Here’s a build series of an ex-Apple/NASCAR/Tesla engineer turned YouTuber swapping Tesla Model 3 drivetrain to a 50s Jag.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoTU9_iCGa6i_C38pwQyg0pBG...

As an antique BMW enthusiast, I know some people that have swapped electric motors in to 2002s and 2000 CSLs and they said it was actually a pretty disappointing experience. You lose the vintage driving experience entirely.

Number 1 problem is battery weight though. Not electric motors.

I have a 84 w123 300D, and would love to add some more power to it. Lightweight hub motors would be great, but any decent size battery would be at least 200lbs+, which is hard to do on a old chasy.

I'm going to replace the differential and the automatic transmission in my truck with a 4-cylinder engine and an electric transmission.

Yup, the visualization didn't help me understand the concept any more than plain text. Superficial in the way that you would expect from a system that has no real world reference for what it is creating.

To get something better I expect more than a one-shot is needed, and the knowledge to guide it in the right way.

Look at the beauty of an interactive visualisation of an internal combustion engine made by a human being - https://ciechanow.ski/internal-combustion-engine/

It’s possible to actually learn something from this, whereas the one fable created is just slop with pretty colours.

Code is here https://github.com/mohsen1/axial-flux-motor-explainer

Feel free to steal! This was one shot with Claude Code. You can take it and adopt it to your need

https://archive.org/details/TWTK_WIN

Yeah, I'm at once awed that something like that can be auto-generated (I presume?) and disappointed that it doesn't usefully or practically improve my understanding, beyond written synopses and human videos, at all.

Stuff like this reminds me that we still need a human in the loop to edit, to improve, to advance.

Auto-from-scratch just doesn't really achieve anything of actual value.

Hundreds of examples of axial flux motors exist online. If you look at the visualization it shows the iron cores in a perpendicular orientation with the hub. This is correct, but loses so much of what makes these specific motors interesting. The angled nature of the grey cores and copper wrapping smoothes the transition between each magnetic field.

Basically it is a pretty version of a dumbed down partially incorrect answer. With a knowledgeable user it would be very good, but he has no idea he is wrong. I’m not sure what Dunning Kreguer with graphics should be called.

You don't. You didn't know before either. The difference is trust. How do you trust it as much as you do the hypothetical humans making such representations? That's up to you.

The question is for you to answer, first. Gotta do that work. (My answer will differ from yours.)

Then, predictably, finding the collection of supporting details + vetting the content in question.

This is an issue we, technology-folk, ought to help guide our non-tech-co-folk through engaging with, BTW. Our responsibility is rising with tech becoming more deeply entrenched / required for society's operations.

I thought that for a long time the german supply chain had an advantage in terms of the precision engineering to create drive chains for ICE - but EV's don't have the same number of moving parts and hence... end of advantage?

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.

> 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.

> The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general.

It has nothing to do with the current administration either. For one thing, China's dominance predates it. For another, the EU and Japan have failed equally hard at capturing any meaningful EV marketshare.

1. There is still no good answer for air transport, trans-oceanic shipping, long-haul trucking, and long-distance rail. ICE will be used there for a good while longer.

The current admin is actively hostile to EVs, but I think the real problem was the chicken and egg issue of charging stations: they wouldn't be built because there wasn't enough demand for them and EVs would be limited in sales because they wouldn't have chargers to use on the road.

This is where Tesla made a huge difference with Supercharger stations. I am no fan of Elon, but that work was fundamental in making EVs viable in America.

In Formula E the drivers control engine behavior and regen. It is much better than F1 right now.

It would be awesome if they would implement a crude rule: no computers. You can use a computer to design the car--CAD/CAM/CAE are all fine--but no stored program computers are allowed in the race car. I think that would improve F1 tremendously.

According to wikipedia[1] the first industrial steam engine (1712) was invented almost 100 years before the invention of the steam locomotive (1804), arguably its greatest evolutionary feat.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine

I am somewhat confused at the intensity of pushback for the statement “leading electric vehicles.”

Chinese EVs are leading and that doesn’t necessarily mean being the best, most advanced vehicles. They are leading in value/pricing, and in many regions they are leading in sales.

BYD sells almost double the EV volume of Tesla globally as of December 2025. They are objectively leading in that respect.

I think the parent comment of yours made a good point (or at least adjacent to a good point) about China’s ability to enter the market: they can’t compete with 100 years of internal combustion engine development along with the vast parts supplier network of the West, but they can compete on battery chemistry, battery supply, motors, and the more vertically integrated EV space where automakers don’t need to depend on a huge network of parts suppliers like they did in the past.

I also think that a lot of pushback to the innovation that China is delivering is criticism that is stuck in the past. If you buy a Xiaomi car, it integrates perfectly with all your Xiaomi consumer devices. You can control your rice cooker or robot vacuum from your car’s integrated infotainment system. This type of approach was exactly what Apple was going to deliver before they abandoned their automotive project.

Or, you can buy a Mercedes and you’ll get a car with more precise handling and perfectly tuned driving characteristics. The infotainment system looks like Windows Vista.

Which side of the aisle do you think most consumers care about? I think most people buy into Xiaomi’s approach.

