Author: EVAI

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• In-wheel motor maker Elaphe doesn’t see issues with durability or unsprung mass
• “Vehicle-level” integration of tech could bring 20% cheaper vehicles, 20% efficiency boost
• Elaphe is targeting 95% efficiency on a battery-to-wheel basis by 2030

If you took a quick look at the display stand for Slovenia’s Elaphe Propulsion Technologies at CES 2025 last month, you might have walked away with the message that the supplier of in-wheel motors has moved on from Aptera, Lightyear, and Lordstown and is pitching its tech to cars that are fast, exotic, and expensive. 

That much is true—in the short term. Long-term, Elaphe has a grander global vision than just fitting into the performance picture. 

In the meantime, it sees performance vehicles as the perfect venue for showing tech-savvy car buyers what in-wheel motors can do. At CES, Elaphe revealed a revised in-wheel motor design, called Sonic 1, that’s compatible with larger, track-ready brakes and high-performance vehicles. 

In a rear-engine, rear-wheel-drive model, for instance, it could deliver “something extra,” as brand and marketing architect Iztok Franko put it, at the front wheels without redoing the architecture of the vehicle—as part of a hybrid performance upgrade. 

Elaphe Sonic 1 in-wheel motor for performance cars. – CES 2025

The Sonic 1 motors themselves, which it teases are likely to arrive in a production vehicle in 2026, can make up to 268 hp and 737 lb-ft each in their default form—designed to fit a 21-inch front wheel, as shown. And to take it to a scorching extreme, they’re being developed to fit up to 24-inch wheels, as Elaphe and its stand partner Italdesign teased in an updated Quintessenza supertruck concept, offering a hypothetical combined max of 1,600 kw (nearly 2,150 hp).

“So now we remove the obstacle of reengineering the whole vehicle, it’s easy to integrate, and you can upgrade the performance and upgrade the control of the car,” said Franko.

Italdesign Quintessenza concept

In-wheel tech promises simplicity, efficiency

If you compare it to an e-axle with an inboard motor, there are no additional mechanical losses, because it’s only one rotating part per motor. There are no additional bearings, gears, or added constant velocity joints, either. 

It’s a good start to thinking about what in-wheel tech can do, and why it’s been popular for some vehicle types, like very large trucks and buses. But it’s only scratching the surface for what Elaphe and the few other companies see as a bright future applying the tech to passenger vehicles.

Green Car Reports caught up with Elaphe chief technology officer Gorazd Gotovac at CES about how its technology is evolving and found a company that sees in-wheel tech as a key part in the long-term future of the car.

Gotovac emphasized to Green Car Reports that over many years and iterations, the company has worked to fine-tune the design through inverter control and management of second-order effects in the physics of the magnetic field. Partly through that it’s achieved a 10% efficiency boost versus the previous generation of its motors, from fourth to its current fifth generation.

Elaphe in-wheel motor for Lightyear 0

By the time Elaphe gets to production in high volume, which it sees as around 2030, it’s targeting a 95% efficiency, on a battery-to-wheel basis, based on highway driving.

Its design uses permanent magnets, but Gotovac says that the company has already confirmed that by 2030 it will be able to bypass the use of heavy rare-earth materials, keeping to lighter rare-earths instead and reducing the environmental footprint. 

“We believe that once in-wheel motors are adopted there will also be versions without permanent magnets on the low end of the market,” he added. “But it will bring some weight penalty.”

Unsprung mass isn’t such a big deal

In-wheel motors increase the amount of unsprung mass (all the mass not supported by the suspension), which auto engineers and insiders routinely claim makes ride and handling much harder to tune and complicates safety. 

It’s simply not as significant of an issue as some vehicle engineers paint it to be, according to CTO Gotovac. That’s because wheels and tires, in combination, are quite heavy; add an in-wheel motor and you’re not at all doubling or tripling the weight, he explained to Green Car Reports. You’re boosting it by about 30% when figuring in the brakes and all the ancillary pieces. Factor in items that are redundant for in-wheel motors and the gain in unsprung mass can be as little as 35 pounds per wheel versus an inboard motor setup.

