New Electric Truck Company - Lordstown Motor Corp - LMC

[NeilBlanchard]

More details on the hub motors:

https://www.greencarreports.com/news...eel-hub-motors

[freebeard]

Very little more. A few shots in the 1:31 video. Did I miss something?

[oil pan 4]

Targeted towards commercial users, as in hopefully no highway driving.
If they use hub motors I await the fails to start rolling in.

[ldjessee00]

I definitely see hub motors as being ok for city/urban duty cycle (lower speeds, on road). So, buses, school buses, trashtrucks, mail trucks, etc.

I do not know for sure, but would assume bad shock or vibration would not be great for hub motors.

[oil pan 4]

No highway driven hub motor has been able to outlast a set of tires.

[Flakbadger]

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

No highway driven hub motor has been able to outlast a set of tires.

Why?

I don't know much about hub motors--and I remember the project from whatever college where they were trying to make a retrofit kit to put hub motors on the rear axles of smaller cars (replacing drum brakes) to make any vehicle into a hybrid. You're saying the motors wear out within like 30,000-40,000 miles?

I always thought it was a genius idea and I even went so far as to contact the college in question at the time to ask them about it for my Yaris.

But if the motors wear out super quick I guess the whole thing is bogus. Is this an engineering problem, IE make a better hub motor, or something to do with the design that makes them prone to failure?

[Piotrsko]

Probably a design/engineering issue. Typically they require a very small air gap between the rotor and stator. So you end up with bearing wear and thermal expansion issues, which could be resolved by better design and materials. Downside is they get bigger and heavier which increases the unsprung weight, a bad juju consideration.

[ldjessee00]

Total speculation on my part, but I assume that the hub motor being a mass added to the unsprung part of the drive train is subject to a lot of shocks and vibrations.

At lower speeds, these will not be so bad, but at highway speed, or even over 45 MPH, the force will be enough to cause issues, either in the metal that makes up the hub motor, or the epoxy (or what have you) that keep the windings and/or magnets in place.

I did some quick googling, but the scientific papers I came across I was not sure if they even applied, so I didn't link to them.

Protean, which makes in-wheel hub motors, says if made correctly, it is not a problem... but most of their current products are in urban, lower speed vehicles, like buses.

Yet another concern that has been voiced about in-wheel motors is their supposed lack of durability. Placing the motors in the wheels, as opposed to under the hood, means they will get battered when the car travels over rough roads. They’ll also be pelted by water, sand, gravel, and all the other *detritus we drive over on a regular basis. Yes, these conditions could pose a problem, but we’ve shown through extensive real-world testing that it’s perfectly possible to engineer a product that can hold up to the beating.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transporta...more-efficient

[oil pan 4]

In classical motor design you want as small a gap as possible between the rotor and stator. In smaller motors it's usually 1mm or less. When the bearings start to go you lose control of that gap real quick.
The problem appears to be when you add a motor to a hub it becomes so heavy it beats the bearings to death.
Now on something like a full float barrel bearing in an oil bath like on heavy duty truck axles the bearings should be able to hold up even with a ridiculous amount of mass on either side of the bearings.
It could work on a truck, but no one is going to put huge full float oil bath axles on a car.
It's easier to do what nissan, tesla and GM have all done.

[freebeard]

IMHO this is better:


https://insideevs.com/news/327855/zf...urban-vehicle/

Move the motor out of the hub and you can add gear reduction.