Koenigsegg's Tiny Electric Motor Makes 335 HP and 443 LB-FT of Torque | Hacker News Reader

Koenigsegg's Tiny Electric Motor Makes 335 HP and 443 LB-FT of Torque

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277 pointsRickJWagner338 comments

It keeps surprising me that “you Americans” are still not using the SI system. As an European, it feels like I am reading an article from 1830, with hp instead of kW and lb-ft instead of Nm.

But - out of curiosity - why is the soda can measured in ml and not in fl oz?

The 12oz soda can?

Yeah that one ;) But gladly I just realized that litres are not an SI unit either.

Call them dm^3 (or cm^3 for ml).

WHAT? Of course they are, they just aren't a base unit.

Wikipedia says they're not an official SI unit. However they work quite well with the SI units.

Wow that's a weird exception; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litre

I was always tought that the liter was an SI unit, I mean, it's defined in terms of SI units, I know it's not a base unit, but weird that it's singled out as "well, you're technically SI compatible, and you're defined in SI units, but we're not gonna let you be part of the group" :)

It even has an official SI symbol (L), despite not being an SI unit, what?!

Unrelated: "The kilogram is the mass of a litre of cold water; a cubic centimetre or millilitre of water has a mass of one gram"

So satisfying...

I'm European and think in horsepower, not kW. Because I was born 40+ yrs ago. So what? It's basically just a linear conversion of kw = .75 x hp anyway. What's the huge advantage here?

I'm all for metric or SI. But let's not overstate the value please.

most of the value is in having a uniform and consistent system of units.

It is the mixture of both that ends up being very confusing.

I was born 48 years ago.

The advantage is not having to remember all those funny constants and being able to do math in your head that actually makes sense?

Or more important, to be able to write an article that the entire planet can just read without 95% of them (everybody outside the US, UK and Myanmar) having to resort to Google to find out if those numbers are impressive or not?

add Canada and you've named like a fifth or a quarter of all English speakers

Good addition / correction. So the amount of people that is unable to follow the article without too much effort went down from 95% to 80% of the audience.

Funny how all these proponents of SI units state their age in years instead of seconds :)

It isn't funny because the GP doesn't want SI units to be used because they are a standard but because 95% of the world can understand them. I'm certain that more than 95% of people understand years.

And some will never understand humour either

This sounds like it is directed at me and I don't see why. Humor is often dependent on context. Some jokes are funny in some situations and not in others. The above joke is not funny here since it entirely misses the context in which it should be used.

Humor also often has a lot of contextual flex, which is intentional misinterpretation (e.g., unintentional double meaning) is often humorous.

Just laugh at the joke.

Phsh, I know a guy that celebrated turning a billion seconds old. Brought pie and everything

I think the point was that horsepower is widely understandable and preferred in Europe as a unit of an engine power, despite otherwise using the SI units.

Horsepower is different though, you have imperial horsepower and metric horsepower (and many more). Both are not the same and neither is a round 750 watts.

For the last years I’ve mostly seen watts being used in NL, but it’s been ages since I saw a fast and furious movie or a top gear show. The car sellers use kW and often also, I assume metric, horsepower.

>The advantage is not having to remember all those funny constants

This, very much! I've done a ton of physical simulation code in my life. Whenever some newb or student comes to me for the first time with their simulation code that mysteriously doesn't work, in 90% of cases they stupidly didn't stick to SI and forked up some unit conversion, or mutiple. I tell the to keep it in SI and never let me see them make that mistake again. (Only exception is simple 1-to-1 unit conversions of parameters and results, when some stupid interface definition demands it that can't easily be changed.)

I don't have a mental model for "64 pounds". Apparently, it s the weight of a 9 year old, which would ve been a better unit of measure.

The value is twofold:

1. Everything uses a common base, so you don't get a base change on a scale change (or indeed, two different bases for different parts of the same measurement), and dimensional consistency becomes trivial.

2. The base is base-10, which is the same as our common counting system.

There are two exceptions I’m aware of to “SI is easier in practice”.

1. Temperature. It’s useful to elongate units over the range normally experienced by humans, which Fahrenheit does and Celsius does not, because it avoids tenths of a degree, for example, in room temperature selection.

2. Woodworking and similar: it’s useful to use powers of two because it’s very common to be marking/cutting/etc. 1/2 or 2x a value, which is easier to do in inverse power of two English measurements.

Celsius isn't SI, though I can appreciate there are reasons for particular units in particular circumstances.

One degree Celsius is exactly the same as one Kelvin, though.

I've found metric to be better for woodworking, and especially metalworking. Powers of two (imperial) are no easier than doubling a metric measurement, and more difficult when partitioning items items in thirds or fourths, or having to cut wood in half with lengths like 56 and 7/32 inches (1428mm).

Horsepower is not horsepower. American "HP" is not the same as the horsepower (PS, pferdestärke) we use in Europe when we talk about "horsepower". a kW is always 1000 watt, not 992.3 watts because of course it's a Canadian kW.

So you’re telling me I can’t even trust SI unit abbreviations when coming from beyond the pond? That a kW in America isn’t 1000 W as it should be?

F*ck :D

You think that's bad, try talking to computer people. They think a kilo of their bits means 1024 of them, not 1000!

I like!

Wish we could all start understanding the difference between kilo and kibi, mega and mebu and so on for bits and bytes.

Kilo is always 1000. Kibi is 1024.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix

I know the 'kibibytes' thing but never encountered it in a real-world context (e.g. like "the C64 had 64 kibibytes of RAM").

I personally decided to just use them always for clarity and I saw few people around me catch on. Be the change you want to see, especially when it comes to the free minor stuff.

Kibi didn't exist until 1998 (per your link), so anything you read that was written prior to that and for a few years after still has the kilo=1000/1024 ambiguity.

This is wrong in Hard drive SSd manufacturers are very happy to give you 1000 bits per Kilobyte.

In the verbal context of IT, it is 1024. If you're being technical, you can nitpick and say it's wrong. Has no benefit, though.

Computer people speak in Base 2 units because that's how the devices operate at a low level.

After many years and different widths the smallest common unit of exchange evolved to be a power of two: 8 bits are a byte, not 9, 10, 27, 30, etc; though Unicode might have been better off if 32 bits were the base character. However then older systems would have been at least 75% less useful.

Physical addressing units are also binary, because literal address lines (or their virtually latched equivalents on a serial bit-shift register) are used.

ROM, RAM, and correspondingly non-volatile writable storage inherit this basic premise.

So a non-sales computer person speaking 'kilo' or 'mega' or any other SI unit in relation to a computer part means it will hold or be able to transfer at least that many SI units in the quoted units. Everything gets rounded to the nearest useful neighbor. A digital kilo is not 1000, it is 2^10. A digital mega is correspondingly also 2^20. This is very similar to the exponents in SI units.

For that matter, humans have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. Wouldn't an octal numbering system make more sense? Though for that we'd have to come up with new unit names near 2^3, 2^6, 2^9, etc that don't sound silly.

> For that matter, humans have 8 fingers and 2 thumbs. Wouldn't an octal numbering system make more sense? Though for that we'd have to come up with new unit names near 2^3, 2^6, 2^9, etc that don't sound silly.

Each of the 4 long fingers has 3 phalanges, so an interesting possibility is to use each thumb to count up to 12 on each hand. Given that many ancient units of measurement where base-12, I wonder why we didn't develop base-12 languages.

I've heard that's how merchants used to count in the Mediterranean. However much like QLC and TLC SSDs are more finicky to work and require stricter discipline than simple on/off storage, the same can be said for fingers and is it up or down.

Sometimes b is for bit and B is for byte, however, just about as often b is for byte and B is for bit.

Nah, kb means kibbibytes, not kilobytes :)

That make me curious to look up the Koenigsegg's power. It would seem they are metric horsepower:

>Two common definitions used today are the mechanical horsepower (or imperial horsepower), which is about 745.7 watts and the metric horsepower, which is approximately 735.5 watts.

I guess speaking as a Brit the foreigners just didn't have proper horses.

Brits will have to concede to the French on that one. A French poncelet is 100kg raised one meter in one second, ~980W.

Same. Screens and wheels are still 100% described in inches in sales. Cars are specified with HP and optionally kW. Never kW alone.

Outside of these weird exceptions, it's SI all the way. And this doesn't really vary with age. The web site whrere you buy wheels and TVs doesn't know your age so it will say the rims or screens are 20" regardless of who you are.

Now with electric cars we have battery capacity specified in kWh, vehicle power in kW and charging capability in kW.

This is all as it should, however a large number of people have a really hard time groking the difference between kW and kWh.

So much so that I wonder if we should start specifying battery capacity in MJ to help people clarify things in their heads.

I've noticed that some EV users talk about charging rates in "kWh/h". Which is interesting, to say the least.

Someone needs to teach them algebra

Calories, grit, carats (for diamonds), Beaufort, viscocity is of ten boven in cP, grit (based on inches), dernier, rpm, dpi, lightyears, and of course km/hr. Plenty of non-SI units in use

Yes. I meant metric and sloppily said "SI" despite most common metric units only occasionally being SI.

Beaufort is a dimensionless label as far as I'm aware and grit is used as such too (i.e. it never says anything else than "240" i.e. it doesn't "240 grit" or "240 something per inch").

Grit is based on the amount of particles that fit through an inch square. You could also indicate it with the particle size inmicrometers.

My list wasn't close to exhaustive. We use all kinds of weird units.

