alt Hacker NewsThe Chinese EV industry is actually lead by development of batteries, especially CATL. Along with the pack engineering, which is good old Mech.E stuff about heat transfer and physical strength.
Secondarily power electronics; at that scale, you can't just pick a bigger transistor and call it a day.
By comparison the motors seem to be a mostly solved problem, although I'm sure there's still some scope for power-to-weight engineering there, it's not as critical as the battery pack.
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> The Chinese EV industry is actually lead by development of batteries
This is the core point, but it applies for the whole of the industry. Motors just don't matter. An electric motor is an almost vanishing component of the weight and complexity of an electric vehicle. Cut the mass of the thing *in half* and you're looking at 100kg savings, tops. You could do that with a Model Y by just changing the roof material to something boring and not glass. You could almost do it by shrinking the oversized-as-is-the-fashion wheels.
So... it's great that Mercedez-Benz is producing these, I guess. But it won't make their cars anything more than incrementally better. Which is why we're seeing them crow about it in a press release and not a spec sheet.
And is development of batteries (and better magnetics) not just chemical engineering and material science?
Motors might be a 'solved problem' - there might not be much innovation, Maxwell's laws aren't changing any time soon, but there will surely be a lot of incremental improvement - an early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE.