Electric vehicles, whether or not they’re automobiles on the street or electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) plane, are constructed round comparable electric motors. However there are very important variations together with element prices, mass, and redundancy.
Jon Wagner spent 5 years because the senior director of battery engineering for Tesla earlier than becoming a member of California-based eVTOL developer Joby Aviation in 2017. He spoke with IEEE Spectrum about how engineering differs between automobiles and plane.
How do eVTOL motors differ from automobile motors?
Jon Wagner: Usually, floor transportation has a unique deal with value versus mass. You recognize, would you be keen to spend extra on the components to be able to save a specific amount of mass? The trade-offs finish on the bottom car and at a sure level the price is dominant, whereas with aviation, the trade-offs between value and mass go loads deeper. And so for sure options eVTOL makers are keen to spend extra money to be able to allow both lighter weight or better effectivity.
The opposite key distinction is expounded to security. In essence, we’re coping with the identical motor applied sciences for floor transportation and aviation proper now, so the failure modes are comparable. However in fact, with aviation now we have the need for continued secure flight and touchdown, and that drives what you do within the design to mitigate these failures in the event that they had been to happen. In lots of circumstances in floor transportation, the mitigation for a failure is to tug over safely to the facet of the street. In aviation, the mitigation is redundancy, as a result of there’s not an possibility to tug over.
Is redundancy designed into EV motors?
Wagner: Sometimes, redundancy is just not designed into electric vehicle drive systems solely for the aim of redundancy. There are some automobiles now which have all-wheel drive—so there’s a motor on the entrance, a motor on the again—in order a secondary characteristic you get the redundancy. But it surely wasn’t achieved with the first intent of getting redundancy.
How does Joby’s eVTOL manufacturing examine to EV manufacturing?
Wagner: Essentially the most environment friendly solution to run a large-scale engineering effort in a mature business, resembling automotive, is to interrupt your system up into items that may be outsourced to suppliers who’re going to do a extremely good job on each bit. The draw back is that if you break an issue up into three items, you now have interface boundaries between every of those items, and people at all times create inefficiencies. We had been capable of design extremely built-in options with out taking that manufacturing penalty.
Are there any supplies you’re actually enthusiastic about?
Wagner: Permendur [a cobalt-iron alloy] sometimes prices within the neighborhood of 10 instances as a lot as conventional motor metal. That’s important, and it’s typically not utilized in floor transportation due to that value. It comes with small enhancements in efficiency, however sufficient that for aviation it’s fairly attention-grabbing.
Will electric aircraft catch on like floor EVs?
Wagner: I’ve at all times needed to be a really ahead thinker with respect to power-train. Nevertheless, one of many issues I’ve discovered over time is that power-train growth has to come back with a really wholesome dose of endurance. Creating an entire new kind of power-train is a giant endeavor, however it’s one which I’m very assured the aviation business will undertake. We’re actually endeavor it right here at Joby, and we’ll see that broaden, I’m positive, with time.
This text seems within the Could 2026 print subject as “Jon Wagner.”
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