-Benz now owns a highly performant electric engine. But is this just an impressive lab breakthrough, or can it work in the real world for their cars? Which means enduring from freezing to high temps, hours of sustained driving, and years of that (or equivalent endurance testing).
First motor I saw in this category was much larger because it had massive mount points to attach it to the car so the torque would go to the wheels and not to destroying the motor.
This one has a narrow ring meant for 3/8” bolts? I guess if you’re buying a 1000 hp motor you can afford titanium carriage bolts.
Having that on a e-bike would be wild.
A similar company is based in Munich: https://www.deepdrive.tech/ They have cool testing facilities applying CI/CD practices to testing hardware!
> According to YASA, this is achieved without using exotic or expensive materials, so the design could actually be scalable once the demand kicks in.
So, no rare-earth magnets? And it will be cheaper than existing motors?
This was already on HN a short while ago:
If used in power generation, would they open new options?
e.g. high RPM, or high torque options over existing generators?
28 pounds - that's gigantic compared to this https://now.tufts.edu/2011/09/05/worlds-smallest-electric-mo...
It's very hard to find any supplier who will sell an axial flux motor to the public.
I see lots of press from Yasa & Donut motors, but afaik no public pricing & relationships with select partners only.
12 days ago | 59 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45675020
I wonder if this tech is already being used in F1, or if it makes sense to do so. The weight savings alone could easily make a championship winner.
Axial flux motors are so next level. Very little power needed per rpm. I’ve built a few tiny ones for FPV and they are a joy to work with. I’ll die a happy man if I never have to coil again.
It's cool, but I think deploying motors without rare earth materials will be more impactful. The Nissan Ariya was ill-fated for other reasons, but it had a EESM motor that is easier to cool, more efficient at speed, and cheaper. That's where motor tech is headed. Power density just isn't terribly important in current applications, at least not past current sota.
Just stick four on a car with fans on and there's your flying car. Not much range though probably.
That's wild! Tiny motors packing that much power? Sign me up for the future of racing!
EV motors are not that heavy. Ok it is 1/4 of a tesla motor but would that make much of a difference compared to the rest of the car since the weight of an EV motor is in single % of the entire weight.
Sounds like it could be more important for drones?
So can I jet ski from NY to London in a few hours?
> YASA, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz, already produces motors that power some of the world’s fastest and most expensive cars.
Never underestimate the swabians.
I wonder whether it is about the same as a small dog
How the heck are they dealing with the heat produced? Water cooling?
Why do we even need to drive cars, why dont we all just have trailers and then an automated robot could pull it around. Decouple the drive train from the cabin.
Tesla should buy Mercedes, they'd make a good team together.
Great! When can I order one packaged in the form of a drop-in limited-slip NA MX5 differential?
Cars are probably fine without that engine. But for drones and robot actuators it should be a huge boon.
Can I get one for my bicycle
Can we build an electric scooter with it?
Yet Another Sale Abroad. Not a criticism of the YASA team. It’s hard to scale a company in the UK and foreign investment is a good thing in general. But still frustrating that the UK was unable to offer the kind of investment that Mercedes could to keep a company British.
Axial flux motors are such an obvious and simple to build design that I don't understand why they aren't used more commercially. I've mainly seen do-it-yourself projects to build them for home windmills etc.
- divergence -
This is perhaps my greatest frustration with wealth inequality. Billionaires like Elon Musk (not to single him out of the thousand others) sometimes fund innovative projects initially, but seem to get lost in the weeds doubling down on evolutionary tech, while missing obvious opportunities in fringe tech and old ideas that were suppressed.
For example, the Tesla turbine could have been used for an onboard generator, and what better opportunity than to build a hybrid Tesla car using it? Its main drawback is that it gets fouled by combustion products (with secondary drawbacks in low torque, noise, etc). So why not use natural gas, propane or hydrogen? Why not use an external combustion system that heats air and runs it through the turbine in place of using a larger (due to low compression) Stirling engine? Why not mount the turbine in sound dampening material or a vacuum? These are all trivially overcome engineering challenges. Yet we can't buy a cost-effective mass-produced Tesla turbine or even a Stirling engine of any appreciable power online.