Besides bar I sometimes see mmHg for pressure. Shoe sizes. I've never seen acceleration in m/s2 outside a physics problem, otherwise it's either G or seconds to 100 km/hr.

> We use all kinds of weird units. > Grit is based on the amount of particles that fit through an inch square.

I'm aware. But I'd say its mostly used as a dimensionless. When I argue "we use metric except for these few" I mean in the cases where the unit (a length, mass, pressure etc) is actually uttered or written.

In some cases as you note there are labels which have non-metric definitions underneath, such as sand paper particles having a never-pronounced inch definition. The same goes for some weapon calibers where you might say a ".303 cartrige" for rifle ammunition but you'd never say a ".303 inch cartidge". A lot of people probably use these labels without knowing they are using an imperial definition. And that (I'm guessing) is also part of why it survived the metrification.

> I've never seen acceleration in m/s2 outside a physics problem, otherwise it's either G or seconds to 100 km/hr.

"10s to 100km/h" is as metric as m/s2 though (But again not pure SI). g being a constant obviously has no explicit unit, it's as metric as you want it to be :) I hear "5g" as 5x9.82m/s2 but an american probably hears something else.

There's more nuance to it though: if you take a closer look at fields where inch are used even in fully metric language environments you'll find that it's often more a class designation than a measurement. A 21 foot container does not exist (turns out that according to the wiki 20 foot containers aren't even allowed to be 20 foot long, they are 40/2 minus some defined amount of padding)

It's even more pronounced with camera sensors, the size given in fractions of an inch is some kind of "equivalent to", whereas the size in mm is the actual size. Apparently the image sensor inch is 16mm or something like that.

I was surprised during NASA's first commentary session of the WEBB telescope launch. It seemed like it was the first time when they were consistently using SI units while speaking to their US audience. I think one time an imperial unit slipped out, but it got corrected immediately.

Metric might be catching hold bit by bit. I think SI units are also standard for recording patient weight in medical records.

Immigration from Latin America and Asia are certainly helping SI in the US. However, there is a loooooong way ahead... And forget about Celsius, this one is nowhere to be seen.

(US here). It kind of helps to think of celsius between 0-100 as “percent of boiling water” for me. Living in one of the hotter parts of the world at the time, being able to say the temperature is 40-50% of the way to boiling water really seems a good objective definition of “too hot.”

(European in the US here) The fact that 0F is not "water freezing" (but way worse...) is weirding me out to no end.

Technically 0F is the freezing point of water, just a different type of water.

As a European I find Fahrenheit kind of makes sense on a human scale as 0 and 100 are the upper and lower limits of it being reasonable to be outside. Below 0 is "too cold", above 100 is "too warm" and when it is 50 it is neither warm or cold.

"Several accounts of how he originally defined his scale exist, but the original paper suggests the lower defining point, 0 °F, was established as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (a salt)."

"He rolled the dice very carefully"

Do we have any account for why he wanted it to be a brine? Is it like sea ice instead of fresh water?

It's funny to use that rationalization regarding 0-100 when in reality the rest of the Imperial system is utterly allergic to that sort of scale. 0F and 100F being endpoints for "reasonable" seems a bit of a stretch as well. As a Canadian that's "reasonably cold" and "way too warm".

Siemens MRI scanners allow you to enter patient height and weight in ‘metric’ and ‘U.S.’ (feet, inches and pounds). It makes me smile.

Just like in 1975... time to try again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Conversion_Act

I can't believe that there were people who actively worked on killing this effort and actually succeeded. Talk about stupidly reactionary. In general it seems US public policy has suffered since the 70s. There were things like serious efforts for universal health care or metric conversion. These days it's not even imaginable to make a big change in the country.

I work with people like that. They don't like metric simply because it would be something new to learn.

Also… just like in 1875… time to try again again?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre_Convention

> The Metre Convention (French: Convention du Mètre), also known as the Treaty of the Metre,[1] is an international treaty that was signed in Paris on 20 May 1875 by representatives of 17 nations (Argentina, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Norway, Switzerland, Ottoman Empire, United States of America, and Venezuela).

At this rate we’ll try again in another 53 years?

I didn't seem that way for their online tracker. Every time you visited the website you have to manual switch it back to SI units as the default was not SI.

Imperial units are often tied to measurement devices or operations of a device, than just being a collection of odd standards.

A passenger jet can attempt a landing on a 3000 feet long runway from 4 nautical miles from touchdown point, flying 250 knots at 1500 feet. Altimeters must be calibrated to announced local atmospheric pressure, or the default to 29.92 inHg or 1013 hPa.

Autoclave is a device used for sterilization that exploits saturated(pressure equal to ambient) steam. It is usually ran for 15 minutes at 121C(250F). According to a random internet source[1], atmospheric pressure at sea level is around 15 psi, and 250F is the point where pressure of steam exceeds that, being a function of temperature.

(One of) the beauty of SI units is measurement devices itself are universally built and marked in SI units that disparate measurements across industries can be converted and compared against. There is no “3000 feet runway 4 miles away” in metric, it’s a 1km runway 6.5km away. There is no need to convert between inHg and feet and PSI, or lb-ft and inch-pounds just because F.G. Superman in 1337 who pioneered art of bicycle repairing set measurement and tolerance for a bike frame to be 50 +/- 3.5 inch-yard per fortnight centigrade.

But that requires phenomena to be well studied and measurements clearly defined against SI units, which is a point more industries than we care to admit has reached.

That has to be an aspect of why imperial units persist, despite NASA and cutting edge aerospace are moving away from it, other than there would be a simple matter of gross widespread ignorance.

1: https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/95722/why-do-we-...

You mentioned nautical miles. Originally, the nautical mile was defined as 1/60th of a degree of longitude (aka one minute) along the surface of the sea, and so it is a pretty natural unit from a navigational standpoint.

It has since been redefined based on that original definition, as 1852 meters.

So it’s a goofy measure in that it uses base-60, but is otherwise more in the SI family both in terms of original derivation from natural measurements and in terms of its current SI-based definition.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nautical_mile

There are other things out there called a “mile” that aren’t imperial, too. Take care when asking for directions in the Norwegian countryside, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_mile

FWIW, the inch has also been redefined as "25.4 mm" in the 1950s.

Originally, a meter was defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the equator and the North Pole. The circumference of the earth is now 40,075.017 km instead of 40,000 km but it was a pretty good estimate for 1795.

As far as I know only blue origin uses non-metric units in their launch coverage. It’s off putting.

It's so annoying. They have the screen real-estate to show both units, but for some reason it's like they're trying make a very subtle statement to their international audience. "For Americans only" or something like that.

Please don't say Imperial, the unit system you are talking about is US Customary. Volume units are different in the two systems.

I don't see why you are being downvoted, you are absolutely right. For example you have US Gallons and Imperial Gallons, with the Imperial ones being used in UK not US.

Thank You. Never knew that. I was always under the impression both Gallons are the same.

Yep, and those two gallons aren't even remotely close. It's the most annoying thing on car forums, because someone will always say "oh my car gets 30mpg but everyone here says they are getting 40mpg!"

Like, yes, because you haven't established whether they mean US MPG or Imperial MPG.

YES! I always assume ( and very stupid of me ) that it was some regulation with cars and the way they drive between US and UK making some difference in MPG. I never knew the G in mpg was different!

This is one of the illustration with online or even real world discussions where we argue pass each other under the wrong basic assumption.

Because it is made to metric specifications? It has Swedish text on it btw.

For better or worse, hp is still used a lot in European publications as well.

Yes, it's funny that when the standard unit is a somewhat lower number (so the KW number is the same magnitude but just a bit lower / less impressive than in HP) there is more resistance to the change.

I think in EU it is mostly due to the German car industry (and all the associated publications) unwilling to change.

In the German speaking world everyone knows what a hp is (PS), how much his car has, his past cars had, in which configurations their car is available... although the kW is what is printed on the documents since ages now.

Nobody likes change. Some people still complain about the Euro, and that the DM was so much better... At least it is not called ECU.

Also the non techie and children are more familiar with horses than with kWh.

I'd dispute that. Everybody can roughly imagine a 1/4 multitude of the 2.5 kW of a typical hairdryer, nobody has a meaningful mental image of the amount of continuous work one could expect rotating a number horses (peak power per horse is about 15 hp)

This makes sense now. We must not use kW in the US because we have horses but we don’t have any 2500W hairdryers!

Heh, that's interesting:

"The country where everything is bigger (*)"

(* except for consumer goods that would be designed around a practicable supply current of 10A elsewhere)

They still are bigger if you measure in amps!

But seriously, I do like the split-phase power we have in the US. I think we get the best of both worlds, having lower voltages in most living spaces, and higher voltages reserved for high-power appliances.

>>I think we get the best of both worlds, having lower voltages in most living spaces

How is this possibly a benefit for anything though. It's not like 110V is safer in any practical way, if you stick something in a socket it will kill you just as much as 220V would, so it seems like for literally no reason at all American homes have a much less "ability" to support a wide range of devices that work without any issue elsewhere in the world.

It's safer because of ohms law. Anything you short it with (whether that be an object that might heat up, or a human) will pass half the current and a quarter of the power.

I've been shocked with 120v on bare skin multiple times.

Yes, but my point is that it's still just as deadly for a human. It's like asking whether you want to be in a plane crash going 300mph or 600mph - it doesn't really matter. The #1 improvement in home safety when it comes to the electrical system is the socket design to prevent foreign objects entering(like the British plug design for instance), and second one is a working RCB fuse to kill the power before you even feel a tingle. 110V or 220V doesn't really matter.

