Porsche has been developing in-wheel electric motors since 1900

Porsche established its repute with inner combustion sports activities automobiles, however on the daybreak of the twentieth century, Ferdinand Porsche, whose son Ferry would later discovered the famend sports-car model, experimented with electrical motors, together with in-wheel hub motors.

The preliminary enthusiasm for electrical automobiles emerged across the early 1900s, previous to the dominance of inner combustion know-how. On April 4, 1900, an electrical automobile developed with Porsche’s contribution was revealed on the Paris World’s Honest.

Having beforehand constructed a whole electrical automobile in 1898, Porsche designed electrical motors that could possibly be fitted into the entrance hubs of a automobile produced by the Austrian firm Jason Lohner & Co. This innovation was completed in simply 10 weeks. Every hub motor produced 2.4 horsepower, enabling the automobile, generally known as the Lohner-Porsche, to achieve a most pace of 19.8 mph. Along with the motors, one noteworthy function of the Lohner-Porsche was its four-wheel braking system, which was fairly uncommon at the moment.

Collaborating with Ludwig Lohner, Porsche continued to refine hub motor know-how, creating three completely different sizes with outputs as much as 11.8 horsepower to be used in vans, buses, and passenger automobiles. These motors had been designed to work with lead-acid batteries, a typical know-how on the time, which provided a claimed vary of as much as 31 miles.

Porsche additionally engineered an all-wheel-drive electrical race automobile known as La Toujours Contente (French for “the one who’s all the time glad”), geared up with a 13.8-hp motor at every wheel. Nonetheless, the engineer’s hub motors discovered their foremost utility in hybrid automobiles, starting with the Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus (Latin for “all the time alive”), which merged entrance hub motors with a gasoline engine.

Lohner and Porsche ultimately applied this hybrid configuration in round 300 manufacturing automobiles, together with 40 items for the fireplace division in Vienna, together with varied taxis and personal passenger automobiles.

Over a century later, in-wheel motors proceed to generate curiosity, although their adoption in manufacturing automobiles has progressed slowly. In 2023, the Chinese language automaker Dongfeng introduced it was the primary to implement in-wheel motors in a completely homologated passenger automobile, regardless of these motors additionally being deliberate for the Lightyear 0 and Lordstown Endurance earlier than manufacturing points arose for each fashions.

Moreover, Aptera is incorporating hub motors into its upcoming super-efficient three-wheeler, and patent filings from established automakers similar to Ferrari, Hyundai, and Toyota recommend they’re exploring this know-how as properly.



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