Surely they wouldn't move the motors into the wheels for actual full-size cars, right? In addition to the poor handling aspects of so much more unsprung weight, it would have to deal with much more vibration. Seems like a tough sell.
I did some work with hub motors a while back. The unsprung mass is still under debate, but moving all that mass to the corners of the vehicle is actually a good thing. I would think putting the inverter in the hub would make for terrible durability problems, but who knows.
Anecdote: The hub motors I wrote code for had integrated planetary gear, so they ran 6000rpm at the motor. The rotor was on a rather large bearing and we had all sorts of runout and alignment issues. It's was really hard to package in that space. We had peak power of 40KW per wheel, but you only got that for about 30 seconds before needing to cool off for 5 minutes (it was also water cooled, but not well - packaging again). Because of the heating and alignment issues, nobody could make much progress on doing the software calibration (motor mapping) on it. It was the only motor we had that required my new algorithm to get it up and running. It made light work of the calibration, compensated for the alignment and eccentricity issues, and ran the hell out of that thing. Sometimes I miss working on that stuff ;-)
In an application I have lots of experience with, mountain biking suspension, the overall sprung weight relative to the frame/rideris so low that even doubling the wheel weight or cassette weight doesn’t really effect suspension performance. (Pedaling rotating mass is a different story)
In a car or truck, where the overall mass of the car is very large, adding more unsprung mass might not matter so much. The car still has a lot more inertia than the wheels. You should be able to make up for the heavier wheels with better suspension valving and improved shims. Problem being that most factory standard suspension is really bad.
Also the hub motors need to spin at the wheel RPM, which might not be in the peak efficiency for motors of that size or dimension, so it becomes a challenging engineering problem to try to match efficiencies with chassis mounted motors, which can be geared to run at their peak efficiency ranges.
Still problematic though.
However, it also avoids a lot of weight due to the lack of gearbox and axles, and efficiency losses in the gears. It can make sense especially in applications that require lower power output - for example virtually all solar cars use hub motors for efficiency.
ps: also that design has no absorbing element in the wheel.. I would have done it differently.