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Car companies, starting with Volvo last summer, have laid out plans to electrify entire lineups of vehicles. But the fine print makes it clear that the coming decade and beyond will focus not just on massive battery packs powering electric motors, but also on adding a little extra juice to the venerable internal combustion engine.
Increasingly, that juice will arrive in the form of new electrical systems built to a 48-volt standard, instead of the 12-volt systems that have dominated since the 1950s. Simpler than Prius-type drivetrains and less expensive than Tesla-scale battery power, the new electrical architecture both satisfies the demands of cars made more power hungry by their gadget load and enables the use of lower-cost hybrid drive systems.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/08/business/electric-cars-48-volts.html
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday February 26 2018, @03:53PM
Fixed wiring as in a motor probably should be aluminium, it would reduce the total weight.
I doubt that. Motors have two main parts: the windings and the core (this applies to both the rotor and the stator, though some motors omit windings in the stator and use permanent magnets). The core is usually made of thin laminations of iron, and is used for conducting magnetic flux. Using aluminum windings would require you to significantly enlarge the whole motor, including the core, which means you'll be adding a bunch more mass in iron, which is even more dense than copper.
Iron is cheap, though, so for cost-sensitive applications where you care more about cost than size, and weight isn't a big concern, it can make sense. A laundry machine is a good example of such an application: heavier is actually better here usually (modern washers actually add concrete to increase mass), and there's generally plenty of room for a motor. But in a car, even if the motors weigh the same, size is much more important than shaving a few pennies of cost.