And adding in-wheel motors at the front wheels is an easier way to add hybrid propulsion while maintaining safety, argued Gotovac. “If you have a car which has been engineered and crash-tested and you want to hybridize it, you have to redo all the crash-testing,” he said. “But if you put in-wheel motors in, you don’t have to redo all the crash-testing, because actually the structure in front, it will be the same…and if you’ve done the engineering right the wheels are just going to hold onto the rest of the structure.”

Elaphe’s units are designed to survive minor collisions, and it means that the body doesn’t need a crash structure designed around incompressible powertrain pieces.

Lordstown Endurance

Durability work already done on in-wheel motors?

What makes in-wheel motors fundamentally different than existing inboard motors is that the motor’s rotor spins directly with the wheel and its stator acts as the hub. Because of this, they’re subject to higher levels of vibration and road shocks, but Elaphe’s Gotovac insists that durability is no longer a concern. In recent years it has pushed its full validation cycle for the vehicle lifetime of its motors out to 300,000 miles, from the previous 150,000 miles. 

Lordstown Motors would have provided that real-world evidence of durability for Elaphe, in its Ohio-built Lordstown Endurance electric pickup, using U.S.-built motors from the Slovenian company—if it weren’t for Lordstown’s demise in June 2023. 

As Gotovac emphasized, the design of the motor that Elaphe still follows was fully validated in the Endurance, but it was a different application as Elaphe itself didn’t have anything to do with the inverters, which allow a finer level of motor control. In a drive of the Lordstown Endurance, Green Car Reports didn’t have any issue with motor response, ride, or handling of the electric truck. 

2023 Lordstown Endurance

One of Ford’s top EV executives, Darren Palmer, told Green Car Reports in 2021 that it nixed in-wheel motors as a possibility in the F-150 Lightning electric truck over concerns about durability. And Aptera dropped in-wheel motors for its production-bound three-wheeler in what appeared to be an issue not with any of those concerns but with cost.  

At present, there are some, but relatively few, examples of mainstream models that offer these motor types. China’s Dongfeng, in 2023, claimed to be building the world’s first passenger car with in-wheel motors—powering the rear wheels in that case, supplied by Protean Electric. 

In the meantime, in-wheel motors continue to look like the future, albeit a future without any significant present-day commitment—and plenty of false starts. Perhaps backing up Elaphe’s claims that they’re the best solution for the future, Hyundai and Toyota have continued to develop their own in-wheel motors, or at least remain involved in their development. 

Lightyear with Elaphe motors

In-wheel motors remain mass-market-bound

As Elaphe’s Gotovac explained to Green Car Reports at CES, the company sees niche high-performance applications like Sonic 1 as an important step in getting the word out about in-wheel motor technology and how it can perform to extremes. But it has bigger-picture ambitions at the affordable end of the market. 

This is the fifth generation of Elaphe’s motors and it’s been simultaneously working toward higher power density and better performance while also keeping an eye on how the tech can truly be applied to the mass market. 

Gotovac said that while selling automakers on the idea of in-wheel motors for mass-market EVs has proven challenging, the technology can potentially pay much greater dividends. 

“We are able to develop this power-dense design that we have into something that is cost-effective for a car that doesn’t have to be as powerful,” he explained. “If you’re using less material to get more power out of it, and if you’re not using exotic materials, then your potential for cost is better than the previous generation.”

Aptera with Elaphe motors

In-wheel motor potential: Ride, handling, identity

Elaphe’s Sonic 1 motor system is designed to use an inverter from its official partner McLaren Applied Technologies, with software developed with that firm—and the key to some of those special control strategies is the software. 

But Elaphe emphasizes that the potential for in-wheel motor tech rests on much more than power delivery. Once you have it at each wheel, all sorts of opportunities arise for the motors to take an active role in: ride, handling, stability control, and even communication to the driver. 

Aptera with Elaphe motors

Fundamentally, one of the key advantages of Elaphe’s in-wheel motor technology amounts to this, Gotovac explained: It’s capable of blipping torque delivery—up to its peak torque delivery—almost instantaneously, more precisely than an automaker could with brakes, and in a more extreme way than automakers would ever dare with an inboard motor because of driveshafts and CV joints. 

Allowing roll control to be handled by the in-wheel motor system, Gotovac says, would allow automakers to eliminate physical roll bars and their constraints. If you have a motor at each corner, coordinated by a central computer, it’s like having “just one brake in the middle…you feel very safe when you get on ice,” Gotovac explained, or the motors can squeeze at varying levels with just the right timing so as to provide roll control. 