Crashing at 300mph is guaranteed deadly. Being shocked with 120v is not. I've been shocked a half-dozen times and I haven't been injured in any way.

Current code in US/Canada also requires RCDs (we call them GFCI) in some places (and AFCI everywhere, which the rest of the world hasn't really adopted) and shuttered outlets... but these do not catch all types of faults. For instance, if a human conducts electricity across two conductors connected to an RCD/GFCI, it won't trip. It only trips if current is drawn to ground or to another circuit. Layered safety is a good approach.

That's not to say that 240v systems are unsafe -- they just have different characteristics and requirements because of it.

Yeah I've been shocked a few times with 240v and it's not nice but doesn't often kill people. Most electricity caused deaths are from something causing a fire rather than shocks I think.

re AFCI: In Europe wires running through wooden walls are much less common, so arcing in the wiring is less of a concern.

Absolutely. They may have even seen a real horse a few times in their life.

This is so true! Fortunately, for BEV we seem to switch and this works incredibly well. You see kW and you know its about electrics, you see HP (or rather: PS) and you know it's about one of those wonky old "explosions in a tincan" things that eventually displaced the horse. It's quite powerful linguistic era demarcation.

When communicating in English with the intent to be understood it is wise to include both, putting the conversion in parens. I’m always thankful when Americans include this - otherwise all those feet and pounds and inches and stone are just random numbers to me.

I just remember that 1hp is 754 watts, but lets just call it 750. Another magic conversion that I remember from working on that stuff is that Nm * RPM / 9549 = kW. We never used ft-lbs though.

kW*h is the unit that absolutely kills me. Especially because people will just say "kW". And before long they're talking about "kW*h per day"... Kills me. "What do you people have against James Prescott Joule?!"

The prefixes with Joules get bigger. 1kWh is 3.6MJ. G and T are rare outside data sizes, it's nice if everything can stay in the milli through kilo prefix range.

I learnt that 1hp = 735 watts. Your comment made me curious, so turns out there is not one, but 6 definitions of horsepower: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horsepower#Definitions

SI isn't being used for real in Europe either. Highway speed limits there are always in kilometers per hour, instead of the SI units of meters per second as used for spacecraft. Heh.

It's called SI prefixes [1], you may also want to check the "Time" section.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix

Are you just trying to be obtuse?

Expressing quantities in SI units doesn't require 'base units'. SI prefixes are permitted (milli, micro, kilo, mega...), as are certain exclusions (including minutes, hours, ...).

And why the heck do sockets and drives come in negative powers of 2 such as 1/2", 1/4", 1/8" whereas smaller tolerances come in 1/1000's of an inch? Why not 1/512" and 1/1024" ? This gets into awkward conversions even within the imperial units such as 5/8" into decimal 0.625" instead of something like 640/1024" because of no good reason :-/

So THAT'S where hard drive companies got the idea from....

Why does it matter though? They're used for different orders of magnitude. I've never understood why people think that having everything in multiples of 1000 (as the metric system does) is an advantage. Yes it's easy to say how many millimetres there are in a kilometer. But when was the last time that came in handy?

That said, I think the US car industry has moved to metric and it is great to not need multiple sets of everything.

Any time the calculation is scaled up (or down), or involves numbers at different orders of magnitude.

If we have 2mm of rain in Copenhagen this afternoon, and my yard measures 8m×12m, how much water must drain away?

  2mm × 8000mm × 12000mm = 192 000 000mm³
                         = 192 000cm³ 
                         = 192 dm³        = 192 L 
                         = 0.192 m³

How much rain falls on the whole city?

            2mm × 180km² = 0.002 m × 180 000 000 m²
                         = 360 000 m³
                 approx. = 360 000 tonnes.

Parsing/reading error of the day:

> my yard measures 8m

You use a very long unit of measure.

Sure, but when do you need to do that?

What about if it isn't water you are calculating but some other substance? You use a look up table to find the factors - we need to look up a but more in the table, but it isn't a big deal.

Are you serious, they literally just gave you an example lol.

I always hear that argument about "but when will I need it?" If you're using this system then you're always going to use it. It comes up all the time, it's natural so you don't think about it too much.

Does it mean it's better? Well yes, but it doesn't mean other measuring systems aren't good. You don't need it, but you'll want it once you learn it.

He gave an example I've never needed in my life other than for trivia.

This is a good opportunity to employ steelmanning.

The first is a real example from a friend whose drains were blocked during some construction work, where rainfall from his garden was running into his basement during a storm. Would the water reach the electric cables?

The second is obviously relevant for the people responsible for rivers, storm drains, sewers, dams, hydropower and so on. When we start terraforming Venus, we'll need to add the conversion factor for sulphuric acid rain.

Maybe you don’t build very much stuff?

The ease is in moving between measurements. How many feet are in 102.3 inches?

Sure I can do the math to calculate it in my head and take a few seconds.

How many meters are in 240cm? Don't need to 'calculate' it the same method. I just move the decimal over. 2.4m...

I say this as an American who finds our use of Imperial pointless. Infact, there is a highway in Arizona that uses metric instead of imperial, as it was a part of our move to metric. (The current measuring and weights system in the United States is based on Metric, we do use it, just converted into another measure)

>> But when was the last time that came in handy?

Every time I need to add or subtract two measurements.

Quick:

What is 2' 3 5/8" plus or minus 1' 2 19/32"?

What is 701.7 mm plus or minus 370.7 mm?

Seriously I work with both everyday, and while I grew up with inches & feet and I still intuitively know how deep two feet of snow is better than 61 cm of snow, I'm really starting to hate the US measurements, and use metric whenever I can.

Also, whenever we deal with things from the rest of the world, it becomes a mashup of US and metric measurements.

The US almost converted to metric in the 1970s, but Nixon squashed it, basically on the complaints of what are surely the ancestors of modern US right wing know-nothings who didn't like "foreign" stuff.

Looking at it historically, the fractions made a lot of sense when things were more coarse, and the ability to split things into even sections, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4... was more common.

OTOH, Metric was designed for doing calculations - we already use the decimal system for all other math, so we should design a measuring system to use the same calculation system. It really does work better.

well, a lot of people don't use SAE sockets for serious stuff. Your IKEA chair might have some 9/16ths wrenches - but for cars and other mechanicals its mostly metric.

A few brake lines and some old exhaust bits might be SAE, but by and large vehicles are done with metric.

Personally I like that SAE has fewer sizes... Its frustrating as hell working on cars with a mixmatch of 6mm 7mm and 8mm bolts. oh this is a 15 but a few awkward 16s! Mostly though, cars are pretty standard. European cars seem to be basically - 7mm 8mm (hose clamps and other tiny stuff) 10mm (air filter housings and such where 8mm is to small) 12mm 13mm (misc bolts, intake manifolds, exhaust, almost everything) 15mm 17mm 19mm (these larger ones are basically suspension and other large components)

England is a strange combination of metric and imperial. Walking is measured in km but driving is miles. Weight of a person is stone and lbs, but of any other object is in kg and g. Height of a person is ft and inches, but of any object is in m, cm or mm. It's very odd

>Weight of a person is stone and lbs

This one is definitely changing. Lots of people here only know their weight in kg now (including me).

When my baby was born about a year ago here in UK I would always say his weight in kg when someone asked, and people would literally stare me blank in the face and say they have no idea if that's a lot or not. Once I converted it to pounds for them they were like "oh yeah, he's a big baby then".

>Lots of people here only know their weight in kg now (including me).

Is that with younger generations? Most people I know doesn't have clue about their weight in Kg.

Well I'm in my early thirties so I'll leave that up to you to decide if that puts me in the "younger generations" bucket

Be happy that the soda can isn't measured in tennis balls or school buses. These are the usual measurements hen something is written about.

It makes me sad that the top comment on a really cool new motor design is a gripe about units.

>> ...a really cool new motor design...

It's not that great a motor design. It's good, but we had similar power to weight motors where I worked 10 years ago and could run 200kW for more than 20 seconds. Good motor designs are cool, but IMHO they are usually not news-worthy but are just marketing.

> But - out of curiosity - why is the soda can measured in ml and not in fl oz?

The article is written for an American magazine while the pictures are from Koenigsegg directly, which are European; beverages use ml and l to measure contents.

Take a look at the graph, also provided by Koenigsegg, it uses Nm and kW.

If you want to see something fun, go check the size of the tires on your car (printed on the wall of the tire). It will read something like "245/35R18", where 245 is the section width in millimeters and 18 is the diameter in inches. All standard tire sizes use a combination of inches and millimeters, haha.

it gets worse the more you dig in. The middle number is am aspect ratio for length of sidewall. so its side wall thickness 35% of 245mm. Then on top of that when youre getting into trucks and jeeps common sizing switches to inches. so you go from 315/70/R18 to something like 35x12.5r18

complete shitshow.

>>As an European, it feels like I am reading an article from 1830, with hp instead of kW

Where in Europe are you that anyone uses kW for engine power lol. Yes it's listed in kW on my registration document but I've literally never heard anyone using kilowatts to describe engine power instead of horsepower, and I lived in a few European countries so far.

I've seen it used for electric cars.

I’m in the Netherlands. I just did a Google search for electric cars and checked the top 3 results (Polestar, Hyundai Ionic, Mini) and all three of them list the kW numbers first / large and then the pk number between brackets or small. So we can safely assume that kW is dominant where I am.

