Mercedes-Owned YASA reveals a 737 hp axial flux electric motor that weighs just 29 pounds

Axial flux electric motors are a hot topic these days. They aren’t new, as our electronics guru Jeffrey Jenkins pointed out in his deep dive into the axial flux world back in 2021. But innovative designs from motor makers including Turntide and Orbis Electric promise to open up new applications to EVs.

Mercedes-Owned YASA is also getting in on the axial flux action—Road & Track reports that the company recently demonstrated an axial flux motor in its AMG GT XX concept car. Now YASA has released some remarkable specs for its new motor, which it claims delivers “the highest power density ever recorded for an electric motor in its class (and possibly for any motor).”

Tim Woolmer, CTO at YASA says a new prototype motor it developed produces 550 kW (737 hp) and weighs only 13.1 kg (29 lb). That works out to a very impressive specific power of 42 kW/kg. As Road & Track notes, “That’s more power than a standard Hellcat engine, in a piece of equipment you can pick up and hold in your hands.”

According to Woolmer, the new motor uses no exotic materials, should be mass-producible at 10,000-50,000 units per year, and touts “insane cooling performance.” Continuous power output is “close” to the peak output using only standard cooling fluids.

YASA’s axial flux motors are inherently more power-dense than the radial flux motors used in most EVs today. As we noted in our coverage of Orbis’s motor, the ability to pack more power into a smaller space could make electrification feasible for new classes of vehicles. We were probably thinking about cool stuff like tractors and construction machinery, but Road & Track noted that “a single electric motor with that much power taking up such little space at a relatively inconsequential weight would be a huge help for packaging, especially for sports cars.”

Source: Road & Track