Rivian Dual vs Quad Motor Teardown Comparison

foreign [Music] [Music] thank you hey everybody welcome back to Monroe live I'm here with Scott and we're going to take a little look at the differences between the old rivian um quad motor system and the new dual system which they developed themselves so definitely excited to dive into this and yeah first off it was just exciting to get this in here I know thanks to the rivian team for sending it over to make it available we were eager to tear it down and look through it and yeah today we're going to do a bit of a comparison one thing I guess just at a high level to clarify we'll say quad motor and dual motor when we're saying that we're really talking about the total in vehicle quantity so exactly the quad motor one a single Drive Unit from that what we've got over here is just the rear drive unit so that actually has two of the four Motors so it's really a dual motor unit and then a single one uh from the other vehicle that in total has to so it's a little bit confusing but essentially two Motors here one motor here you multiply that times two in the vehicle for total quantity so um again I have to thank the guy over at rivien for giving us a motor and drive system and that was very generous of them and for those of you who didn't see it there's an RJ and I uh what do you call it podcast that that you can come in and there's so you can hear what RJ had to say uh he's very very knowledgeable about his products which is very unusual for a lot of CEOs so let's dive in so let's start over here at this at the Staters and um yeah and look around what we got absolutely Sandy I know this was something that jumped out to you and like again again I said so we've got old here new here what kind of juxtapose between the major systems that we're going through here Staters obviously part of the electric motor it's the stationary element we've got the two Staters from the old one here Sandy what are we seeing here and how does that compare to this you can see that this one had the crown cut off this is you can see here though that the crown on this side has been laser welded together and then capped if you look at the rivian you can see that on this side on this side the crown here this is all made with hairpins these are sometimes called hairpins other times they're called eye pins yeah but you've got twice as much welding on the Bosch and by the way we should differentiate yeah this is a ribbian design this is a Bosch design and everything that you see here is from Bosch rivian did really nothing except buy a black box for this and I'm I guess I'm happy to see them move in a New Direction yeah this episode of Monroe live is brought to you by brilliant here at Monroe we love to get technical our Engineers are lifelong Learners and are constantly looking for opportunities to own their skills which is why we love brilliant Brilliance mission is to inspire and develop people to achieve their goals in stem brillia knows that thousands of dollars spent on education isn't always attainable so they offer courses in math science and technology for a fraction of the price and a format that allows you to learn on your own time whether you're interested in learning the basics to deepen your understanding while watching our teardowns or you're looking to level up your skills at work brilliant customizes lessons to fit your needs so you can learn at your own pace with Brilliance interactive approach you can Master large Concepts in as little as 15 minutes per day here at Monroe our team skills are more than just basic engineering adding on lessons in foundational logic helps improve problem solving skills which is essential for our lean design methodology whatever your goals are you can get started on brilliant right away with 30 days free plus you can get 20 off your annual plan by visiting brilliant.org Monroe live or by clicking the link below only the first 200 people will be able to claim the special deal so act fast and get started on your customized learning path and interestingly so seeing this this quantity of welds we have seen Motors that look like this before with the stator I know some of the early GM stuff had that this is not groundbreaking in the sense that we we do see I know like on the lightning and other vehicles it's probably more common to see it with the welds on one side but just as evidence I think we're going to see a trend here we like the direction that rivian's moving in from the old to the new this is definitely more efficient from a processing perspective a lot fewer welds yeah less cost less cost when you when you go with a true hairpin and by the way this um The Hairpin design was invented by General Motors they they were leading the way in electrification for a long a long time and then of course uh ev1 and whatever they they went in a different direction but if we look at the rivian design this is similar much more similar to the Ford design except for one thing they've they've they've splayed out the um the hairpins which allows you to um basically make a smaller package for one thing but also it also tightens up the joint between the hair pins and the um and the interconnecting surfaces that are going through the electric motor so everything about this looks uh looks quite good yeah and even so the stator this lives in a housing you can see on the old unit this was an extruded aluminum sort of cut to size housing makes sense because it was a Bosch unit that was sort of cut to size off the shelf this is cheap and it's modular but you know as a long-term solution this had this case and this housing