High volume production of Electric Machines: Results from WP3 in FFI project P43352-1

This report has been made with the intention to study vehicle traction electric machine design and electric machine high-volume production simultaneously. The aim was to better understand the trade-offs between optimal machine design versus production costs. Four permanent magnet electric machine designs, all different from a production point of view, has been designed. Each machine design has been optimized as far as the project budget allowed to reach the shortest design which would fulfill all technical requirements. For each of the four electric machine designs, a highly automated production line has been set up, capable of producing one million electric machines per year. All the costs for incoming material and for running the production line has been estimated to the best information available. The results show that material cost is clearly dominating over production cost for all four machine designs with at least a factor of 20. This leads to the very simple conclusion that vehicle traction electric machines can be selected based on material cost only.