this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
325 points (94.3% liked)
Technology
60115 readers
2588 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is revolutionary, folks: e-Axles! Can you believe it? They made an electric car!
They're describing an electric car.
Then they gave it a fancy proprietary name so gullible tech writers think it's Technology™️ and regurgitate their ad copy as news articles.
To 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
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 minimal supporting components - 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 vague language that they literally just described an electric car.
This entire article is just ad-copy. It's fashion writing for tech nerds.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
I've programmed quad motor torque vectoring systems myself
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.