Yeah, it's a pain point for me as well. We try to do all of our design work in SI units, use metric screw, etc. The problem is that industry simply isn't aligned this way. Sometimes you end-up with such a mess that you are forced to go back to imperial just for sanity.

The problem with switching the US to the metric system is that the cost would be truly massive. It would take decades, somewhere in the order of 50 years, for a complete conversion.

There's the obvious, things like every single highway sign would have to be replaced. And then there's everything else, like every single tool that everyone owns in this country would have to be replaced at some point. You would still have to be able to buy and use imperial unit hardware and tools for decades during and likely after the transition. I can't possibly list just how deep and wide such a conversion would have to reach.

And that's assuming everyone goes along for the ride. That said, a 50 year timeline would mean a new generation would grow up using the metric system. Another 25 years after that and we should be OK.

All of that said, the real problem is political. The cost of such a transition would be significant. Politicians will only get behind things they can convert into votes. Going metric isn't one of these things. Spending billions of dollars over five decades isn't something anyone can use to win an election. Most people aren't close enough to the design and manufacturing of goods to understand just how much this system actually hurts us. And so, going metric, in a practical sense, becomes an impossible dream.

The Farenheit temperature scale makes a little bit more sense to me then the Celsius one. It covers the temperatures we care about in more or less temperate climate, with 0°F being the lowest temperatures one will witness (-32C) and 100°F the highest (38°C), the latter being also a body temperature above which one has to worry about.

This said as a French and ex-physicist.

Not sure where you’re seeing ml. The soda can is labeled 106 mg caffeine.

The text in the article says “ For scale, that's a 330-mL energy drink in the pictures seen throughout.”

It keeps surprising me that people care so strongly about essentially nothing.

The Europeans are also still not using the SI system for measuring clothes or shoes. Actually I believe clothes and shoe sizes are a much bigger mess between all the countries in Europe than in the US. It is strange that the bureaucrats of the EU have not tried to a least unify these sizes, let alone using metric units.

True. Bit at least mens shoe sizes are the same as womens shoe sizes here in Europe.

So if anyone has looked into motors for electric bicycles, will probably have learnt, how the copper is wound is also important to the performance & characteristics of the motor as this link explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFSTg8BNhoQ

But there are also many many other things which can be tweaked on an electric motor to alter characteristics as this blog explains. https://www.electricbicycleworld.com/blog/review-of-ebike-mo...

I dont think we are even scraping the surface when it comes to electrical motor efficiency, but I think we could be seeing some innovation creeping into things like the washing machine and electric lawnmower in the future.

We may still have many things we can do to improve the efficiency, but the efficiency pretty close to 100% already, with Tesla hitting around 94% in their motors. So not a lot of room there. But of course there is still room to shrink the motors, make the motors lighter, make the motors have more power that can be sustained over a broader range of speeds, etc.

But the motors are already not super heavy or big by automotive standards, so the net benefit of those improvements are not so great, at least in normal sized cars. The biggest thing I would like improved is the range of speeds at which peak power can be sustained. In my model 3, I have around 500hp at low speeds, but it starts tapering off after 40mph or so. The model S plaid reduces this tapering by using more motors, which allows different gearing so the optimum motor speed is hit at a higher vehicle speed, and a bit more voltage.

The thing about improving up from 94% is, we may not magically double the power savings. But say, going from 94% to 97% may cut the waste heat in half, which means you can suddenly run the same size motor with twice the current without melting it down. So there are some nice benefits possible there.

Look at things like the "microstepper drivers" and "inverter heat pumps" too; its not just that we're getting more motor options, we're getting better at switching and shaping rich, chunky amps with little cheap chips of glass. That's opening up all sorts of capabilities that were fairy tale expensive before if they were possible at all.

Hear hear! I think we're just beginning to understand how much we can use smart chips and intelligent switching to improve performance. All you need to do is look at one of the old motors with brushes to realize how far we've come.

Yes, tapping that regenerative power will be a major step towards wheels directly geared to a clutchless motor which will then eliminate drive train losses. And I think alot of motors dont do regen in any major way yet.

The problem with regen is its too spiky and lithium ion charging doesnt like that unlike lead acid which can handle it, but using multiple battery options is becoming more normal. Cars fitted with stop start technology typically have an additional battery using either the newer cheaper Enhanced Cyclic Mat (ECM) batteries and the more older more expensive Absorbent Glass Mat (AGM) batteries, but they work.

" dont think we are even scraping the surface when it comes to electrical motor efficiency"

It's not uncommon for electric motors to be well over 90% efficient, and approach 95% or better within their ideal RPM range.

Windings are just part of the design; there's the lamination of the rotor and its materials, and the arrangement of the magnets (for example, halbach arrays.)

They also make a 2.0l 3 cylinder that makes 600hp: https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a314512...

That is insane!

Impressive, but they are probably optimizing purely for burst power, not for efficiency, making the trick easier, because the car has an ICE delivering the base power. Compared to Tesla, they have to optimize for both power AND efficiency, because their car is running on sole battery power.

Quite right. The small graph in the article confirms it. If you zoom in enough you can see the power and torque are more than doubled during the 20second burst mode, but even so it is very impressive

I think Tesla cars also have a similar "burst" mode too?

Some turbocharged combustion engines also have something called overboost, allowing short periods of operation at higher power than the "continuous" limit (again due to heat build-up)

This might apply for the use in a car having ICE. The electric motor itself could be optimized for efficiency, too. Efficiency adds range and indirectly reduces weight by smaller batteries. To rate the efficiency, we would need more data about motor efficiency vs. loads.

Modern Teslas also can sustain max power as well. Model 3 can basically launch consistently 0-60 in about 3.2sec some 20-30 times with no loss. The new Plaid can do low 9s back to back until the battery is low. Quite an achievement.

And if you work for Tesla in the firmware department, you can get one that will do that backwards as well!

I know this is meant to be a joke but knowing folks that work in said department this is only true of engineering cars. They aren't able to do whatever they want with their own production cars.

The TLDR is production cars are "fused" at the factory to only work with firmware signed for production vehicles and devs can't produce these production builds themselves. There is facilities for live patching production cars but these systems are even more restrictive.

On the other hand... all bets are off in an engineering car. :P

So, they actually would download a car!

As far as I understand, Teslas can't do multiple runs at highest performance level unlike Taycan.

I believe this was mostly on the older Model S that didn't have a dedicated coolant pump. It would always run at a fixed speed which was fine for normal usage but not on the track. New Tesla's have added a dedicated small electric pump so it can run at the speed needed to keep the motor in the correct temp range.

I'm sure they can still overheat based on other limitations (coolant radiator, pipe size etc...) but these can be rights sized based on trim level.

After 40mph the power of the model motor starts decreasing, it is linear but pretty steep.

If my back of the envelope calculations are correct, our 7-seater midsize SUV uses about 35hp at a sustained crusing speed of 70mph. For a road car being able to produce it's maximum power for only short periods isn't much of a problem.

Slightly different if you expect to be able to take it around a track.

Indeed, it's harder to deliver sustained torque, than sustained power.

Stall torque = current, and there is no trick around that.

I need this for my Miata. I’ve been thinking that the area where the fuel tank is and behind the seats could hold batteries. The range with gas is like 200mi anyway so if I could get 100 out of electric With this performance I would go for it

The miata or wild stuff like exoskeletons came immediately to mind for me too. I wish these were going to be mass produced.

If they made an electric vw bug I feel like we could make an electric Miata. It would be heavier yes but if we keep the weight close to the ground and centered it wouldn’t be that bad

Koenigsegg is a company I admire a lot. They really do seem to be on the bleeding edge of tech whether it’s ICE, electric, powertrains, aerodynamics, etc… Their engineering innovations are to push the current subset of automotive tech to the next level (Freevalve, composites). Something we (understandably) don’t see in the Ford’s and GM’s.

They’re a true engineering centric automotive company, not an consumer, or “celebrity” automotive company. It’s nice.

At this rate I would not be half surprised to see in-wheel type hubmotors as used in some electric skateboards [1] or the OneWheel [2]. That kind of changes the whole drive train concept.

[1] https://www.backfireboards.com/products/backfire-g3-with-sup...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29797315

It's unlikely. Anything attached to the wheels is "unsprung mass", and it has a huge effect on the handling and comfort of a car. Furthermore, for efficiency, you really want to minimize rotational inertia in the wheels.

Sure, for slow vehicles where these things don't matter, hub motors work great, but not for your typical road going car. They could put one of these near each wheel and drive the wheels via axles.

> They could put one of these near each wheel and drive the wheels via axles.

Pro: get rid of the differential.

Cons: have less power overall, less efficiency (for an electric motor?), more losses. Probably.

I don't think there are any losses on a (reasonably short, i.e. without intermediate supports) axle transmission, the only form of attrition are bearings and on both sides of such a setup you need one anyway, unless the same bearing is common between the wheel hub and the motor (i.e. the motor is actually the hub).

Could you elaborate a bit more? Do I understand correctly that in today’s world of energy efficiency, the car’s mass distribution has to be carefully tuned for maximum efficiency, and hub motors throw that off balance?

Intuitively, I always figured that having mass on an object that’s very low to the ground is a good thing, but I can imagine it’s something different when it’s attached to a wheel.

Apart from the mass distribution, if you look at a car travelling on an uneven road from the reference point of the car itself, you will see the wheels moving up and down very quickly to keep contact with the ground. My understanding is that adding mass to the wheels will slow them down and thus increase the time they don't touch the ground, reducing the grip.

