Shut Up About the Batteries: The Key to a Better Electric Car Is a Lighter Motor

No, it's not. Doppelbauer is absolutely right. He just forget one key strategy with these high dynamic dynos. You make them longer, called cigar. The longer, the more area to apply the force. But then you've got a problem with the tyredyno design. The best cigars are 150cm's long, the ones used to test the best F1 engines. Those are handmade in low numbers, and extremely powerful and sensitive. They always need to need to know the exact absolute angle of the rotor, which is a hard mechanical problem. Wrong cooling fluid will break the engine. Only very few such engines do exist, but they are multitudes better than any cheap engine. Such dynos usually win F1 championships.

Yeah, it's a neat motor design, but it doesn't support the headline - 6% greater power to weight of the motor.

Synchronous motors can be nice where you have predictable loads, well thought out maintenance schedules, and few surprises. Or worst case just can't deal with AC.

Almost nothing falls in that category.

Made even worse since it probably wasn't the authors who gave it that headline.

I agree we could really use improved batteries, but- You may not have to beat chemical energy if you can improve aero, weight, and efficiency.

Generally it is perfectly valid to judge a book by it's cover but the article is actually pretty different in tone from the headline so I think it's actually worth a read.