that contained the stator was a lot of separate castings and extrusions that bolted together on the newer unit they've gone more in line with what other folks tend to do when they're you know building a bespoke unit that's purpose built they've got a single cast aluminum housing with an end cap and this is getting bolted within it so we're seeing you know in true lean design methodology right fewer parts coming in shrink wrapping it again like the direction they're moving here not like Earth shattering but more definitely more competitive and definitely in the right direction well the idea behind the Bosch unit is they'll sell to anybody yeah and um and it's made for everybody so that means that it's not perfect for anybody um so what we're looking at here is uh is the guys over at rivien designing their product to suit their their vehicle they're they're not they're not beholden to anybody anymore so I'm looking forward to seeing uh the quad coming out like this in the not too distant future yeah another big thing while we're looking at this and this will kind of transition to another topic but that is the cooling system and cooling strategy they're using here so big difference between the old unit and the new was in the previous units they were using ethylene glycol and water so coolant that they were passing through the jackets on the stator so these little the housing yeah yeah on the stator housing they were passing coolant through here to try and take heat out of these copper conductor bars that are in the stator by contrast on the new unit they've went from glycol cooling to a pressurized oil cooled system which is in line with what we see on other sort of high performance competitors specifically Tesla they've always done that right and what that allows them to do is instead of passing things through jackets that are close to the conductors they're actually able to put oil directly onto their electric motor components so they're going to dribble oil onto the stator windings they're going to pass it actually into the rotor as well and they're going to bathe this whole rotating assembly on this side of the case is going to be immersed in oil and I know Sandy we were talking earlier oil versus glycol you know there's a reason that you can't bathe an electric motor and glycol right well even with standard oils um you can't do it so these are the types of oils that you find inside of those Transformers outside your house they're they're sitting in a bath of oil that oil does not conduct electrically and so consequently what happens is you get the cooling but but you don't have to worry about a lot of other things like blowing up the transforming and whatnot so this is this is one of the splash units that uh that that are that goes into the um into the Arabian unit and it's it's basically like that uh not necessarily here but in the housing but it's going like that and it's just it's just bathing the outside edge and I can't remember which ends which but I think it's this way yeah there's actually one on both sides and this plugs into a jacket here and essentially it's going to pass oil from that side through and these are little nozzles that are going to spray Jets of oil down onto here which is a source for sure of heat when you're using this and this is very very similar to the types of units that we put into um an ice engine as well normally what you do is you you're kind of like trying to bathe the uh the components inside of a ice engine in in oil to keep them from seizing up so let's have a look at the other part of this equation so I like this for a whole bunch of reasons and um trying to try not to hurt yourself not on camera anyway so anyways I like this for a couple of reasons and I'm going to talk about one and then we'll talk about the real Biz or Scott can talk about the real business end so I want you to have a look at this cool idea here so look at how this is bumped out here and bumped out there this allows me to drill in one side keeping my ceiling surfaces nice and flat and I drill into this other boss Here and Now what I can do is I can plug that in and I can square it in this end and then it comes along this path and comes out this is kind of clever design I like clever design personally I wouldn't have done it this way I would have I would have had a cast in place pipe but this is still a really a really nice idea so yeah why don't you tell us how it works yeah and so essentially this is called the resolver cover resolver housing this goes on the far side of the case and this basically there's a an end cap that closes out the side of the gearbox unit here this is where the rotor and stator lives this goes on the end cap and what this essentially is this shaft here you can see there are small holes in it that again are going to be used as Jets to push oil through to cool to take heat out of these motor components so when that's installed this actually goes into the rotor and seals in there so there so again in an electric motor you're generating heat in the stator and in the rotor this is coming in they're passing oil through this and taking heat from the rotor itself whereas again on the previous unit they were taking it only from the perimeter and interestingly I remember the first vehicle that I saw doing Cooling in internal to the rotor was actually I think it was 2016. Tesla Model X was doing that they've since kind of changed up a little bit of that but they do still they've always been doing pressurized oil Cooling and one thing I would say they were talking about the pros and cons and trade-offs so a pressurized oil system