F=ma, so if you increase the mass you either decrease the acceleration (they slow down) or increase the force (they hit the bumps harder). In practice it's both. The vertical acceleration when you hit a bump is essentially determined just by your speed and the size of the bump; it can't be slowed down. So instead what happens is the bump will exert a greater force on the tire (which will deform it more, reducing grip and probably meaning you'll need to run higher pressure, which also tends to reduce grip). On the other side, when you leave the bump, the force is determined by the spring rate of the suspension and the amount of compression, so for the same suspension, a heavier wheel will move back to the ground slower, which yes, will reduce grip. You could increase the spring rate to compensate, but that would exacerbate the first problem, and also wouldn't help in the situation where you hit a dip from steady state rather than exiting a bump.

The purpose of the car's suspension - the springs and shocks - is to decouple mass from the wheels. This allows the wheels to travel up and down over bumps and dips in the road surface quickly without large forces being exerted, which in turn makes for a smooth ride and good traction between tire and pavement. The more weight you move from the 'sprung' part of the vehicle - everything that's suspended by the springs - to the 'unspring' part - directly connected to the wheels - the more this is compromised. You can think of the extreme case where you take all the vehicle's weight and move it to the wheels: then it's like you don't have suspension at all and you're bumping and jarring across every imperfection in the pavement. Moving a lesser amount of mass to the wheels is basically a lesser version of that. (Likewise anything you can do to reduce unsprung weight - lighter brakes, wheels, tires, etc. - tends to have an outsized effect on handling. (And on performance in the case of rotational weight, but that's a separate issue.))

This made me think of that peculiar vehicle where the wheel is massive and the driver sits inside. Can't remember what it's called now but I seem to remember a spoof version in South Park.

"Tom Slick and his Thunderbolt Grease-slapper".

Thanks for the explanation!

Something funny I've noticed with a few buses and large trucks is that the 'suspension' is built into the driver's seat

Seat suspension is for added driver comfort and does not replace regular suspension.

Think about going over a bump. This gives the wheel a strong upward motion. The suspension has the task to discouple that motion from the car. Which is easier, as much as the wheel mass is low compared to the cars mass. Thus the aim is to keep the wheel as light as possible.

It might be worth mentioning that “because unsprung weight” argument is a chassis design argument, not a powertrain one. It applies to all engine types, including electric, gasoline, diesel, and steam engines.

I would not discount it completely. If you need only 20kW per wheel (for a typical european car) maybe then electric motor ends up actually lighter than classical axle setup? Perhaps even more so if also replacing brakes, but I don't expect that to happen soon.

In 2017, Lazareth and NTN-SNR worked on a trike prototype using this technology[1], mixing an electric engine within a full-hub assembly.

[1] https://www.lazareth.fr/project/e-wazuma/

Electric Wheel motors have been used before. The LeTourneau had an electric wheel back in the 1950s. This was IIRC mainly used for Earth moving equipment though.

They probably don't make sense on cars though as explained by other people here.

Or Porsche[0]. In 1898.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/02/check-out-the-first-eve...

That was electric, but didn't use a hub motor: "Foregoing Porsche's new wheel-hub motor, the P1 employed a rear-mounted drive unit."

So it does. I was recalling Porsche lore from memory and thought I had a correct reference. Iirc Porsche built an electric 4-motor (hub) car for the Paris Expo about this time…

Oh, here we go:

> In 1900, at the Paris Exposition Universelle…[0]

[0] https://www.automobiliardent.com/index.php/home/article_deta...

I would love to see a 4WD with inhub motors, to get extreme clearance.

Aptera uses in-wheel motors in their EV reverse trike thingy.

Doug DeMuro review of the Koenigsegg Gemera 4-seater hypercar employing three of these motors in addition to a fuel engine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mPmCDS66Qc

Size is not the issue. Electric motors can be made very small and very powerful. The issue is efficiency and handling the torque. Such a motor is useless if its structure cannot handle the loads. Throw enough power into it and nearly any motor can break loose from its mounts and/or snap its drive shaft. Note too the coolant pipes. I suspect this motor cannot sustain such power for more than a minute or two. Small=light=low thermal mass=gets hot fast. As a general rule, electric parts become less efficient as they heat.

"Those peak power and torque figures are only available for 20 seconds, which is common among EV motors. After 20 seconds, the figures drop to 134 hp and 184 lb-ft of torque."

It was the lower numbers that i question. I wonder how long it can sustain even those, and at what sacrifice to efficiency.

Your typical car only uses about 20-30 horsepower when going down the road. However when coming off the line at a light it can use hundreds of horsepower for the 3-10 seconds it takes to get up to 60mph (for non-US readers, in the US all car reviews make a big deal of the 0-60mph times, and many magazines have tracks where they test that themselves. I'm guessing you would see 0-100mph here, which is only a slightly different top speed by I have no idea). Thus for car applications a motor that can deliver a lot of power for a short amount of time is useful and light weight is important. If this is light enough it might be worth the unsprung weight issues to put this in the wheels (particularly front wheels to get cheap 4x4)

Automobiles are rather unusual in wanting and using a high amount of power in a burst and then needing a much smaller amount most of the time. Most equipment (including trucks when used as a truck) tend to need a lot more power all the time.

> I'm guessing you would see 0-100mph here, which is only a slightly different top speed

kph?

opps.

Yeah, other EV and hybrid motors are similarly impressively small for their power output.

Because many of the parts that in an IC are part of the "engine" are on EVs not part of the "motor". All the piping for air/exhaust/cooling, all the wiring and control units, are included in IC engines. But such external systems on an EV are somehow conceptually dissociated from the motor. Its like looking at the block of a tiny rotary engine. Very small and powerful, but certainly not the whole picture.

Even if you're just comparing a piston engine block/head, electric motors are tiny. Rotaries are close in power density if you're just comparing the block.

This was all in the article

That max power and torque figure is limited to 30 seconds, presumably for thermal reasons.

They claim the advantage it has over other small powerful motors is the output RPM here is already in a usable range where others need a gearbox.

Neither can an internal combustion, of course. When doing a max speed test, holding high horsepower output levels for a long time, an internal combustion engine will overheat quickly. That's true even with massive airflow over large liquid radiators, with coolant flowing through the casting along the cylinder walls - not to mention literally being a pump which moves cold air in and hot exhaust out at a rate of thousands of liters per minute.

In both cases, it's fine that the power doesn't last, because it takes merely 10-20 horsepower (7.5-15 kW) to move an average car on a flat road at 60 MPH/100 km/h. To accelerate to that cruising speed in ten seconds takes about 180 horsepower/135 kW.

I had the pleasure last week of working on an industrial vacuum pump installation with twelve 100-horsepower/75 kW electric motors - these guys:

https://www.baldor.com/catalog/EM4400TS

Don't look at the photo and think "Oh yeah, there's one of those hanging on the back of my dad's drill press." The shaft is the size of your wrist, not your finger. The casting is the size of an oil drum, and it is made from extremely dense cast iron and copper on a level that non-metalworkers probably don't understand: It weighs 1,200 lbs/550 kg.

Size absolutely is the issue! That sort of motor would be a terrible powerplant for an electric vehicle: It MUST be made very much smaller and very much more powerful. It's made that way because an industrial motor needs to be able to dissipate 4.6% of that max rated 75 kW (acting as a 3,450W space heater) as heat while running at full power for days, covered in dirt and debris, spinning tirelessly in the desert sun, probably with a significant safety factor on all those numbers. Industrial motors are not the same as EV motors!

>> holding high horsepower output levels for a long time, an internal combustion engine will overheat quickly.

Every racecar in every 24-hour race. Every large boat/ship that runs at full throttle 24/7. Every large truck pulling a load up a hill. Every diesel generator that runs at full load for weeks. Modern IC engines can run flat-out for considerable periods of time. Counterintuitively, in many ways running at high power settings is easier on an IC engine than at lower fuel-efficient setting. Some pressures between parts are lower at higher RPMs. Total power/RPM is higher, but the energy involved in each rotation of a part is generally less. Oil moves more efficiently and doesn't get squeezed out as parts push against each other. And the ignition inside the cylinder is richer (ie cooler) when optimized for power rather than efficiency. Talk to anyone riding a Japanese sportbike. Those engines are far happier running flat-out on the track than sitting at idle in traffic.

Those long durations just mean that they (the engine designers) are taking thermals into consideration, and capping at a lower power to compensate.

What you think is flat out, is really just "max it can run without burning up".

No. Flat-out means at full RPM, which is not a thermal decision. It is a limit based on cylinder size and flame speed. Any higher and the fire is still burning when the exhaust valve opens. That is why engines with big/wide cylinders cannot turn as quickly. This is why a large ship with 2-foot wide cylinders might max out at 100rpm while a sportbike with 1-inch cylinders might at 16,000rpm. The capacity of the cooling system is a different issue.

Because of the physics of air movement, sitting at idle is very hard on a car engine. Idle means no speed and air has to be forced across the radiator. Flat-out would mean at least some forward movement and lots of air across the radiators. Any radiator system meant to survived idle while stopped will handle flat-out at speed indefinitely. Those Japanese sportbikes racing around the track are not overheating, but they might if asked to idle at the start line for too long.

Where I am, it is normal to see cars/trucks with carboard across their fronts to reduce airflow. In winter there is too much cooling and engines have trouble getting up to temperature at any forward speed. This is a big issue if you are relying on the engine to warm up and de-fog your windscreen (hybrids).

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/honda-crv-civic-heater-1.59...

