Sandy Munro Tears Down Tesla and Chevy EV Motors & Discovers This…
A few months ago, I was able to interview Sandy Monroe and I I truly enjoyed it. Sandy is considered one of the most intelligent engineers in the world in the automotive industry and he’s exceptionally humble. But um here’s the thing. There is very few ways you can find out what actually is going on inside an electric car. How are things made? Why do they work this way? Yeah, there’s plenty of YouTubers, including myself, who speculate on this stuff, who learn what we can, but it’s completely different to being the person taking these things apart piece by piece by piece. And I can tell you now, there are some YouTubers who are, you know, they say that they’re engineers and they’re highly qualified and a lot of their statements they make on their channels, they end up being proven to be false. Anyway, Sandy says this, “Tesla and General Motors, they cool their electric motors in different ways, and there are some pros and cons to doing it the ways that they do it.” Hello, my friends. Welcome to the channel. I’m Sam Evans. You’re watching The Electric Viking. YouTube’s new algorithm means that you’re often not getting all of our videos in your feed. There’s 7,500. I’m pretty sure you’re probably not seeing a lot of them. In the description, there is a link to our newsletter. Click on that and you can get an update every day of all the latest news in the electric car industry. Monroe and Associates, which is Sandy Monroe’s company, they’ve taken apart General Motors and Tesla Motors, and their engineers found there’s two very different approaches to how these motors work. Cooling an electric motor is actually really necessary because sometimes, right, you’ll see EVs, they’ll be doing track racing, for example, the Xiaomi Sous7 Ultra, which is their 1500 horsepower weapon. There was a um a video, a drag race video on CarWow with the Sous7 Ultra racing the Tesla Model S Plaid. Now, you’d think the SU7 Ultra with an extra 500 horsepower would destroy the Model S Plaid, but it didn’t. And the reason it lost is because in fact in most of the quarter mile test the Tesla actually won. I couldn’t believe it. I was totally shocked. The reason it lost was because of cooling problems. The Xiaomi was overheating. So Sandy Monroe’s engineering firm, they’ve torn down these motors. One is from a Tesla Cybert truck. The other one is from a Chevy Equinox. And these motors are quite different. It’s quite interesting to see. Monroe’s Paul Turnbull actually shows the internals of both motors. and the parts that they actually use to cool them. It’s a big factor when it comes to trade the trade-offs between different styles as well. GM’s approach to cooling the motor. Turnball says that GM’s brilliance is the simplicity of how it achieves cooling. Rather than use complex plumbing and pumps, General Motors uses the motor itself as kind of an ingenious gear system to fling oil upwards into cast channels and then use gravity to rain down the oil over the motor while it’s moving. This cools the windings, the magnets, and the cast metal all at once. This method is also cheap to engineer, and it’s fairly simple because there are fewer moving parts to fail. It doesn’t require sapping additional power from the car’s battery to run any external cooling hardware. And apparently this is a trick that Toyota used for more than a decade on the Prius C. So General Motors have obviously seen what Toyota did with their Prius and they’ve kind of engineered a similar motor that’s better than what you get in a Toyota Prius. The setup though does have some limitations. Those are it’s dependent on the motor speed. Basically, if you’re driving down the highway fast, then the oil is spinning around constantly. But if you’re stationary in traffic, it’s not going to move around the motor so well, or in fact, it’s not really going to move around at all. If you’re on a steep hill or thrashing around a track, the system’s rainfall method of cooling can shift offtarget, which might not be ideal for electric motor that can spin at a speed of around 10,000 RPM. Give you some context, though. The world’s fastest spinning electric motors can spin around 27,000 to 30,000 RPM. So, the spinning speed of the Equinox motor is quite a bit slower than those. Tesla uses a more precise method of cooling. It uses a high-pressure pump to force oil into channels where it flows over specific components like the electrical windings and the magnets to keep them nice and cool. approach to cooling says inside EVs is why Tesla can use cheaper magnets in its powertrains rather than having to use expensive rare earth metals. I think that’s a good strategy