is a more expensive cooling system but what it allows you to do is from a performance perspective you can get more out of your motor yeah so so in the in the path to going from two Motors to one motor they're able to get away with you you know a unit it's not double the size of the others it's somewhere in between you know maybe 150 percent but they're able to push this unit and achieve more with it because they've chosen to spend a little bit more money on a superior form of clearing management essentially right so let's let's move on to the disconnect here yeah seeing it sitting right in front of you yeah so this is another big deal on this unit when they had two Motors um the drivetrain was unique in that it was independent wheel control and there was no differential connecting the two sides when going to a single motor that's going to be on an axle they now have to have a differential between the two sides meaning that they're they're linked because there's only one motor that's going to drive both wheels so in the in the name of efficiency something that existed on the previous unit was they had disconnect units but they had to have two of them and they were mounted external to the gearbox on this unit they've now brought the the disconnect unit and integrated it into the gear train so and kind of show you how this works essentially they've got a series of components inside of the the ring gear here this is like this is a spring washer a helical washer this drops in and you've got a component uh tooth drive gear here that drops in and you've got an electromagnet inside of this unit and this when they apply current to it this ring can shift in or out and it's kind of oh there we go so it just moves in and out slightly and what that's going to do the spring keeps pressure but whether it's in or out it's going to basically allow this unit to Freewheel and allow you to spin your wheels without putting drag back on the electric motor and getting those back electromotive forces that are a source of efficiency loss in an EV so um you know in contrast what they had on the previous unit they had to have two they were these sort of bolt-on units means was the company means industrial that did them got some of the components over there but essentially because you had two Motors an independent wheel control and I'll show that component here you had to have two units so they've they've gone from two to one right true lean design principles this was the old unit essentially you had one of these on either side of the gearbox it bolted on at the point between the output of the gearbox and where the half shaft came in these were actuated still with an electromagnet so that had the ring so X actuated in a similar fashion but with these it was a dog clutch that had little toggles that flipped and mated with the pieces in here and I know we reviewed that in an earlier video essentially though yeah you went from two to one and that's consistent with a trend the whole reason you have a disconnect unit we've seen Hyundai do this they're claiming drivetrain efficiencies of six to seven percent which might not sound like a lot to people but in an AV efficiency is the name of the game right and so having something like a disconnect unit that reduces drag on your permanent magnet powertrain what that allows you to do is Achieve the same things with fewer kilowatt hours in the battery pack and at the end of the day your batteries are still your most expensive component in the vehicle so to the extent that you can limit the number and the quantity of those you're doing yourself a favor so you spend a few hundred bucks and you save more than a few hundred bucks essentially right so again there's four things that you want to try and look at always for efficiency if you like in in a vehicle a range I guess is the Better Way efficiency is one of them and the efficiency can come about with mechanical things like this or weight is the second thing or your arrow is a is another thing that you want to get through get through and then there's one more that people kind of forget and that is friction so if we take a look at all the friction devices in the old system versus the new system you're looking at a significant difference and like I say maybe six percent for that that's that's one thing but at the end of the day I think that there's a there's a ton of less friction going on here um and and I think some of that has to do with the fact that they're actually using oil so this oil like I say is for cooling and it's non-conductive but it's still slick and uh and that helps out in some cases sometimes you want an air bearing which is kind of like what you've got in a normal uh like this one but occasionally it's not so bad to have something where where you've got lubrication for other things that are going on inside in this case the engine and and gearbox so let's swing over and have a look at some of the electronic stuff yep so when we say Electronics on a Drive Unit you know we refer to a three in one unit the three main components you've got the electric motor you've got the gear train and you've got the inverter the inverters the electronic brains of it it's what's taking the DC power from your battery and converting it to three-phase AC power that's going to your electric motor here we've got the new inverter setup and here we have the old one I guess at a high level important again to note that this was essentially two inverters packed into one housing because there were two separate Motors versus just a single unit here and I know Sandy I know there's some things you want to point