>> Flat-out means at full RPM, which is not a thermal decision. It is a limit based on cylinder size and flame speed. Any higher and the fire is still burning when the exhaust valve opens.

Partially -with some engines, the limit is valve float, or cam shape (which is why electronically operated valves are becoming a thing), with some it is thermal.

With pro-level drag race cars, producing 7000+ Hp / 5+MW, some of the more key considerations are how much fuel can be pumped into the cylinders. But they turn over only something like 900 revolutions each race run and need to be torn down between each run.

The point is that ICE engine design is a massive balancing act between inertia of parts, internal friction, strength of parts, fuel, and thermal. Thermal may not be the main driver of every engine design, but if you claim thermal is irrelevant and not a limiting factor, you're just plain wrong. In many types of road races from F1 to Le Mans, merely picking up a small sheet of plastic or paper on the radiator intake will be a cause to pit almost immediately because the thermal management is designed to handle the requirements.

> When doing a max speed test, holding high horsepower output levels for a long time, an internal combustion engine will overheat quickly. That's true even with massive airflow over large liquid radiators, with coolant flowing through the casting along the cylinder walls - not to mention literally being a pump which moves cold air in and hot exhaust out at a rate of thousands of liters per minute.

No? Many passenger cars do not have sufficient oil cooling capacity to handle continuous high speed high power running, because it's not necessary. That doesn't mean internal combustion engines in general can't.

Airplane engines run at max power most of their life and the piston variant is typically only air and oil cooled.

Plenty of race car engines operate at near their maximum power and RPM limits for long periods of time.

Lots of cars can in fact operate at maximum power for long periods of time (see: Autobahn.)

Train internal combustion engines can operate at maximum power continuously.

Generator engines from home to megawatt size operate at max power continuously.

Stick to what you know, friend.

For people who use SI units, that's 243 kW and 600Nm in a package weighing 28.5kg.

Presumably, quite apart from supercars, these units could be useful for flight? Small and light, but with the necessary power.

Aircraft mostly don't need much torque. And, a reasonable mass of batteries still don't hold enough Joules for a generally useful flight.

So, given a beefy fuel cell and liquified hydrogen tank (bonus points for aerogel insulation), an electric motor optimized for energy efficiency is likely to be more useful than one optimized for torque.

But no kerosene-powered airframe will be able to compete with them, once they show up. Hydrogen turbines might outdo the fuel cell/motor combo, though.

They are similar in power and weight to what e.g. Magnix and a few others are supplying.

Does it really help you if the engine weighs nothing when the batteries weigh a ton? Economically viable (battery powered) electric aircraft is sci-fi.

These could be awesome for something like replacing a hefty 100 HP boat outboard.

Could be really cool on a small jet boat where cooling can come from all of the water you’re already sucking up.

I'm having some issues here with the scale. With "For scale, that's a 330-mL energy drink", do they mean that it has a diameter of around 13 cm or what?

Also, aren't energy drink cans larger than coke cans? I haven't had a can in front of me for years, so using cm (or inches) would have been better.

330ml is a small Red Bull can. 13cm diameter is completely wrong, it's about half of that.

"small Red Bull can". I didn't know they come in different sizes. Apparently the small one is 250 ml, mid one 355 ml and then there's a big one of 473 ml.

The 250 ml comes in a 14 cm height box, so I guess the 13 cm were a correct guess?

A 330 ml "Sleek Can", which I guess is the same one as a Red Bull can, has a height of 146 mm.

You know there's some scientists who study shapes and they say that diameter and height are different properties of a cylinder. I wouldn't know anything about that though I'm certainly no scientist.

It's the article which is comparing the height of a can to the radius or diameter of the motor (apparently the radius, but it would be more logical to compare it to the diameter).

It's just as valid as using bananas for scale, but the issue with the article is that that it doesn't even bother to mention the actual dimensions in cm or inches, yet it uses "tiny" in the title to describe the engine.

But for a circular cylinder, the height is not the same as the diameter, which of course is taken as the widest length across the circular cross-section. For a standard energy drink style can, that is around 70 mm (less than 3 inches).

But we’re comparing the height of the can to the diameter of the motor.

Aahh, totally did not parse the original comment as meaning that, how dumb of me. Thanks.

The diameter is about twice that. The radius of the motor is about 1 can, so the diameter would be about 26-30cm, depending on the height of the can.

Generally the “small” Red Bull can is 250ml not 330ml.

> For scale, that's a 330-mL energy drink", do they mean that it has a diameter of around 13 cm or what?

It just means it's a standard european small-but-tall style can. There are 2shapes of 330ml cans, the shorter/stubbier one and the taller narrower one which was initially most common in energy drinks but is now used for soda cans too. Beer still uses the shorter/stubbier 330ml.

I believe they are around 14.5 cm high. Diameter around 6cm.

These seem really useful for a huge range of use cases. But they also sound expensive or hard to build to the point of being bespoke:

“Koenigsegg uses all sorts of interesting materials for the construction of the Quark, including aerospace/motorsport-grade steel, and hollow carbon fiber”

They finally did it, I remember on YouTube watching videos of a man at some kind of trade show who claimed you could build car motors that were roughly the size of a soup can and far more friendly for the environment. Always thought he was a crank, but I guess not.

Scaling the weight linearly down to a soup can (1/63) gives you about 5 horsepower. The Model-T had 20 horsepower though, as does your typical riding lawn mower. So you'd have to soup it up a bit more than that.

That's not too far off if you go by volume instead? Perhaps other bits of the car can be more efficient than the model T to make up for it.

Motor torque capability generally scales in proportion to volume, but shaft speed capability typically increases as the motor shrinks, so the motor power will usually fall at a smaller rate. A motor with 1/64 volume will probably output between 1/30th and 1/16th of its power. So 20 horsepower might barely be achievable. It all really depends on the driver though.

Why don't you see a lot of very long thin, high revving motors for higher power with smaller size than large motors? This one has completely the opposite scale of dimensions even.

Heat dissipation mostly. Square-cubed laws are brutal for getting the heat out.

Long and thin - volume and area increase proportionally with length. Think of 10 small motors put together end to end.

So, mainly two reasons that I am aware of. First, with a long spindly motor running at high speeds, eventually shaft whip becomes an issue; the distance between the bearings ends up being really far. Second, designers usually want low-speed torque more than super-high-speed power, and at high diameters you get a bit more torque than small long motors of equal volume, because torque scales more like the volume of a somewhat hollow cylinder rather than a fully solid cylinder.

For most brushless motors--though not axial flux motors like the one under consideration here--it's much easier to get heat out by passing air axially across the stator. This means that while the surface area is increasing proportionally with length, your ability to flow air across that surface area is not keeping up. For that same motor volume, a shorter and fatter motor will have better airflow and cooling than a long skinny motor.

Moving coils at faster surface speeds require faster switching at less efficiency. Extra diameter for same volume buys extra performance for free.

I have a motor the size of a film canister that produces 0.5HP. It was built in 2003. I'm sure with better magnets and scaling to the size of a soup can would get it well above 5HP. The main caveat is that it spins at 20k RPM, so it would need a gearbox.

Would love to hear more about that baby

It's a Mega ACn 16/15/4. Permanent magnet inrunner with 2200kV. Made in Czechia.

Officially specced for 25A, commonly run from 4S LiPo = 14V, but the current can go higher with good cooling or in bursts.

Wow, thanks. I am really behind the times. $80 gets you some oomph:

https://www.hyperflight.co.uk/products.asp?code=MEGA-16-15-4...

You can already get a soup-can sized 3.5kw motor on Amazon for ~$100, so that exists already. Their tech might be optimized for the size motor, but if not, there might be room for improvement at the smaller size.

https://www.amazon.com/Flipsky-Hardened-Skateboard-Brushless...

(The idea that an e-skateboard can have four of those motors blows my mind. Suicide!)

The point is that's not enough for a car. You need around 20x that power as a minimum starting point for a small car.

5HP (3.7kW) is not enough for a two ton car, but it is plenty for a small city vehicle. 1kW is enough to reach about 40km/h on a bicycle.

> 5HP (3.7kW) is not enough for a two ton car, but it is plenty for a small city vehicle.

It's not enough for a car. I don't want to get pedantic about it, sure it could power a clown car or two scooters and an umbrella duct taped together.

The (BTW I have seen one in person and it is actually cute IMHO) bare-bare minimum is the Citroen Ami (which is not a car, but rather a quadricycle) :

https://www.auto-data.net/en/citroen-ami-electric-5.5-kwh-8h...

5.5 kW to get 45 kmh speed (and 70 km range)

Since the Ami is a car that actually makes a little sense for cities, it probably counts as "clown car" for people who are used to the huge hunks of steel that you usually see on streets.

Yep, though "clown car" seems dismissive, maybe we could call it "sort of legal for the road golf cart", as it does makes lot of sense for some EU city centres or for local deliveries in places where streets and parking spaces are tiny.

The UK site for it envisions a possible use for the "cargo" version for "last mile deliveries": https://www.citroen.co.uk/models/future-models/ami.html

Here's a guy using a soup-can sized motor in an older BMW. (25:00 to see the car moving).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcoVYZ20PwM

I saw a comment a few years ago from a guy that claimed to design electric motors. He said the design space is pretty hashed out. But what's changing is controls and use cases.

That said I think rocket lab gets 50hp out of the soup can sized motor they use for their turbo pumps.

It mostly is, but way at the boundaries of performance where cost is no object, I wouldn't be surprised to see a company like Koenigsegg advance beyond normal limits, using pricey materials like cobalt steels, sintered powdered iron, phase-change cooling, or other tricks that are beyond mortal budgets.

