Millions of miles with one electric motor: prototype can be used again and again

Unlike modern combustion engines, electric motors can power an electric car for millions of kilometers - in theory. One defective bearing, faulty electronics or a rusty body and the motor ends up on the scrap heap along with all its valuable components.

It is currently shredded and melted down in order to extract all the valuable metals. However, the purity deteriorates in the process, which makes it considerably more difficult to reuse in an electric motor.

What is currently standard - and not just for motors - sounds enormously energy-intensive and very impractical. Reason enough to take a different approach, which the Fraunhofer Institute has just presented in collaboration with a number of automotive suppliers.

The aim is to create a prototype of an electric motor whose design is based on four value retention strategies: reuse, repair, remanufacturing and material recycling. The differences to current raw material recycling could hardly be bigger.

Don't throw it away, use it again and again

With reuse, the e-motor should continue to be used in one piece. Of course, this requires standards so that the engine can be reused in different vehicles and, ideally, over generations with minimal effort. PC builders will be familiar with the principle.

With repair, the focus is on simple maintenance and the interchangeability of standardized components. If only the housing is damaged or there is a defective bearing, it must be easy to access and replace.

Remanufacturing is closely linked to repairability. The only difference is that parts of an electric motor should also be able to be used in another motor. Here, too, the analogy to the good old PC cannot be dismissed.

Last but not least, material recycling should make it possible, for example, to reuse the material of the permanent magnet or certain alloys as a whole instead of breaking them down into their original raw materials.

Ultimately, this could amount to a small revolution if entire assemblies of an electric car can be used again in the next generation or in another car from a different brand.

The use of rare raw materials and metals that are difficult to extract, such as neodymium, could also be put to the test. After all, sufficiently powerful electric motors are already being developed entirely without permanent magnets or other critical raw materials.

There are many small steps that could ultimately significantly reduce the price of the electric engine and therefore also the electric car itself. Almost in the same way that the standardized components in PCs could significantly reduce their prices.