We have already told you how the Tesla Model S works as a car. But the electric motor itself — the part shared by every EV we’ve tested, from the Polestar to the Hyundai IONIQ, the Volkswagen ID. Buzz or the Volvo XC40 P8 — has never had its own explanation. It deserves one, because unlike a combustion engine, it has almost no moving parts to look at, and yet it is arguably a more sophisticated piece of engineering than the block it replaces.
Electricity in, rotation out
An electric motor produces torque exploiting a single physical principle: a conductor carrying current, placed inside a magnetic field, experiences a force. Arrange several of these conductors around a rotating shaft and you get continuous rotation instead of a single push. In practice, the motor has two parts: a fixed outer ring wound with coils, the stator, and a part that spins inside it, the rotor. Feeding the stator coils with alternating current in the right sequence creates a rotating magnetic field; the rotor is dragged along by it, or reacts to it, depending on the design — and that difference in how the rotor responds is what separates the two motor families that matter in EVs today.
Two families, two philosophies
The Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) has rotor magnets, almost always built with rare-earth elements like neodymium, that lock onto the stator’s rotating field and turn in perfect step with it (hence “synchronous”). Because the magnetic field doesn’t have to be induced, a PMSM loses less energy as heat, so it reaches higher efficiency in a smaller, lighter package — which is why it now equips the majority of EVs on sale, from compact hatchbacks to premium SUVs.
The Induction Motor, also called Asynchronous Motor (ASM), has no magnets at all: the rotor is a simple cage of conductive bars, and the rotating stator field induces current — and therefore a magnetic field — in that cage by itself, slightly “slipping” behind the stator field (hence “asynchronous”). It is less efficient at partial load and needs a physically larger motor for the same power, but it needs no rare-earth material at all, degrades more gracefully, and can be freewheeled with zero drag when not driven. It was famously the layout Tesla chose for the original Model S rear motor, and several manufacturers still pair it with a PMSM on the second axle of dual-motor EVs specifically to get the best of both: PM efficiency for daily driving, induction torque on demand for the times it’s actually needed.
Both layouts above are, in almost every production EV today, radial flux designs: the magnetic field crosses between rotor and stator radially, the same way it has since the first electric motors. A less common axial flux geometry instead sandwiches a thin, disc-shaped rotor between one or two stators, with the field running parallel to the shaft — a flatter, pancake-like motor that needs less magnet material for the same torque and packages more easily into a wheel hub or a short e-axle. Still confined to niche applications (the Mercedes-AMG One’s hybrid system uses it), it is where two more EU-funded projects, further down, are placing their bets.
The inverter: the part that makes it all work
A battery only stores direct current; a motor needs alternating current at a frequency the driver controls with the accelerator pedal. That translation happens in the inverter, a block of power semiconductors that switches the battery’s DC on and off thousands of times a second to synthesise an AC waveform of the right voltage and frequency — and does the reverse during regenerative braking, converting the motor’s AC output back into DC to recharge the battery. The semiconductors themselves have become a technology race of their own: silicon carbide (SiC) switches lose markedly less energy than the older silicon IGBTs, which is why SiC inverters are now the standard on efficiency-focused and high-voltage EVs. Voltage architecture matters here too — moving a pack from 400V to 800V halves the current needed for the same power, which cuts resistive losses in cables and inverter alike, and is the single biggest reason recent EVs can accept much higher DC fast-charging power without the cabling melting.
Where the state of the art is heading: Europe’s 2Zero research
The electric motor is not a finished technology — it is the subject of active EU-funded research under 2Zero, the “Towards zero emission road transport” partnership co-programmed between the European Commission and the automotive industry inside Horizon Europe, backed by roughly €615M of EU funding. Its research agenda explicitly targets “high efficiency and low cost electric motors for circularity and low use of rare resources” — in short, motors that match a PMSM’s efficiency without its dependency on rare earths mined and refined almost entirely outside Europe. Three projects funded under that call, all listed on CORDIS (the European Commission’s own research project database), show where that effort is heading in practice:
- HEFT (2022-2026, €3.48M, coordinated by Mondragon Goi Eskola Politéknikoa, Spain) is developing a motor concept that cuts rare-earth content by 60% and reaches over 80% recyclability, while still targeting a 20% cut in losses and a power density above 7 kW/kg — explicitly designed so a mass-produced EV motor no longer needs to trade efficiency for magnet independence.
- HiVEP (2025-2028, €4.98M, coordinated by RWTH Aachen, Germany) pushes powertrain voltage above 800V while pairing it with rare-earth-free electric machines optimised specifically for high voltage and SiC power electronics, targeting sub-10-minute charging and a 25% cut in energy consumption.
- GEN1200 (2024-2027, €5.0M, coordinated by Ghent University, Belgium) goes a step further architecturally, integrating motor, inverter and transmission into a single electric axle built around 1700V SiC electronics, designed to support 350kW charging while remaining backward-compatible with today’s 400V and 800V chargers.
- MAXIMA (2023-2027, €5.48M, coordinated by Arts et Métiers, France) and CliMAFlux (2024-2027, €4.70M, coordinated by Ghent University, Belgium) are both taking the axial-flux route instead, aiming to bring that geometry’s lower magnet content and higher power density out of niche applications and into a mass-producible automotive motor.
None of these are lab curiosities: all three are industrial consortia including car manufacturers and tier-1 suppliers, with a shared 2026-2028 horizon for results to reach production programmes.
Why it matters beyond the spec sheet
The choice between PMSM and induction, and the progress of projects like these, isn’t an abstract engineering debate: it shows up directly in three things a buyer actually experiences. Efficiency determines how much of the battery’s energy reaches the road as range rather than heat. Rare-earth dependency is a real supply-chain and cost exposure for the whole industry, since the refining of neodymium and related elements is concentrated almost entirely in one country outside Europe. And recyclability decides whether the motor in an EV scrapped in 2035 becomes raw material for the next one, or waste. The motor spinning quietly under the floor of every EV we test is where all three of those questions are actually being answered.
Photo: © Car-Shooters