I'm really excited to see what smaller and more powerful motors combined with increasingly dense battery technology does for robotics. Anyone with knowledge or expertise care to predict the next 10 years?

I don't think we're close to the limits yet of how many kilowatts we can pack into a defined weight/volume.

For example, one could imagine a motor having many 'onion layers' from outside to inside, where half of the layers are stationary, and half move. Magnetic fields between the layers cause the torque. By making many smaller layers, magnetic flux paths are shorter, and therefore less metal is needed for a given pulling force, and hence less space.

Current motors have just two layers (rotor and stator), but in future motors with 10+ layers, total power in a given space will be very high - the only limit really will be cost and difficulty of manufacture, especially of complex bearing sets required to keep all the layers concentric.

Eventually, motors will become small and light enough that they get integrated into wheels, and suddenly car design will be dramatically simplified.

Is it possible to cool it in that form factor when it's producing that much power? Can you actually go around the Nurburgring with it?

No. They can run it at full power for 20 seconds, per the article.

You can ace the Nuremberg in the car they make, of course..

for 95% efficient 200kw motor you'd need to dissipate 10kw. Doing it with air is problematic, and usually motors like this are water/oil cooled, otherwise it is really limited to short sub-minute burst of full power.

For example 160kw, 6.7kw/kg motor https://www.yasa.com/products/yasa-p400/

I don't think the size of the electric motor is of concern even in a hybrid vehicle. The problem is still the batteries.

Yeah, but motor size might compete with other things in the limited space. If you get (say) 30L more space from making 4 motors smaller, then that's 30L you can use for batteries which is (....really bad napkin math...) perhaps around 10kWh? Or 30L more trunk space or cabin space.

In a hypercar it's obviously even more cramped, but more importantly a smaller engine is lighter.

now if only this was packaged as part of a conversion kit for ICEs. 3.5k$ would be a magic price. And a shop could similarly charge to retro it at that price. So hopefully 7k$ total. Mind you the work shops will bank even more with all the "scrap metal (engine block, catalytic converters etc)" so maybe we'd see free swap deals.

It's way too overpowered for most ICE conversion; so an even smaller and lighter one would be fine. Now where's the batteries...

Edit:"After 20 seconds, the figures drop to 134 hp and 184 lb-ft of torque.". That's more like it.

I wonder how a 100hp variant would look.

> After 20 seconds, the figures drop to 134 hp and 184 lb-ft of torque

Almost exactly the same :)

Your main hurdle is the driveline surviving the initial torque shock, so even with that 20sec power drop you still have the initial torque from a full battery as a risk.

Not at all unsolvable, you just want to consider it before you break your axles!

At this size, you don't need axles, just mount them straight to the hubs and pay a little penalty in unsprung weight. Or use stubby half-shafts.

This is already a solved problem, as the accelerator peddle in an electric vehicle isn't a simple on / off switch, it's connected to a computer that talks to an electronic speed controller, thereby providing drive-train safe power application.

The same sorts of governing functions are computer managed in an ICE powered vehicle too.

Of course, this is in response to an engine swap, just talking out that these are all decisions to be made and thought about. People regularly drop in bigger ICE motors and blow their drivelines up. There is absolutely the option of plonking in a big torquey electric motor and sending all you've got through it, without upgrading axles or using the right settings/setup in your motor controller.

This isn't a theoretical problem, even some ICEs with a lot of torque have warnings against flooring them from standstill to avoid axle/drivetrain damage.

Oh I didn't mean solveable in the theoretical sense, I meant it is very much a practically solveable problem. Buy bigger axles, use a nuanced motor controller etc. It's a problem you have to solve for ICE swaps/tunes too. Just discussing that it's something you will likely want to consider if you're swapping from something low torque.

The scrap metal isn't really worth all that much. Maybe the cat is worth something. I do agree though that it'd be great to be able to buy new high-performance conversion motors for a reasonable price. (I'm working on an RX-8 conversion with a Netgain Hyper9. It's a decent motor, but 120 horsepower isn't a lot compared to the ~230 hp engine it originally had, or the motors that come in mid-range modern EVs.)

On the other hand, a smaller, more powerful motor would probably need a lot of cooling. The Hyper9 is air cooled, and is supposedly about 96% efficient when it's in its optimal range. Sometimes it's nice to have things be simple. (The motor controller generally does need water cooling. It's not technically mandatory, but highly recommended.)

How many death threats have you received for the "heresy" of removing the rotary engine from the RX-8?

They typically remove themselves.

I wish that were literally true, it would have been a lot easier. Those engines are heavy (especially with the exhaust manifold/alternator/flywheel/etc.. hanging off it).

None. I bought the car with a bad engine in the first place, so it's not like I threw away a perfectly good engine. (I even took the old engine to a guy that rebuilds rotaries; he took it apart and said there weren't any parts that were worth trying to reuse.)

This is true of a lot of conversions: they aren't "destroying" a perfectly good ICE engine, they're salvaging a car that would otherwise be sent to the wrecker because it doesn't work anymore.

I think the RX-8 is a great platform for conversion because it's a nice, reasonably modern car and they can be had for almost nothing if the engine needs rebuilding, or is too damaged to be rebuilt.

When I was heavily in the rotary scene back in the early 2000s people would get lynched for even hinting about putting a ICE block into their RX-?.

That may be true of some rotary enthusiasts still; I don't really know that many. I could see it being more of a thing with RX-7s, which are kind of rare and expensive. RX-8s aren't super common, but they're also not hard to find. And if the engines are due for a rebuild, they're sort of like old pianos -- people will practically give them away.

Also, climate change is a thing. I'd expect more people are aware of that these days, and its hard to justify running such an inefficient engine even if they are admittedly really cool.

Do you have the swap project posted anywhere? Would love to follow. I'm more in favor of a K-swap if anything but I've seen videos of an FD3S with some electric motor and it seemed pretty rad; I lack the details for it, though.

I don't. I've been meaning to, just haven't gotten around to it. There's a guy in the UK doing a pretty similar conversion documented on Youtube. He's using a Leaf motor and batteries I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_ACg1JTqtY

$3.5k is waaaaaaay too low to expect for an e-conversion any time soon. Heck, that’s too low for a decent ICE crate motor.

Too low? Meaning there's no room for people to make money as what installers? How does the price being low make it less likely to become a thing?

Meaning the actual price will be much higher than that estimate. Electric vehicles aren't just gasoline vehicles with a motor swap.

True.

Batteries, inverters etc are expensive.

Comparing a gas tank to EV batteries, the cost swings the other way unfortunately.

Even with an e-conversion you will often have to address the ECU in some manner. Even if you have a full standalone EV setup you will likely still need to integrate some portion of the body harness and fool the rest of the car. Bolting in the crate EV parts will be pretty trivial, the wiring etc is going to take time.

A smart company will come around one day with a targeted selection of cars for a "plug and play" wiring harnesses and control units.

For that money rather spend it on a V8 crate motor like a used LS or new Ford 5.8L V8 (easy 300 hp).

A hybrid conversion would be ideal, if this motor could also act as a generator. It seems like it's small enough to fit on the tailshaft of a regular transmission; or perhaps even several of them.

I think that amount of power, although for only 20s, would make for a fun Tesla-beating hybrid sleeper.

The problem is not the engine, it's finding a place to securely mount the batteries that won't interfere with the crash safety systems. Hint: that would cost tens or hundreds of millions per car model if it's even possible. Conversions aren't going to be mass market.

But what about the cost of the batteries?

perhaps batteries as we know them today may be different in a couple of years. hydrogen fuel cell batteries hold promise in this regard and possibly others like salt based batteries.

JerryRigEverything is converting an older US military Humvee to electric: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0vZL9uwyfOFezIOiBjkd...

tl;dw: It's much more involved than simply swapping the motor. You need to create a custom mounting bracket for the electric motor, you need batteries (used long-range 75 KwH Tesla batteries go for about $10k), you need a charging system, an electronic management system, and you need to find a way to power peripherals like A/C which are typically powered via a serpentine belt from an ICE.

In time there will be a 3rd party market for conversion kits from EV parts to old cars just like there is a huge market for frames and engines etc for classic cars today.

Ford is selling ev crate motor if your interested

Got a link/name for this ?

$5,000! https://performanceparts.ford.com/part/M-9000-MACHE

Seems they initially sold a few for $3900, but now have them priced at $4095

https://electrek.co/2021/11/03/ford-is-selling-mach-e-crate-...

https://www.thedrive.com/news/43030/fords-already-out-of-390...

https://performanceparts.ford.com/part/M-9000-MACHE

Why on earth would a company on the cutting edge of EV technology sell their motor for $3.5k?

> Mind you the work shops will bank even more with all the "scrap metal (engine block, catalytic converters etc)" so maybe we'd see free swap deals.

What? You severely over-estimate the value of that unprocessed "scrap metal."

Also, the EV motor is probably one of the least expensive parts of the system. It's the battery and inverter that are expensive.

My first thought when seeing the size of these is "What would happen if you put one on each wheel?"

one would think & hope small well designed motors would & could also be economical to build. there's probably intense process to produce these but how fancy do you need to get with 200kg of materials?

whether material or production costs dominate is an interesting question.

Permanent magnet motors sometimes use rare-earths. It's not absolutely necessary, but going without may lose some power and/or increase the weight. Induction motors don't need permanent magnets, but they're less efficient so the EV industry seems to be moving away from them. (Less efficient also means they generate more heat, which means more active cooling.)

