European Initiatives Addressing High Efficiency and Low-Cost Electric Motors for Circularity and Low use of Rare Resources

The automotive industry is amidst an unprecedented multi-faceted transition striving for more sustainable passenger mobility and freight transportation. The rise of e-mobility is coming along with energy efficiency improvements, greenhouse gas and non-exhaust emission reductions, driving/propulsion technology innovations, and a hardware-software-ratio shift in vehicle development for road-based electric vehicles. Current R&D activities are focusing on electric motor topologies and designs, sustainability, manufacturing, prototyping, and testing. This is leading to a new generation of electric motors, which is considering recyclability, reduction of (rare earth) resource usage, cost criticality, and a full product life-cycle assessment, to gain broader market penetration. This paper outlines the latest advances of multiple EU-funded research projects under the Horizon Europe framework and showcases their complementarities to address the European priorities as identified in the 2Zero SRIA. Target of this paper is to introduce a family of European projects (EM-TECH, HEFT, MAXIMA, VOLTCAR and CliMAFlux), all following the target of high efficiency and low-cost electric motors for circularity and low use of rare resources. Especially, this paper will describe the latest advances of the respective projects as well as their complementarity to address the 2Zero strategy.