I spent a number of years designing outer-runner direct drive permanent magnet motors for industrial equipment and I've got some questions.<p>Cheifly, bearings. They're not shown in any of the oh-wow images, but these will likely be the most expensive component of each motor. Big bearings are expensive, and to accept the loading of normal wheel operation, these will have to be pretty beefy. That's not even discussing operational life and maintenance.<p>After you've stuffed a pair of angular contact roller bearings into this "wheel", you're going to want to keep salt water and road grime from entering those bearings, so what do you use as a seal? Whatever you use is going to be big, expensive, and suck up huge amounts of power due to the large contact surface.<p>Finally, once you've got big ass bearings and big ass seals, how do you have enough room to put a decent amount of copper in there? Power in these things always amounts to maximizing the amount of copper in the space, and I just don't see room for it.
At first I was like "this is crazy, those are going to be crazy expensive, they'll never make it" and then I realized we're not the customers, at least not willingly<p><a href="https://www.donutdefence.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.donutdefence.com/</a>
More on their design can be found in their patents, <a href="https://patents.google.com/?assignee=verge+motorcycles&oq=assignee:(verge+motorcycles)" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/?assignee=verge+motorcycles&oq=as...</a>
Although that may not be their most recent work due to how long patents take to get published.<p>NB reminder that your employers legal policy may be to never look at patents.
There's a concept called "unsprung mass", which basically destroys handling of all vehicles from race cars to trucks. Basically the greater the unsprung mass, the harder it is to damp the input into the suspension because of the inertia of the moving suspension components themselves. An ideal suspension has zero undamped mass, and all input to the suspension is a direct result of contact with the surface the vehicle is traveling on.<p>There is zero chance this tech will make it into sports cars unless it can beat the weight of a magnesium or AL alloy rim. Even casual vehicles like minivans have rim weight minimized for comfort.<p>Not an expert :) just watched enough Donut media on youtubes :P
Pretty powerful stuff. The Model Y Long Range AWD has a pair of motors that deliver Peak Power of 286 kW and Peak Torque of 510 N⋅m. Donut's claims their Automotive (21") motor can 2.2x the Power (630kW) and 8.4x the Torque (4300 Nm)<p>That's high enough that I have to assume it's for all four wheels... if it's for a single wheel, then an all wheel drive vehicle would have 2520Kw Power + 17,200 Nm Torque, which is 1.6x more than the most powerful production car in the world: the Lotus Evija (1,500 kW).
Is the control of these things good enough that there's no need for a steering mechanism? Or I should say "mechanical steering". Devices like the Segway steer by changing the wheel speeds just a bit. Could this deliver enough control to steer well enough at highway speeds? I'm guessing it could work in a parking lot.
Have they put one in a car yet? Maybe I’m a simple person, but the first thing I’d do if I was CEO of that company would be putting my ultra-powerful motors in a car and heading to the drag strip.
Looks like one of many "shovels for gold diggers" unitized motors for robotic dogs and humanoids. There's been a lot of such compact all-in-one motor units from China lately.