from Tesla. By not overcooling the motor itself, but rather precisely applying the oil to the points where temperature matters the most, Tesla’s approach means the motor’s casing stays at a higher temperature despite its cooler internals. This increases the electrical resistance of the case and reduces the formation of eddiurrens. Eddie currents are typically tiny whirlpools of electricity that occur as the magnetic fields from an EV motor change while it actually spins. And this isn’t a problem unique to EVs. This is actually a problem that is found in other electric motors as well. But but every time the magnetic field flips within the motor as it turns, tiny loops of unwanted electricity are stirred up and bleed into the metal encasing components. These small fields create extra heat and waste energy, basically causing an efficiency problem. They can be reduced by keeping the motor’s casing warmer and naturally increasing its resistance to electricity. So hey guys, this myth is quite fascinating, isn’t it? Because I think a lot of people have been wondering how the hell are Tesla’s cars so efficient? It they don’t use 800 volt architectures or you know some of newer cars using 1100 volt architectures or even a,000 volt architectures. They’re not doing that. And how on earth uh is the Tesla Model Y, for example, not that it uses this same motor, but something similar, how can it be more efficient than other similar EVs and quite a lot more efficient? The trade-off with this type of motor though is that the pump eats energy from the battery to keep things cool. But so does the physical resistance created using General Motors method. Clearly Tesla’s method is a little bit more expensive, but it’s more precise and it works out better overall for efficiency. Now, keep in mind Tesla’s method requires extra machining for the specific passages in Tesla’s motor, plus extra parts, the plumbing, and the pump itself. So, there’s a quite a bit more cost involved than what the Equinox setup has. And the Equinox setup is, I think, good for the Chevy Equinox, which is more of a budget price car. Not budget, but medium medium price range to more affordable electric SUV. For that segment, it probably makes a lot of sense. And it’s not a high power motor either. So, it’s two different things here. The Cybertruck has a lot of power. The Equinox has a lot less power. General Motors is well using physics. Well, Tesla is using physics and extra stuff to ultimately kind of get to the same place, I guess you could say. That said, if you’re looking at this long term, clearly the Tesla Cybertruck motor would be better for the long term because GM’s way of doing this, it’s not always going to work. Yeah. I mean, if stop start stop driving, if you’re sitting there for a long while a long long time and the temperatures are really really hot outside and you’re doing some some fast short accelerations, you may not get the kind of cooling that would be ideal for the Equinox motor. So really over the long term, if you had a choice between the two of them, I think the Tesla option is better. It’s just more expensive. Now, Monrose and associates say this, the Tesla way is more technologically groundbreaking, even though it’s more complex, but it does also allow Tesla to cut costs inside the motor thanks to some funky electronic wizardry and squeeze out every extra ounce of performance. Both ways work, but they’re quite different. And I think um really guys, I recommend you watch Sandy Monroe, his channel, and so basically if you’re interested in how the inside of EVs work because there’s some absolutely fascinating stuff on their channel, I’ll put a link to it in the description below. Thanks for watching the Sydney EV International Motor Show. If you want to get a 50% discount on your tickets, all you got to do click the link in the description and use the promotion code that’s in the description. Just copy and paste that. Now, I should mention there’s only 200 tickets available per day. So, if you go to use the promo code and you can’t get a ticket, wait till the next day. Don’t wait until the day before the show to get your tickets cuz otherwise you’ll probably miss out on getting the 50% discount. [Music]
Sandy Munro Tears Down Tesla and Chevy EV Motors & Discovers This…
Engineering expert Sandy Munro recently tore down the electric motors from Tesla and Chevrolet’s latest EVs, uncovering major design and efficiency differences. Munro praised Tesla’s compact, cost-optimized architecture while criticizing GM’s heavier, less efficient setup — a finding that highlights why Tesla still leads in drivetrain engineering.
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