“China tightening its stranglehold on rare earth elements (REEs) makes now the perfect time for the automotive industry to start thinking about alternatives for EV motors, but not a single proposed solution appears ready for reality.
A trio at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US – who’ve been working on EV blueprints that don’t require rare earth magnets, and hence are less reliant on China – said this week there have been lots of promising developments in terms of removing REEs from electric car designs, but every single approach appears to have the same basic drawback.
“The bottom line is that replacing rare earth–based magnets with non–rare earth ones comes at a cost: Degraded motor performance,” the trio wrote for IEEE Spectrum. “We’re not there yet.””
1 Comment
“China tightening its stranglehold on rare earth elements (REEs) makes now the perfect time for the automotive industry to start thinking about alternatives for EV motors, but not a single proposed solution appears ready for reality.
A trio at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US – who’ve been working on EV blueprints that don’t require rare earth magnets, and hence are less reliant on China – said this week there have been lots of promising developments in terms of removing REEs from electric car designs, but every single approach appears to have the same basic drawback.
“The bottom line is that replacing rare earth–based magnets with non–rare earth ones comes at a cost: Degraded motor performance,” the trio wrote for IEEE Spectrum. “We’re not there yet.””