Elaphe is currently working toward a very quick 10-kHz modulation cycle and a reaction time of just 4 milliseconds for full torque delivery of its motors. It takes the quickest inboard motor systems 20 times as long to respond, Gotovac claimed, and even then they won’t be able to provide close to full torque. “So that means we really can control with very high bandwidth, a lot of force,” he said, inserting with a smirk: “So we can get very interesting effects.”

Those effects can be quite subtle, he says—like engineering some vibration or tonality back into the driving experience. “We can generate vibration so that you can get a feeling in the car which is engineered but still authentic,” he said, or have the motors generate safety alerts, play songs, or emulate combustion engines—serving a purpose not unlike what Stellantis has engineered for the Dodge Charger Daytona EV.

All of those are things you can’t do with an inboard-motor EV because there are too many other factors with the driveshafts and suspension, and concerns over durability or the harmonics of the gear system. 

2024 Dodge Charger Daytona

The future: EVs built on platforms for in-wheel motors

None of this tech will be fully realized, Gotovac admits, until we get a new kind of EV, conceived from the start for in-wheel motors. Enabling their potential is a “vehicle-level issue,” he says, and in-wheel motors will only make the vehicle much more efficient if it’s engineered from the ground up for the tech.

If automakers are up for playing this long game with Elaphe, it believes it can lower overall vehicle cost by 20% and boost range and efficiency by 20%—including whole-vehicle design, aerodynamics, chassis controls, and the weight of the car. “That’s where the big potential lies,” Gotovac said.

No major automaker has signed up yet. And what exactly keeps automakers from committing to in-wheel motors on big, mass-market, affordable EV projects sounds like a classic chicken-or-egg dilemma. 

Rivian and Volkswagen Group electrical architecture and software stack

Getting to the 20% efficiency boost requires a big investment and commitment that goes beyond the supplier, lamented Gotovac, including an electrical architecture intended to accommodate it. “On the component level we can demonstrate a little bit of efficiency improvement, but not enough for them to make a $5 billion investment,” he added, summing up the predicament.

Gotovac asked rhetorically: “What is the step in between that gets them to believe in this system, so that they engineer that new platform? That’s the thing…”

It’s what drew my attention back to the Sonic 1 motor unit on the pedestal, ready in the meantime to create an Italian exotic that, perhaps, the tech-savvy will recognize for all its firsts. 

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Mercedes-Benz on Monday announced the start of real-world testing of prototype solid-state battery cells from the U.S. firm Factorial.

These cells were installed in a Mercedes-Benz EQS sedan in late 2024, and the car has been used in laboratory tests since then, according to a Mercedes press release. The automaker now claims the EQS is ready for road-testing—and that it could achieve up to 621 miles of range (1,000 km, on an unconfirmed drive cycle) with solid-state cells.

Mercedes-Benz EQS solid-state battery prototype

That range is possible mainly due to the solid-state cells’ increased energy density. Mercedes claims these cells allow for 25% more energy (and range) for the same weight and dimensions of the standard EQS battery pack. Passive battery cooling, such as what was used in the Mercedes EQXX engineering concept, will also help lower weight and increase efficiency.

Developed with input from Mercedes’ Formula 1 powertrain unit, the EQS test vehicle’s battery pack uses a new floating cell carrier, with pneumatic actuators that compensate for expansion and contraction of the cells as they charge and discharge, respectively.

Mercedes-Benz EQS solid-state battery prototype

The partnership between Mercedes and Factorial goes back to 2021. Factorial began providing test cells to Mercedes (as well as Stellantis) in 2022, and in 2024 appeared confident that its cells could boost Mercedes EV range by up to 80%. The Massachusetts-based battery firm has also opened what it claims is the largest U.S. EV solid-state battery plant yet in a Boston suburb. But that plant—with which aims Factorial aims to eventually produce up to 200 gigawatt-hours of batteries annually—is still small compared to conventional battery plants.

Mercedes will continue its testing in the laboratory and on the road over the next few months, but it may lead to a commitment to use solid-state cells in production vehicles. And if they are commercialized, a new micro-converter also being developed by the automaker plus some extra cooling-system innovation might allow them to be mixed with other cell types in the same EV battery pack.

