this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2025
135 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
60801 readers
3783 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Eliminating the entire drivetrain is the benefit. That's a ton of complicated heavy wear parts you immediately don't have to worry about. Even if you take more wear on the motor, fixing that would be as simple as just swapping out a wheel.
I mean you effectively just eliminated 75-90% of the car
On the other hand every time you need to replace a wheel (one of the most easily damaged parts of your car) you're probably shelling out a quarter of a car in cost.
That's assuming you can't just move the motor to a new wheel.
On the other, other hand, the cost of manufacturing the car just went down by ~60% (cost of parts) assuming they can make these somewhat conparable to the price of a tire. If they can match the price of a tire it went down by a shitload more
I don't think there's any practical way for that to happen and I expect you'd want to put tires over top of these anyway. Which will themselves be very expensive because they won't be able to mount regular tires on them.
I'm sure they can design it in a way to work with existing tires. But I'm also sure there's zero chance replacing these wheels will be anywhere near cheap.