Listening to the heads of the American and European car companies say the same and driving in them in china. I know that is different than personally disassembling one and reviewing it, but I am not sure the incentive for the other companies to say they have inferior products, unless it was a play for subsidies or deregulation of some form.

Personally I feel that the rest of the world continues to dramatically under estimate China’s progress and technological advancement at our own peril. Is there fluff and are their lots of untrue claims, of course, but that is certainly not something they have a monopoly on.

Aren't you getting your analogy backwards? American supermarkets have the same role in the story as Chinese cars.

It's a press release.

Yes. If you have a laser printer, that windup sound you hear at the start of a job is the polygon mirror motor spinning up thousands of RPMs - those are PCB stator motors. As were VCR head motors.

"Advantages : A motor can be built upon any flat structure, such as a PCB, by adding coils and a bearing." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_flux_motor with image of "A miniature DC brushless axial motor used in a Digital Data Storage drive, showing the integration with PCB construction techniques."

No, it means the motor is smaller and it can be put into the wheel

It's poorly worded. There aren't three motors per axle, there are three motors total: one on the front axle and two on the rear axle.

The translation's a little woolly.

For the AMG GT4 there will be 3 motors: two at the rear, and one at the front.

My interpretation (and my German's pretty lousy) is that each motor is combined with a gear system in a single package, and they're calling the overall package (motor plus gears) a High Performance Electric Drive Unit (HP.EDU).

The two rear motors will probably be independent, so no need for a mechanical rear diff (it'll be electronically controlled).

There's no mention of a front diff, so it's unknown whether that's built into the front HP.EDU or is a separate mechanical diff).

To build on what others have said. Multiple motors per axle allow you to get rid of the diff, and you get torque vectoring basically for free.

Then there's braking. More driven wheels means more braking energy that can be recouped via regen. In traditionally rwd cars you lose out here because braking energy tends to be directed forward.

Also there's packaging. One large motor might impinge on the cabin.

Also you get benefits wrt mass production.

A smaller motor is easier to handle. Potentially could avoid the need for high voltage cables. Which eases repair.

I got the impression that there were three motors altogether and they were integrated with the axles.

V5?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VR5_engine

We owned an vw inline 5 Passat (quantum in North America). Good engine and synchro awd.

I'd like a 600 HP 1.5l supercharged V16 - doesn't even need to be in a car, mainly just to listen to!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Racing_Motors_V16

Since they're relatively compact they will probably start stacking them. Like pancakes.

Stick two of them together on the same axle then.

> Axial flux motors aren't some new sci-fi invention

Indeed not. The first ever electric motor was an axial flux motor built by Michael Faraday in 1821. It's definitely not a new idea.

I would be careful about that video, it seems relatively "explaining this new amazing innovation that has no/negligible downsides (please invest in us)" rather than "explaining the practical pros & cons of this technology".

The AI voice is annoying, the content is as personal a a vanilla yogurt but the animation is clear.

well you could have really cheap drum brakes that probably would last the lifetime of the vehicle. Maybe not even hydraulic - electro-mechanical with a mechanical (E brake) fallback.

even better a motor brake already is a thing. Its kinda of like air brakes, requires current to disengage and looks liek a little clutch thats slapped on the shaft or housing.

Can regen brakes keep a car stopped? I would think that the braking force diminishes as the rotor speed approaches zero so it wouldn’t keep you in place on a steep hill, but I’m not sure.

So how do you stop then if the batteries are (close to) fully charged? You'd need to shunt that power into a big resistive load, and then dump that heat.

The energy density on super capacitors is pretty bad. If you imagine full power 200kW braking for 5 seconds that's 1 mega joule and at a best case 8 watt hours per liter you're going to need 35 liters minimum. Really you probably need to double that so you can float up and down and never fully saturate the capacitor as power inflow is going to drop as you get closer and closer to fully charged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor

Yeah. Traditional car makers have enormous demand for EV innovations. Germany has more and bigger traditional car makers.

The UK is by far the best country to raise venture capital in Europe, and is the third largest market in the world after the US and China...

That is also not guaranteed. VW (with its array of brands) leads the european BEV market by a lot. [1] (sorry I only found data for April 2026 right now but earlier months were similar)

One additional point of data. In Q1 of this year they delivered 200K BEV worldwide [2] while Tesla did 350k [3].

Calling that 10 years behind is not warranted in my opinion. I would agree to say competitive and challenged.

[1] https://cleantechnica.com/2026/06/01/europe-ev-sales-report-... [2] https://www.volkswagen-group.com/de/pressemitteilungen/volks... [3] https://ir.tesla.com/press-release/tesla-first-quarter-2026-...

Mercedes always brings their latest technologies to the highest tier of cars first. Almost every major innovation has first debuted on the S class

    > "instead of applying engine breaking when the driver takes their foot off the pedal, they went to great lengths to _move the break pedal_ in proportion to the amount of engine breaking that is currently being applied as per the VCUs command"

There may also be a sports-related reason for people who habitually left-foot brake.

The equilibrium of "good enough vs technological simplicity" for cars was probably reached in the 1950s. Everything after that was more or less solving "non-issues" with ever-increasing complexity ;)