out to me one of the things that jumped out right off the bat this inverter the way that it is integrated to the Drive Unit is much more like what we've seen from others yeah like Tesla Ford we've seen others do it but essentially you've got the guts of the inverter are getting mounted onto the Drive Unit and sealed and there's just there's just one side essentially right you've got a cast housing with a machine surface and a seal and it goes to that they're able to do what they need the inverter on the previous unit was sort of its own separate fully enclosed Monument where you had a lower portion and then you had an upper that went on to it so again like moving in the right direction we're just seeing fewer components right the lid is gone they essentially flipped it upside down and they and they found a way to work it into the cast case now it was a little difficult because the packaging here was with the motor so I kind of understand why it is shaped like this but again that's that's what you want to see that's competitive I'm still not sure why it's painted black you don't see many Castle we actually asked about that I didn't get an answer I don't have any reason to want to paint this at all it's made out of aluminum it doesn't need Paint that's for sure I we thought maybe it had something to do with um I don't know um RF but I mean look at the thickness I mean this is a fairly thick component there's no way that you're going to get any any feedback or any I just don't I really don't understand it yeah I wouldn't do it I know that without knowing like it and it could be that it's a coating there are some things you can do maybe for Emi or electromagnetic interference uh it could be some sort of isolation like I say Emi is what we thought initially and um and I don't I don't believe it uh so did you want to talk about the ultrasonic welds I know that jump dots yeah yeah gasoline design moving moving yeah so these um um these Moss these mosfets yeah those are the power switches yeah so mosfets in this case um there's another one called igbts but anyway this mosfet here um is bolted together and you can see that you got the three phases click the click that's kind of like how this is put together but what I like about this one is uh first off it's a single piece it's not three lumps but a single piece and um and then we've got it laser welded at one end done this is a really I like this better than that I got a fool around with three parts and nine bolts this one here one part and I'm all finished and this will never break I have a real problem with screws and electrical components and the reason for that is because when you pass current through anything that looks like a threaded Fastener um it has a tendency to want to undo itself so in a case of uh in in many cases what you do is you glue them in use Loctite and you're basically gluing it because quite frankly um they're not called really they're not called Threaded Fasteners they're called threaded unfasteners it's got a 60 degree angle so you can get them apart if you want them to stick together yeah you can't beat a laser so I'm pretty uh pretty happy to see and and I just noticed that um this one's um these ones here are are really well done these are additives so they're they're they're flattened out good forever so there's never going to be any problem with this yeah so yeah definitely reducing failure points making it faster to put together and right like the the propensity for air with this style of fastening it's it's certainly less than it is well you can't make a mistake because when you pass these things down when you drop these uh these six uh components over the top of the hey this one's got nine this one's got six uh there we go so there's even more good stuff going on here I gotta check that out anyhow um what we're looking at here is that um with this assembly I never I can't make a mistake it'll never come apart and um I think they're the same we we were debating whether we want to talk about this but we think that these are silicon because they're from the rear and we pretty sure that the ones in the front are going to be silicon carbide which is like quite a bit more money for these uh for these components but they you can't tell them apart they package them the same you really need to tear them apart to know if they're leather carbide or just silicon based but um but yeah going from they went from the danfoss sort of three separate units to the single Infineon Drive G2 unit sort of a three in one we've seen that in other competitive Vehicles certainly easier to put together one piece versus three so yeah and I'm pretty sure that um I'm pretty sure that again we go back to wait it's one of the biggest issues associated with efficiency or mileage whatever you want to call it and you look at that and you look at this and in essence they're the same thing they may be this one may be only uh only doing a single motor and this one's doing a dual motor but there's not that much difference and you can see that this little teeny tiny thing versus that plus the lid you're looking at a lot of extra weight yeah and I think from so for this entire Drive Unit versus this entire Drive Unit the Delta and weight was almost 30 kilos slightly more so more than 60 pounds and you're doing that twice in the vehicle right so over 100 pounds of weight savings and that all goes back to that thing we mentioned earlier about efficiency and reducing doing more with fewer kilowatt hours right or going farther with the same number of kilowatt hours and uh that that I mean I know that's always been Tesla's