At CES, Donut Lab unveiled the next-generation expansion of its innovative donut motor family, a key component of its modular platform designed to support electric vehicle manufacturers. The company, known for providing a library of interoperable components, revealed five new motor models that cater to all vehicle categories with industry-leading performance.
The standout feature of the Donut Lab platform is its unique donut motor, which integrates directly into the tire, addressing challenges that have historically slowed EV development. By incorporating this motor into the vehicle’s tire, Donut Lab has significantly advanced the potential for electric mobility.
CEO Marko Lehtimäki commented on the development, stating, “After much anticipation, we’re proud to present the next iteration of our core technology. This expanded motor family offers versatile size options and performance classes for diverse applications, setting a new benchmark for the industry.”
A solution to the biggest challenges facing electric vehicles
Donut Lab’s vision is to introduce solutions to development work-related problematic issues that are currently faced by vehicle manufacturers. For example, traditional powertrain systems have made electric vehicles expensive to manufacture and maintain, while reducing vehicle performance and increasing weight and complexity.
A donut motor integrated directly with the tire now eliminates the need for power transmission entirely, making vehicles considerably lighter, more economical, and easier to manufacture. In addition, the second significant advantage of a donut motor is that it makes unsprung mass completely irrelevant.
The donut motor offers the best torque in the world, making it exceptionally light compared to other technologies. The motor also breaks the traditional formula by which motors are optimized either in accordance with power or torque. In addition to the highest torque density, it has the highest power density in the world, which means that significantly more power and torque can be packed into the same weight and space than any other motor.
“Great unsprung mass has been the most important reason why everyone hasn’t used motors integrated with the tire in their vehicles. Through the torque and power density we’ve now achieved, the relative weight of the motor is so small that for the first time the unsprung mass is insignificant. For these reasons, we’ve also invested a lot of time into patenting our inventions, because we believe that these motors will change the whole industry,” Lehtimäki declares.
Lehtimäki sums up by pointing out that the donut motor is a solution that no longer requires compromises for operators in the field.
“This is the first electric motor that truly responds to the current requirements of electric vehicles and opens doors to completely new types of solutions. We’ve managed to bring something new to operators in the field that has previously not been possible – and this, in a nutshell, is Donut Lab’s mission.”
The world’s best electric motor by any yardstick
The benefits created by a donut motor extend comprehensively to a range of applications. This is why Donut Lab makes a five-model engine family available to manufacturers that represents the most advanced, high-performance and versatile series on the market. For example, the 21-inch version weighing 40 kilograms can produce 630 kilowatts of power and 4,300 Newton meters of torque – per motor. By any yardstick, this is the world’s best electric motor. The motor is designed particularly for the motor vehicle industry, and its performance capability enables vehicles to break world records. A special version of this motor intended for trucks has been released simultaneously.
For two-wheelers, the company released a new 17-inch motorcycle motor that produces 150 kilowatts of power and 1,200 Newton meters of torque, with a total weight of only 21 kilograms. Conversely, the 12-inch version of the same motor is suitable for smaller two-wheelers and weighs only 8 kilograms. As the fifth motor, the company released a “minidonut” intended for drones, which is 120 millimeters in diameter, and produces 3 kilowatts and 20 Newton meters of performance, while weighing only 1,500 grams.
Donut motors also offer significant cost savings to vehicle manufacturers. When the same performance capacity is achieved with a smaller quantity of active materials, considerable reductions in costs are obtained. This way Donut Lab’s solutions reduce the price of vehicle manufacture compared to traditional technologies.
Modular technology platform revolutionizes development work
The assembly of motor vehicles has traditionally been a highly expensive and lengthy process. One of the main reasons for this has been that the main components are not designed to work together in the first place, but are sourced by vehicle manufacturers from various operators. For this reason, most vehicle development is going into integration work.
“Getting the different parts to function perfectly together and the software to communicate with each other is very time-consuming development work. Our solution enables all parts to function without any trouble, accelerating the development effort and opening new opportunities in many fields of industry,” Lehtimäki emphasizes.
In addition to the motor, the important components of the modular Donut platform are battery modules, computer units and software that controls the vehicle. The company’s vision is that in the future customers will be able to select the components they need from a catalog and link them together with standard connectors quickly and simply.
The components are designed to work excellently even on an individual basis, but particularly together they form a seamless whole and ensure unprecedented performance.
