Honda debuts new global EV series, Honda Zero, coming in 2026

Dinsmore@sh.itjust.works to Technology@lemmy.world – 317 points –
Honda debuts new global EV series, Honda Zero, coming in 2026
theverge.com
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To be fair e-axles are actually a thing. You can mount the electric motor where an engine would be and use largely the same components as a traditional car to get the motion to the wheels. Instead e-axles basically wrap all the motion components around the axle. Motor trend had an article about it a while ago.

www.motortrend.com/news/e-axle-vs-central-drive-motor-layout-commercial-evs

So it's basically a fancy Technology™️ term for a layout decision which was called motor on axle for decades until a marketing department decided they needed some Innovation™️, and this tech writer described it so poorly I couldn't even identify it even though I've programmed quad motor torque vectoring systems myself.

Electric motors have this interesting property where they require such minimal supporting components - basically a couple of power wires and some sensors - that they can scale to any size with very little overhead, and so you can do 4 motors. That's it, electric cars give you this possibility for free.

"Motor-on-axle" is descriptive and helpful. In fact it's too descriptive, because it reveals that nothing special is going on. "e-Axle" is opaque nonsense for gullible tech writers, and this one tried to make it sound special but ended up opting for such vague language that they literally just described an electric car.

This entire article is just ad-copy. It's fashion writing for tech nerds.