Every generation of engineers inherits assumptions. Most of them go unquestioned - not because they’re the most optimized or best, but because they’re familiar.
Electric motor design is no exception.
Across a spectrum of platforms from drones to HVAC systems, robotics, and industrial equipment, we continue to design motors that look remarkably similar to those built decades ago. Specifically, radial flux machines utilizing laminated electrical steel. Geometries optimized around processes defined long before today’s performance demands existed.
The uncomfortable truth is this:
motor design hasn’t stalled because the physics ran out - it’s stalled because our thinking hasn’t kept up with how manufacturing/technology has evolved.
In the early 1900s, cars were handcrafted, mechanically simple, and constrained by the tools of the time. Manufacturing dictated design.
Then manufacturing evolved.
Assembly lines. Automation. New materials. New processes. And eventually, entirely new ways of thinking about how vehicles should be built. The companies that adapted thrived. The ones that didn’t became footnotes.
Fast forward to today. Just when the industry believed everyone was operating on a level playing field, a disruptor like Tesla didn’t simply improve the car - it rewrote the manufacturing and engineering playbook- changing how we look at propulsion systems to occupant comfort, and yes, even how we drive the vehicle. Integration replaced assembly. Architecture replaced parts lists. Manufacturing became a design variable, not a constraint.
That same inflection point is approaching electric motors.
So, the question isn’t whether better motors are possible.
It’s whether we’re still designing them for a manufacturing reality that no longer exists.
A radial flux motor is one where magnetic flux flows radially between the rotor and stator. This architecture pairs naturally with laminated electrical steel, which is produced as thin, flat sheets stacked to form the magnetic core.
Together, this combination became dominant because it:
For decades, it was the most practical way to build efficient electric machines.
Then quietly turned into default.
This is the question most teams rarely stop to ask.
Are radial flux machines everywhere because they’re the best solution for every application?
Or because everything around them - tooling, suppliers, qualification paths, simulation models - was built to support them?
Most motor architectures aren’t selected through a clean-slate evaluation of system-level performance needs. They’re inherited - reused and chosen because they’re “proven,” “safe,” and already understood.
That mindset made sense when change was expensive and risk was high.
Today, comfort has become a constraint.
At some point, many engineering teams hit the same wall.
The winding has been optimized.
Controls are refined.
Cooling has been added where possible.
When optimization no longer moves the needle, the question stops being how to improve the motor - and becomes what assumptions the motor is built on.
If geometry, flux paths, and integration are dictated by the material itself, then no amount of refinement will change the outcome.
When optimization no longer changes outcomes, the only lever left is the one most teams hesitate to pull: material and topology.
Soft magnetic composites (SMCs) are magnetic materials made by electrically insulating individual iron-based particles and compacting them into near-net-shape components.
Unlike laminated electrical steel, SMCs are magnetically isotropic. Magnetic flux is no longer constrained to flat, stacked paths - it can move in three dimensions.
This doesn’t automatically make motors better.
It removes the assumption that motor geometry must remain flat (in essence 2D) – enabling new architectures.
And that single shift changes the design conversationentirely.
When magnetic flux can move freely in three dimensions, motor architecture becomes a design freedom again.
Flux paths can be shortened instead of folded.
Stators can be shaped around electromagnetic intent rather than lamination stacks.
Thermal, magnetic, and mechanical considerations can be addressed together - earlier in the design process.
Material choice stops being a late-stage constraint and starts defining what kinds of motors are even possible.
Not for every application.
But for the ones pushing real limits.
Once planar constraints are relaxed, motor architectures that were previously dismissed begin to look different.
Axial flux machines
Transverse flux designs
Yokeless axial flux
These topologies weren’t failures of theory. They were constrained by what materials and manufacturing methods could realistically support at the time.
As those constraints evolve, so does the viability of the architectures built on them.
Every engineering team eventually reaches an inflection point.
You can continue refining architectures optimized for yesterday’s manufacturing realities.
Or you can step back and ask whether those realities should still define the design.
This isn’t about abandoning what works.
It’s about deciding whether familiarity is still serving progress.
The teams that shape the next decade of electric machines won’t do so by asking what’s familiar.
They’ll do so by asking what’s now possible - and being willing to design for it.