Comment on Honda debuts new global EV series, Honda Zero, coming in 2026
fhqwgads@possumpat.io 1 year agoTo be fair e-axles are actually a thing. You can mount the electric motor where an engine would be and use largely the same components as a traditional car to get the motion to the wheels. Instead e-axles basically wrap all the motion components around the axle. Motor trend had an article about it a while ago.
www.motortrend.com/news/e-axle-vs-central-drive-motor-layout-commercial-evs
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
So it’s basically a fancy Technology™️ term for a layout decision which was called motor on axle for decades until a marketing department decided they needed some Innovation™️, and this tech writer described it so poorly I couldn’t even identify it even though I’ve programmed quad motor torque vectoring systems myself. Electric motors have this interesting property where they require such little support - basically a couple of power wires and some sensors - that they can scale to any size with very little overhead, and so you can do 4 motors. That’s it, electric cars give you this possibility for free.
“Motor-on-axle” is descriptive and helpful. In fact it’s too descriptive, because it reveals that nothing special is going on. “e-Axle” is opaque nonsense for gullible tech writers, and this one tried to make it sound special but ended up opting for such a vague language that they literally just described an electric car.
This entire article is just ad-copy. It’s fashion writing for tech nerds.