Mini is delaying electric vehicle production at its U.K. plant, which could further delay U.S. sales of both a redesigned electric Cooper hatchback and the Aceman, a new nameplate being sold only as an EV.

Both models are currently built in China and were due to be added at Mini’s Oxford, England, plant next year. But Autocar reported Friday the U.K.-made Mini EVs are delayed “for an unspecified period of time,” citing Mini parent BMW.

“Given the multiple uncertainties facing the automotive industry, the BMW Group is currently reviewing the timing for reintroducing battery-electric Mini production in Oxford,” a BMW spokesperson told Autocar.

2025 Mini Cooper electric hatch

Mini has already spent more than 600 million British pounds (approximately $758 million at current exchange rates) to ready the Oxford assembly plant and a nearby body plant in Swindon for EV production. The automaker confirmed to Autocar that it’s returning a related government grant.

Mini confirmed last November that a decision on whether to sell these electric models in the U.S. was being delayed. That left the door open for one or both models to reach the U.S. eventually, but that’s likely dependent on U.K. production. China-produced versions of the Mini Cooper and Aceman are likely non-starters for the U.S. due to steep tariffs. Mini did start taking orders for the Countryman SE ALL4 electric crossover last year.

Already on sale in Europe, the current-generation Mini Cooper EV was unveiled alongside the Countryman SE ALL4 at the 2023 Munich auto show, promising more range than the 114 EPA miles of the outgoing Mini Cooper SE. Gasoline versions of the current-generation Cooper are being sold in the U.S. as 2025 models.

2025 Mini Aceman

The Aceman crossover, sized between Cooper and Countryman, was unveiled in early 2024. That’s smaller than the Hyundai Kona Electric or Volvo EX30, which has made it a long shot for the U.S. all along.

Mini aims to go all-electric by 2030, and it has also shown sportier John Cooper Works (JCW) versions of some of its recent EVs. But a delay in U.K. production will likely further push back the introduction of them to the U.S.

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In recent years, Rolls-Royce has launched a series of Black Badge models aimed at updating the stalwart luxury brand’s image with a more youthful and sporty demeanor and a darker color palette. Now the first electric Rolls-Royce—the Spectre coupe—is getting the Black Badge treatment.

Rolls claims it’s the most powerful production car it’s ever sold—gasoline or electric. That’s thanks to a retuned version of the Spectre’s dual-motor powertrain, which is now rated at 659 hp and 792 lb-ft of torque. Those are increases of 75 hp and 128 lb-ft over the standard Spectre.

Full power is unlocked via Infinity Mode, which also sharpens accelerator response, but Rolls-Royce also created a Spirited Mode launch mode that allows the Spectre Black Badge to accelerate from 0-60 mph in 4.1 seconds, according to the automaker.

Rolls-Royce Spectre Black Badge

Spirited Mode is activated by fully depressing the accelerator and brake pedals, then releasing the brake, making it somewhat like the launch modes available in other high-power EVs. Such a feature might seem a bit out of character for the stately Rolls brand, but the automaker claims that a review of anonymized data voluntary provided by current Spectre owners showed a desire for such a feature, impart because drivers tended to use max power mainly in short bursts.

Other mechanical changes include retuned steering with a heavier feel, and suspension that aims for better body control and reduced squat under acceleration. It’s unclear how these changes will affect EPA range, which currently sits at 291 miles. That’s achieved with a 102-kwh battery pack, making the Spectre surprisingly efficient for a gilded luxury car—making 260 EPA-rated miles out of 102 kwh.

The Black Badge treatment also brings darkened chrome trim and 23-inch wheels on the outside, which in the press photos is matched by brooding Vapour Violet paint. Customers will have access to the typical large catalog of paint options, though, and even multiple colors for the car’s illuminated grille.

Rolls-Royce Spectre Black Badge

Inside, an elaborate interior motif consisting of 5,500 individual lighting elements is sprinkled across the dashboard and door panels, set against a piano black backdrop to give the impression of a night sky. It’s paired with what Rolls-Royce calls Technical Fibre, comprised of woven carbon fiber and metal over a wood base.

Such decadence is currently rare among EVs, but obligatory for a Rolls-Royce. The Spectre likely won’t be the ultra-luxury brand’s only electric model for long, as Rolls is also reportedly planning an electric SUV and sedan.