Quote:
Originally Posted by Hersbird
To me the Lordstown guy seems serious about making the EV, and it seems all the prototypes have hub motors. Maybe they have figured out the shortcomings or know nobody else is making pickups that last much more than 200,000 either without a $5000 motor or a $3000 transmission or $4000 worth of fuel injector work or all of the above. Even if it needed $10,000 worth of new hub motors after that it's still under what and average new pickup is going to bleed you.
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To use 4 motors instead of a single motor, transmission, and differential (or 2 motors if you want 4wd) .. the hub motors would need to be in the $3000 range. That's still $12K for the drivetrain ...
Everything that I have read so far points to .. unfortunately .. the $12K replacement motors installed at 50K - 75K(optomistic) or 30K - 40K(pessimistic), not 200K. And the failure mode of the hub motor is nasty. Rotating metal hub hits stationary metal stator when the single side-loaded bearing gets not-very-much wear. Screeching metal, abrupt stop
I'd love to be proven wrong by Lordstown. If they figured out how to make the bearings wear very little ... or have designed a different setup that uses 2 or 3 bearings and they can spread the load ... they'll be a couple of years ahead of everyone else and should be able to make a decent profit before anyone else can reproduce their success. Particularly if they continue to improve their design.