strategy I know Ford has now doubled down on that I've seen a interview where Doug Fields was talking about that right he was saying the the boardroom solution is to double the amount of kilowatt hours in the battery pack but the real way to do it efficiently is to make the vehicle lighter and more efficient so that you can do more with fewer and actually um it's it's amazing when you start talking about efficiencies that's one of the reasons why we're trying to get to less latency which means basically the amount of time it takes for the computers inside the vehicle to make their decisions and um and again Edge connectors or going to Flat Diamond technology for circuit boards and stuff like that all these things adds minute amounts of uh of time if you like but the efficiency goes up and the range goes up along with it so I think unless I'm mistaken I think we've I kind of covered all these we should probably kind of tie a bow on it though eh so like I guess in a summary perspective we've said a lot of good things about this we should though probably note it's not all necessarily Roses and Rainbows there are some trade-offs with this right so you get a lot of Advantage reduced cost reduced weight but objectively speaking from a performance perspective it would be unfair not to it note you can still get the vehicle with a quad motor setup or you can get dual motor or you can get dual Motor Performance with the quad motor setup you got 835 horsepower you go to the dual motor it's 533 or 665 horsepower if you get the performance ones so with that you're seeing about 20 percent less horsepower but still a heck of a lot of horsepower competitively speaking Yeah similarly with the torque across the range if you get if we assume that this is the performance dual motor 908 foot-pounds of torque at the total vehicle level versus 829 so about 10 percent less there and the 0 to 60 time goes from 3.1 or I've seen 3.0 seconds to about 3.3 or 3.4 so still wicked fast uh but about 10 percent less I drove the damn thing and I'm telling you what I will tell you that um that Eric has told me he wants me to gun it so oh first we'll put it in gear then we'll try again well it's got plenty of them uh I thought it was uh I thought it was hugely uh hugely fast yeah I I don't think anybody can can really uh notice a 0.3 of a of a second um I was very very happy with it sue drove it as well said it was like driving a cloud excuse me Sue's got a very light foot um almost aggravatingly light but at the end of the day I I definitely wanted to try this out um I think rivian did more than just um uh go to the dual motor on the car we had I I really maybe it's because there was less weight or whatever but we're one of our little washboard Road over here at Featherstone and um I was very impressed I really like terrible roads that are double as endurance uh endurance yeah it's good for us because we don't have to go to the track we just exactly right yeah just go yeah just go down any old street so at the end of the day this has been a a little you know side-by-side analysis and and I think really and truly rivian's moving in the right direction as far as I'm concerned if you're an automotive company you should own your power train yeah when you lose track of a few um critical components those things that make you stand out from the rest of the crowd you start losing so I'm very very excited about what's going on here with rivian I think they're doing the right thing so I think we've uh anything else we forgot no I think he summed it up nicely I mean that's I I share that same perspective there are some compromises but I think they're a typical driver even Seasons drivers probably aren't going to notice the difference but you know depending on if you get the if you get the dual motor variant um standard uh it's eight thousand dollars less than the quad motor and if you bump up for the Dual Motor Performance you're still saving three grand over the quad motor setup um I think it's a little interesting what they did there like their software limiting between the performance version and the and the regular dual motor version I would suspect so there's still sort of steering people towards the dual motor one but yeah there's definitely north of a thousand dollars of cost that is not in this vehicle uh the customer is seeing less of you know seeing a reduced cost as a result so it's good to see the savings getting passed along man it's uh yeah well actually this uh if you if you're just going with the standard dual motor you're looking at about 74 000 and that's what I paid for mine and um uh uh after after owning it for a little while and finding out all the doodads that are in there I uh I don't know who who tagged it for that number and we tore it down and looked at it significantly I would have probably pegged that at north of 100 Grand sure um and I think that quite frankly it's worth every penny uh if you can get this car for seventy four thousand dollars I I can't imagine why you wouldn't uh if if you're the kind of person that I am I I can't imagine why you wouldn't uh you wouldn't jump on it so absolutely anyhow thanks for watching and stay tuned we'll be giving you more information on the uh on the quad versus dual um adrivian there's more technical things that are coming down the pike thanks very much and we will be talking to you soon thanks Sandy thanks [Laughter] [Music]

Channel: Munro Live

Views: 33,783

Keywords: EV, BEV, Sandy Munro, Munro, Electric Vehicle, Benchmarking, Electric, Insight, Lean Design, Design, MunroLive, MunroLive.com, ElectricCars, Review, Car Review, 2021, