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I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was a

I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was able to develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast. (Edit: My more clarified point is regarding the machinery required + place to accommodate them to work on electric motors vs. ICE metal parts and all the intermediary parts transfering power in the drivetrain. The shop in the video is smaller than many would imagine.) When these hopefully go to the next generation Formula E cars, we’ll see some crazy improvements in cornering. The newest generation already has active 4WD. I imagine this can bring even better torque adjustment improvements.

JSR_FDED 3mo ago
The new season of Formula One feels (unfortunately) like Formula E!
- eightysixfour 3mo ago
  In Formula E the drivers control engine behavior and regen. It is much better than F1 right now.
- jcgrillo 3mo ago
  It would be awesome if they would implement a crude rule: no computers. You can use a computer to design the car--CAD/CAM/CAE are all fine--but no stored program computers are allowed in the race car. I think that would improve F1 tremendously.
  - pbmonster 3mo ago
    Very funny idea. That basically means a carbureted gas engine, or a direct injection diesel with a mechanical governor and mechanically timed injection pumps - can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically. So, basically '60s Formula 1. Might be fun to watch. We'd certainly see some crazy engine designs and a lot of re-fueling pit stops...
    - jcgrillo 3mo ago
      > can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically. This is not accurate, the first production direct injection gasoline automotive engine was in the 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL. It's true, you probably won't be running piezoelectric injectors without computer controls, but there's nothing preventing direct injection. But that would make it interesting. How many of the advances we've made in the past 75yrs could be accomplished some other way if you take the computer away? You don't need a computer to accomplish nanosecond timing. Maybe there's a clever analog way to run piezoelectric injectors.
      - jcgrillo 3mo ago
        To phrase it maybe a little more provocatively: how would you accomplish the precise timing necessary to achieve spherical implosion? This was possible with analog electronics in 1945. Surely in 2026 we can also build analog piezoelectric fuel injection systems.
        bityard 3mo ago
        To play devil's advocate, this starts to get into the territory of, how do you define a computer? If the analog circuitry is using sensors and passive components to inject fuel at spark at just the right time under varying conditions, "computing" them, one might say... Maybe "no integrated circuits" might be a finer line.
        jcgrillo 3mo ago
        A stored program computer, that is a device which can run arbitrary programs from storage, is a pretty rigorously defined thing. Like, we all have a pretty clear shared understanding that things like FPGAs and microcontrollers are computers, whereas you can have integrated circuits which don't have these capabilities. To be clear, I don't think making elaborate analog ICs would be really "cheating" so long as they don't put a generic von Neumann machine on it. EDIT: to be more clear, what I'd be trying to achieve with a rule change like this is making "computation" a somewhat larger investment in time and difficulty. By and large, at least in my opinion, profligate, non-essential computation has enabled many of the things that have made the sport less interesting. It's also made cars suck a lot. This would impose kind of a tax on those things.
  - _carbyau_ 3mo ago
    Most F1 fans have an opinion on F1 regulations. I like your take. I want to see F1 car design be about function/performance above all. I want to see awesome gadgets using insanely clever design. Then ideally that design should influence built items in the rest of the world. F1 used to be influential in creating and developing high technology. Now it seems to be about gathering high technology from elsewhere so as to meet the insane regulations most efficiently.
picofarad 3mo ago
> develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast. How do you know this for a fact? Chinese press releases? You've driven one? Some auto blogger drove one? After world war 2 Gorbachev or whoever visited the United States and during that trio visited a supermarket. He thought it was a facade, possibly, put on just for him, there's no way Americans are this prosperous (or whatever, this good at agriculture, farm equipment, etc) Also do the race cars have 4 wheel drive, or all-wheel drive? I'm wagering all-wheel with "torque vectoring" and "Yaw control", like a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X.
- throwaway20222 3mo ago
  Listening to the heads of the American and European car companies say the same and driving in them in china. I know that is different than personally disassembling one and reviewing it, but I am not sure the incentive for the other companies to say they have inferior products, unless it was a play for subsidies or deregulation of some form. Personally I feel that the rest of the world continues to dramatically under estimate China’s progress and technological advancement at our own peril. Is there fluff and are their lots of untrue claims, of course, but that is certainly not something they have a monopoly on.
  - crote 3mo ago
    It's because the West still views Chinese people as dumb laborers: just a bunch of cheap bodies who can do nothing more than screwing together our brilliant inventions. China creates something of equal quality as a Western company? It must've been IP theft! China competes on price? It must be state subsidies! China creates something innovative? Don't use it - it'll send your data back to the CCP! Or just pretend it doesn't exist. In reality Chinese people aren't idiots. We've spent a couple of decades giving away all of our manufacturing knowledge for a few cents of shareholder value, so it is not exactly surprising that they now possess that knowledge - and are able to build upon it. China is dealing with huge demographic changes, so obviously they've been pushing for automation, so it shouldn't be a surprise that those factories are now rapidly automating. Which we could've done in the West, but outsourcing it to cheap Chinese labor was cheaper in the short term. For every genius in the West there are ten geniuses in China, and with their top-down economic policy they are able to apply it where it truly matters. We created our own worst enemy, and are now crying foul. If we don't get rid of our outdated racist biases soon and start treating China like the successful superpower that it is, we're going to get completely steamrolled in the next few decades.
AtlasBarfed 3mo ago
I'm not saying there isn't room for innovation but... Electric motors have been around for a century now already in many applications. It's not like the Dawn of the steam engine
- graftak 3mo ago
  According to wikipedia[1] the first industrial steam engine (1712) was invented almost 100 years before the invention of the steam locomotive (1804), arguably its greatest evolutionary feat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    The timeline of the electric motor isn't much behind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor.
cromka 3mo ago
AFAIK Chinese electric cars used western motor drivetrains and often still do?
pjc50 3mo ago
The Chinese EV industry is actually lead by development of batteries, especially CATL. Along with the pack engineering, which is good old Mech.E stuff about heat transfer and physical strength. Secondarily power electronics; at that scale, you can't just pick a bigger transistor and call it a day. By comparison the motors seem to be a mostly solved problem, although I'm sure there's still some scope for power-to-weight engineering there, it's not as critical as the battery pack.
- DrBazza 3mo ago
  And is development of batteries (and better magnetics) not just chemical engineering and material science? Motors might be a 'solved problem' - there might not be much innovation, Maxwell's laws aren't changing any time soon, but there will surely be a lot of incremental improvement - an early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE.
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    > n early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE. But how much worse is a early 1900s electric motor from a modern one? I can't find data, but I suspect the first electric motor from the 1830s is more efficient than a modern ICE (even if we assume the ICE is built for efficiency, screw emissions). There is some room for improvement, but there isn't much difference between our best motors and perfection (a carnot cycle by contrast is as best much worse than perfection)
    - crote 3mo ago
      Early electric motors were awful, because there was no good way to control their speed. For example, DC motors used in some late-1900s trains still had a giant variable resistor in series with their motor, burning away a huge chunk of the power as heat to force the motor to run at a lower speed during acceleration. AC motors weren't much better. Electric motors only became truly efficient when variable-frequency drive became viable, which was in the 1980s due to semiconductor innovation.
tw04 3mo ago
>I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was able to develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast. The talent had very little impact to be honest. The primary factor was a government looking 50 years down the road seeing that: 1. ICE engines have little to no long-term future in transportation. 2. global warming is a thing whether the right wing in the US likes it or not. 3. They were never going to overtake the West in ICE engines and had to attack from a different angle. The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general. For the rest of the planet, EVs becoming the primary form of transportation is just an obvious and logical conclusion, even if it takes us another 25-50 years to get there. China saw it and decided to heavily incentivize and subsidize the rapid expansion of EVs both to fix the air quality issues in China and corner the market.
- pstuart 3mo ago
  The current admin is actively hostile to EVs, but I think the real problem was the chicken and egg issue of charging stations: they wouldn't be built because there wasn't enough demand for them and EVs would be limited in sales because they wouldn't have chargers to use on the road. This is where Tesla made a huge difference with Supercharger stations. I am no fan of Elon, but that work was fundamental in making EVs viable in America.
  - henrikschroder 3mo ago
    Nevertheless, there seems to be zero buy-in from commercial players in the US. It's such a weird uphill battle. I live in the US, but every summer I spend a month in Sweden, and the past two years I've rented EVs for the entire stay, and the buildout of chargers these past 4-5 years has been astonishing. It's gone from crap to fantastic in a very short time, and that's without massive government intervention or subsidies or screaming and cajoling. Because in Sweden, the primary driver of charging stops along highways and in the cities are gas stations. They already make all their profit from incidental purchases and not the gas itself, so them pivoting to EV charging stops makes perfect sense. They already have the infrastructure in place to sell you overpriced hotdogs and coffee and snacks for your road trip, they already have restrooms in place. But they also do the same in the cities, it seems like every city gas station has also put up a couple of 350W charging stations. It's not half-assed, they mean business. They all see the writing on the wall, in neighbouring Norway EV's are 90+% of all new car sales, Sweden is at ~30% right now, and climbing, so gas stations will go out of business if they don't pivot to EV charging. It's fundamental market economy forces at work, the kind of stuff that the US normally prides itself of. So why is that not happening in the US?
SoftTalker 3mo ago
Standing on the shoulders of giants, mainly. All the industrial processes and machine tool development that happened in the ICE car industry over the last century (and the electronic hardware manufacturing, more recently) was available day one.
mattgrice 3mo ago
Low power and high power electronics don't actually have a lot in common other than the broad types of engineers you need to be educating. China has industrial policy. The country and companies are able to invest in BEV technology knowing that everyone agrees on the direction.

JSR_FDED 3mo ago

The new season of Formula One feels (unfortunately) like Formula E!

eightysixfour 3mo ago
In Formula E the drivers control engine behavior and regen. It is much better than F1 right now.
jcgrillo 3mo ago
It would be awesome if they would implement a crude rule: no computers. You can use a computer to design the car--CAD/CAM/CAE are all fine--but no stored program computers are allowed in the race car. I think that would improve F1 tremendously.
- pbmonster 3mo ago
  Very funny idea. That basically means a carbureted gas engine, or a direct injection diesel with a mechanical governor and mechanically timed injection pumps - can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically. So, basically '60s Formula 1. Might be fun to watch. We'd certainly see some crazy engine designs and a lot of re-fueling pit stops...
  - jcgrillo 3mo ago
    > can't run a direct injection gas engine without a digital engine control unit, because the injection timings are much to precise to do mechanically. This is not accurate, the first production direct injection gasoline automotive engine was in the 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL. It's true, you probably won't be running piezoelectric injectors without computer controls, but there's nothing preventing direct injection. But that would make it interesting. How many of the advances we've made in the past 75yrs could be accomplished some other way if you take the computer away? You don't need a computer to accomplish nanosecond timing. Maybe there's a clever analog way to run piezoelectric injectors.
    - jcgrillo 3mo ago
      To phrase it maybe a little more provocatively: how would you accomplish the precise timing necessary to achieve spherical implosion? This was possible with analog electronics in 1945. Surely in 2026 we can also build analog piezoelectric fuel injection systems.
      - bityard 3mo ago
        To play devil's advocate, this starts to get into the territory of, how do you define a computer? If the analog circuitry is using sensors and passive components to inject fuel at spark at just the right time under varying conditions, "computing" them, one might say... Maybe "no integrated circuits" might be a finer line.
        jcgrillo 3mo ago
        A stored program computer, that is a device which can run arbitrary programs from storage, is a pretty rigorously defined thing. Like, we all have a pretty clear shared understanding that things like FPGAs and microcontrollers are computers, whereas you can have integrated circuits which don't have these capabilities. To be clear, I don't think making elaborate analog ICs would be really "cheating" so long as they don't put a generic von Neumann machine on it. EDIT: to be more clear, what I'd be trying to achieve with a rule change like this is making "computation" a somewhat larger investment in time and difficulty. By and large, at least in my opinion, profligate, non-essential computation has enabled many of the things that have made the sport less interesting. It's also made cars suck a lot. This would impose kind of a tax on those things.
- _carbyau_ 3mo ago
  Most F1 fans have an opinion on F1 regulations. I like your take. I want to see F1 car design be about function/performance above all. I want to see awesome gadgets using insanely clever design. Then ideally that design should influence built items in the rest of the world. F1 used to be influential in creating and developing high technology. Now it seems to be about gathering high technology from elsewhere so as to meet the insane regulations most efficiently.

picofarad 3mo ago

> develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast. How do you know this for a fact? Chinese press releases? You've driven one? Some auto blogger drove one? After world war 2 Gorbachev or whoever visited the United States and during that trio visited a supermarket. He thought it was a facade, possibly, put on just for him, there's no way Americans are this prosperous (or whatever, this good at agriculture, farm equipment, etc) Also do the race cars have 4 wheel drive, or all-wheel drive? I'm wagering all-wheel with "torque vectoring" and "Yaw control", like a Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X.

throwaway20222 3mo ago
Listening to the heads of the American and European car companies say the same and driving in them in china. I know that is different than personally disassembling one and reviewing it, but I am not sure the incentive for the other companies to say they have inferior products, unless it was a play for subsidies or deregulation of some form. Personally I feel that the rest of the world continues to dramatically under estimate China’s progress and technological advancement at our own peril. Is there fluff and are their lots of untrue claims, of course, but that is certainly not something they have a monopoly on.
- crote 3mo ago
  It's because the West still views Chinese people as dumb laborers: just a bunch of cheap bodies who can do nothing more than screwing together our brilliant inventions. China creates something of equal quality as a Western company? It must've been IP theft! China competes on price? It must be state subsidies! China creates something innovative? Don't use it - it'll send your data back to the CCP! Or just pretend it doesn't exist. In reality Chinese people aren't idiots. We've spent a couple of decades giving away all of our manufacturing knowledge for a few cents of shareholder value, so it is not exactly surprising that they now possess that knowledge - and are able to build upon it. China is dealing with huge demographic changes, so obviously they've been pushing for automation, so it shouldn't be a surprise that those factories are now rapidly automating. Which we could've done in the West, but outsourcing it to cheap Chinese labor was cheaper in the short term. For every genius in the West there are ten geniuses in China, and with their top-down economic policy they are able to apply it where it truly matters. We created our own worst enemy, and are now crying foul. If we don't get rid of our outdated racist biases soon and start treating China like the successful superpower that it is, we're going to get completely steamrolled in the next few decades.

AtlasBarfed 3mo ago

I'm not saying there isn't room for innovation but... Electric motors have been around for a century now already in many applications. It's not like the Dawn of the steam engine

graftak 3mo ago
According to wikipedia[1] the first industrial steam engine (1712) was invented almost 100 years before the invention of the steam locomotive (1804), arguably its greatest evolutionary feat. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine
- bluGill 3mo ago
  The timeline of the electric motor isn't much behind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_electric_motor.

cromka 3mo ago

AFAIK Chinese electric cars used western motor drivetrains and often still do?

pjc50 3mo ago

The Chinese EV industry is actually lead by development of batteries, especially CATL. Along with the pack engineering, which is good old Mech.E stuff about heat transfer and physical strength. Secondarily power electronics; at that scale, you can't just pick a bigger transistor and call it a day. By comparison the motors seem to be a mostly solved problem, although I'm sure there's still some scope for power-to-weight engineering there, it's not as critical as the battery pack.

DrBazza 3mo ago
And is development of batteries (and better magnetics) not just chemical engineering and material science? Motors might be a 'solved problem' - there might not be much innovation, Maxwell's laws aren't changing any time soon, but there will surely be a lot of incremental improvement - an early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  > n early 1900s ICE is considerably worse than a 2000s ICE. But how much worse is a early 1900s electric motor from a modern one? I can't find data, but I suspect the first electric motor from the 1830s is more efficient than a modern ICE (even if we assume the ICE is built for efficiency, screw emissions). There is some room for improvement, but there isn't much difference between our best motors and perfection (a carnot cycle by contrast is as best much worse than perfection)
  - crote 3mo ago
    Early electric motors were awful, because there was no good way to control their speed. For example, DC motors used in some late-1900s trains still had a giant variable resistor in series with their motor, burning away a huge chunk of the power as heat to force the motor to run at a lower speed during acceleration. AC motors weren't much better. Electric motors only became truly efficient when variable-frequency drive became viable, which was in the 1980s due to semiconductor innovation.

tw04 3mo ago

>I wonder how developing electric motors compares to combustion engines. My hunch says that it’s the main reason the Chinese high-tech electronics industry was able to develop and iterate leading electric vehicles so fast. The talent had very little impact to be honest. The primary factor was a government looking 50 years down the road seeing that: 1. ICE engines have little to no long-term future in transportation. 2. global warming is a thing whether the right wing in the US likes it or not. 3. They were never going to overtake the West in ICE engines and had to attack from a different angle. The US' lack of breakthroughs in EVs has little to do with technology or expertise and everything to do with an administration that is openly hostile towards EVs and renewable energy in general. For the rest of the planet, EVs becoming the primary form of transportation is just an obvious and logical conclusion, even if it takes us another 25-50 years to get there. China saw it and decided to heavily incentivize and subsidize the rapid expansion of EVs both to fix the air quality issues in China and corner the market.

pstuart 3mo ago
The current admin is actively hostile to EVs, but I think the real problem was the chicken and egg issue of charging stations: they wouldn't be built because there wasn't enough demand for them and EVs would be limited in sales because they wouldn't have chargers to use on the road. This is where Tesla made a huge difference with Supercharger stations. I am no fan of Elon, but that work was fundamental in making EVs viable in America.
- henrikschroder 3mo ago
  Nevertheless, there seems to be zero buy-in from commercial players in the US. It's such a weird uphill battle. I live in the US, but every summer I spend a month in Sweden, and the past two years I've rented EVs for the entire stay, and the buildout of chargers these past 4-5 years has been astonishing. It's gone from crap to fantastic in a very short time, and that's without massive government intervention or subsidies or screaming and cajoling. Because in Sweden, the primary driver of charging stops along highways and in the cities are gas stations. They already make all their profit from incidental purchases and not the gas itself, so them pivoting to EV charging stops makes perfect sense. They already have the infrastructure in place to sell you overpriced hotdogs and coffee and snacks for your road trip, they already have restrooms in place. But they also do the same in the cities, it seems like every city gas station has also put up a couple of 350W charging stations. It's not half-assed, they mean business. They all see the writing on the wall, in neighbouring Norway EV's are 90+% of all new car sales, Sweden is at ~30% right now, and climbing, so gas stations will go out of business if they don't pivot to EV charging. It's fundamental market economy forces at work, the kind of stuff that the US normally prides itself of. So why is that not happening in the US?

SoftTalker 3mo ago

Standing on the shoulders of giants, mainly. All the industrial processes and machine tool development that happened in the ICE car industry over the last century (and the electronic hardware manufacturing, more recently) was available day one.

mattgrice 3mo ago

Low power and high power electronics don't actually have a lot in common other than the broad types of engineers you need to be educating. China has industrial policy. The country and companies are able to invest in BEV technology knowing that everyone agrees on the direction.