Elaphe In Wheel Performance Electric Motors Raise The Performance Bar For Electrics Significantly With In-Wheel Motors Providing Nearly 300 HP Each Making Individual Wheel Drive The Better Alternative

Elaphe is an interesting EV technology company, and they have created a powerful in-wheel electric motor that could increase EV performance significantly and make individual wheel drive more common.

What Is Individual Wheel Drive?

We know 4-wheel drive is where you have one engine, generally gas, which powers all four wheels, but these vehicles often need lock-up front hubs, lock-axels or positraction, and a lock-up transfer case to get full traction; otherwise, the power goes to the wheels with the least traction.

All-wheel-drive cars can be either gas or electric and use various technologies (in electrics, typically two motors, one for each axle) to drive the wheels. However, while this is better, this technology may still put too much power on the wheels with the least traction.

Individual-Wheel-Drive is generally electric, and this gives each wheel its own motor, which allows the ECU, the brain of the car, to direct power to where it will do the best, pulling it from wheels that have little or no traction and increasing it to the wheels that do.

This provides several unique advantages, including better torque vectoring than all-wheel drive for better cornering, the ability more safely use the motors to slow the vehicle, and the unique Elaphe design also allows room for performance disk brakes, addressing the big problem with Tesla performance cars, which is insufficient braking in their most powerful cars.

The Downsides

The downside to this and many, if not most, other individual-wheel-drive implementations is unsprung weight. Typically, you want your wheels and tires to be as light as possible because, when they hit a bump or anything else on the road, you want the tires to return to the road as rapidly as possible. Still, if they weigh a lot, it takes longer for these wheels to return to the road again.

Technological advancements, like the hydraulic suspension in the new Audi E-Tron GT Performance Edition, allow the car to lift the tire over the obstacle rapidly and return it just as rapidly to the road, potentially mitigating this downside. But with an EV with a more traditional suspension. The Elaphe motors weigh 88 lbs. Performance wheels and tires typically weigh between 17 and 27 lbs. This significantly increases unsprung weight.

On the other hand, placing the motors in the wheels rather than in the car reduces the car’s center of gravity, potentially offsetting the traction reduction caused by high unsprung weight.

Another downside is complexity, but EVs, by nature, are relatively simple compared to a typical gas car, and this should remain true even with four motors due to how much more complex gasoline power systems are when compared to electrics.

Performance

Each Elaphe motor provides around 288 HP, which can be increased somewhat with software. This means an individual Wheel Drive car with Elaphe technology could have more than 1,200 HP by slightly upgrading the motors, and given electric motors can be adjusted thousands of times a second, they should hook up, putting that fantastic level of power to the ground.

In addition, with the motors in the wheels, you should get far less weight transfer under hard acceleration, which typically pushes the weight and traction to the back of the vehicle while reducing the traction the front tires contribute. The weight of those front motors should significantly increase the traction under hard acceleration, making it more likely you’ll be able to put this massive amount of power down.

Finally, with Individual-Wheel-Drive, you reduce the complexity of the physical drive train. No differentials, transfer boxes, or drive shafts make pulling the motors far easier for repair and potentially easier to remove the main battery pack.

Wrapping Up:

Elaphe and companies like them are working on electric hub motors and promise to increase EVs' measurable performance massively. This, coupled with the coming battery improvements, should make it even harder for ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) cars to compete in the world once that new technology is available.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst covering automotive technology and battery developments at Torque News. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.