By Dr. Tim Sandle
DIGITAL JOURNAL
December 20, 2024
Renault has big hopes for its little R5 to boost its sales of electric cars, tapping into nostalgia for a popular model of the 1980s and 1990s - Copyright AFP KAREN BLEIER
The electric vehicle (EV) market continues, in general, to grow; however, its growth has slowed significantly in Europe and the U.S. in the first half of 2024. Can the market be reinvigorated?
According to one recent review, growth can be triggered by release of models in a more affordable price range. This is connected to lowering manufacturing costs. Here, the battery rightly takes focus; however, other components such as the electric motor can also contribute to cost reduction.
These factors feature in IDTechEx’s report “Electric Motors for Electric Vehicles 2025-2035: Technologies, Materials, Markets, and Forecasts”. The report analyses the current technology and materials landscape for electric motors in EVs and forecasts the future trends and demands for the next 10 years.
In the study, IDTechEx forecasts that over 160 million electric motors will be required for the EV market in 2035 with approximately 30 percent of the automotive market using rare earth free technologies in the same year.
Improving Performance to Reduce Battery Demands
The first way a motor can reduce vehicle cost is through driving efficiency. Vehicles are generally designed to maximize range on test cycles and in real-world driving scenarios.
The more efficient a motor is, the more range can be obtained from the same battery capacity. For example, if a motor has an efficiency of 96 percent rather than 93 percent, then this could decrease the energy needed for a 75kWh vehicle by around 2.9 percent to achieve the same range.
Materials vs Manufacturing Costs in the Motor
Permanent magnet (motors dominate the EV market with an 85 percent market share in battery electric and plug-in hybrid cars in 2023 according to IDTechEx. The permanent magnets used in these motors contain rare earths and can be very costly.
Magnet free motors, such as wound rotor synchronous motors (WRSM, sometimes called externally excited synchronous motors, EESM), have a lower bill of materials cost due to replacing permanent magnets with copper windings.
Rare earth free magnets are another future solution, these magnetic materials are much less costly, but sacrifice performance. As technology improves, and with the goal of producing a low-cost vehicle, this could be an approach taken.
Could Axial Flux Play a Role?
In the future, axial flux motors could play a larger role in cost reduction. Given their very high power and torque density, the material utilization per kW of power can be significantly reduced. Given most of a motor’s cost is in the bill of materials, this could enable another route to cost reduction. However, axial flux motors have not yet been manufactured at the scale required for the automotive market.
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