EV motors often have absurdly high RPM limits, which may require some exotic materials and/or lubricants. (I think Tesla motors go up to about 18,000 rpm if memory serves.)

Copper for the windings is another high-cost material; copper has been expensive lately. You could use aluminum instead, but it would mean having to scale up the design or run at a lower power to compensate for the wire resistance.

I do hope to see good, cheap, powerful motors be a thing that was more available to random third parties to swap into their old ICE vehicles. Right now the best options seem to be to use something like a Netgain Hyper9, or scavange a drive unit out of something like a Leaf or Bolt or Tesla.

ok so based off your first three paragraphs what could justify all these mainstream car makers building motors that weigh 2.5X, use so so so much more material? why is Koenigsegg alone able to achieve such material efficiency, when it seems like we should be so pushed to push weight/material usage down down down? what justified such a high power density motor being so expensive?

For an electric car, the hardest part to design is the battery. It's really expensive, and really heavy. If you spend a ton of engineering effort to make your engine 50% smaller and $500 more expensive, all you've done is lowered your profit margin for a tiny decrease in weight. If you instead put the same engineering effort into the battery and manage to make it 5% smaller, you get a bigger weight reduction for the car, and it's probably accompanied with a lower price.

Optimizing things that aren't a bottleneck is almost never a good use of resources.

PerhPs a smaller firm like this can’t optimise the battery though because it’s too capital intensive to do so?

Agreed that we shouldn't mis-optimize.

I wonder how much Tesla pays for their motors. I wonder how much they'd save if they only needed 1/3rd as much material.

This kind of material-minimizing innovation seems like it could go a long way. It feels like if someone wanted to mass produce power-dense electric motors, they could radically reduce the cost of a motor by simply using less materials. If they can get to scale. If they can sell them like crazy, which they should, since they should be cheaper to make, as the material inputs are so much less.

Koenigsegg of course doesn't care about production costs. It's expected that every item that goes into the car is going to be built via the most exorbinant processes possible. But the underlying idea of using far less material to make a motor sounds extremely attractive to me.

I didn't see much in the article about efficiency. Koenigsegg seems focused on supercar performance like acceleration, but most EV makers care about range. EV makers do pay a lot of attention to their motors and highly optimize them for the specs that they care about.

The more efficient your motor is, the more mileage you get out of your battery, so the smaller your battery can be. It could easily be that an extra 1 kg of steel and copper shaves off 10 kg of lithium ion batteries.

The Netgain motors are wildly outdated. 100-140v in a world where 400v is almost standard, and 800v is increasingly common.

Means you need very heavy duty wiring/controllers, high current rated batteries, can't use OEM power steering / AC compressors, can't use OEM battery packs, can't use DCFC infrastructure....

>can't use OEM power steering / AC compressors

And why not? Power steering systems don't run on the HV system but on the LV system as every electric car has a DC/DC converter that bridges the HV and LV domains. So regardless if your cars is using 800V or 100V powertrain system, all the auxiliary equipment will still be on the 12V network.

I basically agree with that, though I'd say that lower voltage motors are sometimes useful in conversions, since they usually have a smaller battery pack than what would be in an OEM vehicle (due to weight, cost, and having limited space to put the battery). Lower voltage doesn't really stop you from salvaging all those other parts from an OEM vehicle. I think it's usually just the motor controller and DC-DC converter that run at the full pack voltage. DC fast charging is a problem if the charger doesn't support the lower voltage.

I have wondered whether the Hyper9 can actually run at a higher voltage without damage. I suppose the limiting factors are the insulation on the motor windings and the ability to dissipate heat. (The motor demagnetizes if it gets too hot, which is why the motor has a temperature sensor so the controller can back off before that happens.) The Hyper9 comes with a motor controller that's limited to 180 volts (that's for the 144v nominal version). I don't know if anyone's tried to run a Hyper9 with a different controller that can handle much higher voltage, like 300 or 400v.

How can I get several of these motors in my car, ideally one per wheel!??

That'd be enough torque to rip my 70s british car to bits!

For those that needed it: ICE = Internal Combustion Engine

eh, it's so small you can put it on a bike :)

Pounds, feet, horse power and millilitres are used in one sentence which makes my head spin.

Here's the same press release written in metric land:

https://www.autodaily.com.au/koenigsegg-designs-in-house-ev-...

It's good that people are getting the weight down of these motors, but i'm still unsure why I need 250kW+, let alone two of them built into the drivetrain.

I've managed with <100kW for the last 30 years in my cars of choice, and I know headline figures sell stuff, but we're trying to save the planet at the moment. But I guess if it convinces petrolheads that there's still fun to be had going electric that serves a purpose...

Koenigsegg makes super cars. These motors are not for you.

Not that you're wrong generally speaking, but doesn't Koenigsegg R&D and license technology too? I believe they're trying to license (maybe even manufacture) their freevalve technology to some ICE-based auto manufacturers?

So it's certainly true that most of us here probably aren't the target for Koenigsegg super cars, we might be indirectly consumers of the engines or engine technologies they create.

Koenigsegg has been an incredible company to follow and their CEO is such a pleasure to listen to that they're one of the few auto companies that I'm excited about. I'd be even more excited if they took a path similar to Tesla or Polestar and started offering an affordable brand of EVs.

You most certainly are not in the target audience for anything Koenigsegg makes. Maybe a handful of HN could have the finances.

YC 2023: buying me a Koenigsegg

Although it’s worth noting that “trickle down” tech advancements are quite a powerful force in the automotive industry

Unlike internal combustion engines, an oversized (for everyday driving) electric motor is not substantially less efficient in everyday driving than a normal-size one. In fact, oversized components are often more energy efficient (less electrical resistance etc).

i've always had the impression that miniaturization was the key to low thermal dissipation and electric consumption... How is it different with motors ? ( genuine question)

An oversized motor will be slightly less efficient at low load, but only slightly (compared to an IC engine whose efficiency is strongly related to size).

An oversized battery, or oversized wiring, will generally be more efficient due to reduced resistive losses. Larger components (such as are designed to handle high power levels) have lower electrical resistance.

(Resistive heating power) = (current)^2 * (resistance)

Since you seem pretty knowledgeable : how can i reconcile two observations that seem contradictory to me :

- "smaller" cables in CPU make for lower energy consumption

- "larger" cables in engine reduce resistance

Most of the places where miniaturisation is key to low power consumption are where power is used to process information. In that case, you're trying to get the amount of energy required to handle a bit flying past as small as possible. Most of the energy consumed in this way is used to fill up or empty the capacitance of the "wire" leading from the output of whatever is processing that bit of information, so anything that reduces the capacitance will reduce the power consumption (to a point - you also need to worry about leakage). Miniaturisation reduces that capacitance.

With electric motors, it's completely different - the amount of physical work that comes out of the motor is fixed - you can't reduce it like you can with information processing. So, you're purely looking at improving the efficiency of the conversion from electric power to mechanical power. A larger motor allows you to do that with thicker wires (so less resistance to heat up) and with things moving at a slower speed inside (which also helps). The only downside of a larger motor is if you have to carry it with you - that could reduce your efficiency by making the vehicle heavier. However, electric motors are generally remarkably efficient these days, and the main consequence of the inefficiency is heat generation, which gives us the other advantage of making it bigger - it is easier to dissipate heat from a larger object than a smaller object.

Energy efficiency is usually expressed as a percentage in one of two forms:

1. (useful energy out) / (energy in)

2. (theoretical minimum energy consumption) / (actual energy consumption)

In thermodynamic systems the second is often expressed as "isentropic efficiency" or similar.

In computing the second term can also be expressed using Landauer's limit [0], the theoretical minimum energy consumption of computation. Current computers are still shockingly inefficient in this regard, taking several orders of magnitude more energy usage than the "ideal" minimum.

So really, as inefficient as a gasoline engine is, it's nowhere near as bad as even the smallest, most modern CPU.

"Millions of times" level of inefficiency is like burning banknotes for warmth.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

There is one positive environmental aspect of high power electric motors if they are capable of recuperation: you can recuperate a larger portion of the kinetic energy which would be wasted otherwise as heat using breaks. This counts even for heavy cars running lower speeds or not accelerating fast.

cracking the case in 30 seconds!

I always do a quick fact-check on any automotive engine claim: HP & Torque curves vs RPM should always cross at 5252 RPM. The one in TFA does not. \_(ツ)_/¯

I didn't see any graphs in units of hp or ft-lbs. Do you have a link?

There's a torque-to-kilowatt graph roughly near the top of the article, and you can convert kw to hp by multiplying by 1.341.

Crap, my bad, I didn't even realize the graph was using NM and kW. I'll go back into my cave now.

That doesn't appear to be true? https://auto.howstuffworks.com/question622.htm Mathematically, the OP seems to be correct.

It is mathematically impossible for the curves not to cross at 5252.

The scales are different: torque is from 0 to 700 Nm, power is from 0 to 300 KW.

It helps not to work in ridiculous units. Power = torque x angular velocity

So in this case let's take the position of the bend, where power goes flat (4000rpm, 250kW, 600Nm): P=4000 x 2x pi/60 1/s x 600 Nm = 251kW

Seems to be correct.

> HP & Torque curves vs RPM should always cross at 5252 RPM

Not really. First, this number only applies to imperial units. Second, axis scaling will move the crossing point. The only way this happens (provided we are talking about imperial units) is if the torque and power axis scales are explicitly scales such that the curves intersect at 5252 RPM.

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