As we see more and more of these missed or suppressed innovations by moneyed interests, I can't help but come to the conclusion that wealth inequality is the largest force stopping widespread prosperity, especially the kind brought by automation to provide basic resources. We can claim that so much progress has been made possible by crony capitalism, for example the computers we are writing and reading this comment on, but I believe that they exist despite concentrated wealth, not because of it.
And I'm worried that access to fee-based AI will widen the wealth gap even further. Because people with money will be able to pay AI to do their jobs and get paid, while people without money may be forced to do those jobs by hand performatively under ever-increasing pressure as the cost of AI only decreases due to economies of scale and Moore's law. So that the main goal for moneyed interests could become to deny access to capital to the working class so that they can be exploited. Even though it would be far easier and more beneficial to more people to distribute the costs of some minimal level of AI to everyone in the world.
I dunno, the more I see these exciting innovations that could practically be built for cost of materials (28 pounds of copper costs less than $150 and is the most expensive component) yet never reach widespread adoption - while other inferior products that use more material flourish - it makes me question if our market-based economy even works anymore. I'm not saying that older (antiquated?) alternatives like socialism/communism would work better today, just that there may be a post-scarcity 21st century economy where patents that could increase equivalent personal wealth by orders of magnitude are put into the public domain. Not for money, but as automated and open source goods/services/resources having equivalent value to what money would have provided. The closest I can get is stuff like solarpunk, which still hasn't caught on for reasons I don't understand.
Edit: before I get flamed too badly for this comment, I should add that neodymium magnets could perhaps cost more than copper, and/or be a scarcer resource. If I were working on this type of motor, I would try to get similar performance from non-rare-earth magnets and aluminum wire, as well as explore hybrid motors that achieve say 80% of the power and efficiency using only 20% of the rare stuff. On that note, we are long overdue for mass-produced graphene and carbon nanotube wire. We need a definitive answer as to whether they are safe enough to use commercially, or if they are a dead end like asbestos. I don't understand why billionaires don't put more money into getting this sort of first-principles "real work" done. If I won the internet lottery, I would set up a foundation with an endowment to tackle these pressing problems and invite hackers through grants, sort of like what MacKenzie Scott is doing.
Everything but the Metric System: “The new YASA axial flux motor weighs just 28 pounds, or about the same as a small dog.” :)
I am heavy motors guy, and this is my EV. She weighs one hundred fifty tons and drives four custom-tooled motors at one thousand horsepower per wheel.
It costs 10,000 Wh to power this car.. for 12 seconds.
But what does this mean for AI...
Feels like a vanity metric, electric car companies don't boast about their cars having X horsepower. Not many people care about horsepower because either way there are speed limits on the road.
I think electric motors should focus on other vectors.
> It can also sustain between 350 and 400 kilowatts (469–536 horsepower) continuously, meaning it’s not just built for short bursts, as it can deliver massive power all day long.
On what battery?
Could lead to significant efficiency gains for EV's, because 1/4 of the motor weight means better power-to-weight ratio... a lot of things will automatically get better.
YASA was founded in 2009, a spin out from Oxford University following the PhD of founder and still CTO, Dr Tim Woolmer.
"Over the decades that followed both of these technologies were explored. But despite the potential for weight reduction, smaller size, shorter axle length and increased torque, it was the difficulty in manufacturing the axial flux technology that limited its commercial viability, because the motor could not be made by stacking laminations, as with radial machines."
"The breakthrough innovation came by segmenting the axial flux motor in discrete "pole-pieces", so the motor could be manufactured using Soft Magnetic Composite material.
SMC can be pressed at low cost into a wide variety of 3D shapes. This removed the need for the complex laminations, overcoming the major manufacturing challenge of the axial flux machine."
"In 2025, after a £12m investment, YASA opened the UK's first axial-flux super factory, in Oxfordshire.
The opening of this facility boosts YASA’s manufacturing capacity, setting new benchmarks in e-motor technology and quality, and enabling production to scale beyond 25,000 units per year."
This is awesome. Lighter motors also make electric flight more viable