nidec服务器开机显示off,Nidec plans to apply electric motor expertise to car industry

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From the Porsche Taycan to the Jaguar I-Pace, and from the Mercedes EQ range to BMW’s Mini E, the world market is about to enjoy a deluge of new electric vehicles.

Analysts and engineers in the sector are obsessed with batteries— the crucial component in an electric vehicle and the biggest constraint on its cost, range and performance. But there is another that counts almost as much: the motor.

“I’ve been in the auto industry for 30 years and I’ve never seen a period of technological innovation like this,” says Kazuya Hayafune, a senior executive at Nidec, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of electric motors. “From about two years ago the interest in traction motors just took off.”

Mr Hayafune says he is travelling 300 days a year in Europe and China to support customers and partners producing electric vehicles. “It isn’t enough. I’ll have to do 330 days.”

The convergence of electronics and automobiles, two mainstays of Japanese industry, is opening huge opportunities for companies such as Nidec. The Kyoto-based company, founded by famed entrepreneur Shigenobu Nagamori, is known for its rapid growth and acquisitive approach.

Hitherto, motors for electric vehicles have been a low-volume cottage industry, made inside car companies for their experimental vehicles. The arrival of electronics industry specialists holds the prospect of big cost reductions and performance gains.

“To meet fuel efficiency targets, the carmakers need to electrify their whole model range, and there’s no way they can make all of those motors in-house,” says Mr Hayafune. “For the volume segment, they will have to look outside.”

Nidec has its origins in motors for hard disc drives, sometimes as thin as 3mm, which it produces by the billion. Now it promises to bring the same electronics culture of constant reductions in size and cost to electric vehicle motors.

It is building a 66,000 sq m factory in China, and plans to start production in May next year. It has aggressive sales targets. “This is going to be the next pillar of Nidec’s business,” says Mr Haya-fune. “Our sales target is ￥1tn [$8.8bn] by 2030. Our chairman wants us to get to ￥100bn in sales by 2025. I say we can do it by 2022.”

Nidec’s initial target is the Chinese market. A plant in Poland will follow in 2021 if growth in Europe goes to plan.

Underpinning this bullish approach is a belief that there is room for big im-provements in electric vehicle motors. “Technology development for anything involved with cars is about making it smaller and lighter,” says Mr Hayafune. Any reduction in a motor’s weight im-proves fuel efficiency and creates more space in the car; any improvement in efficiency gets more range out of a given battery size.

Nidec’s initial offer for the auto industry is an 83kg motor that puts out a maximum of 150kW, roughly equivalent to the power of a two-litre turbo engine. A combustion engine of that power would weigh more than twice as much.

Mr Hayafune says there is potential to reduce the size of the motor, the inverter that converts direct to alternating current, and the reduction gearing between the motor and the wheel. “We can’t see any limit yet. Maybe in 20 years we’ll need a change of approach but so far we can’t see any limit,” he says.

Halving the size and cost of electric vehicle motors by 2025 is not impossible. That would help bring down the price of electric vehicles to consumers. Nidec’s specialities include the use of computer-aided design to shave off every sliver of unneeded material.