[pminmo]

Originally Posted by Al_The_Man The DIY electric car community has been active for some years now, There should be quite a few active sites by now. In the early days, DC motors were prevalent, now just as in the Locomotive field, AC has taken over. DC motors and PM AC often posses full torque at zero rpm. There were some designs that used a motor on each wheel, along the lines of Locomotive practice. These usually require the addition of wheel slip detection, however. A little like the traction control used on current autos. Al.

It seems that most of the add on conversions use series wound DC motors. I suspect the future will probably be brushless pmdc motors as they are so much more energy efficient than AC or DC series field motors. With todays high intensity permanent magnetics, logic would say you have to take advantage of that "stored" energy of the PM as a portion of the equation. A lot of the new high efficiency motorized appliances are going to brushless pmdc motors. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's like 9X% verses 6X% efficient when comparing brushless pmdc to field wound motors.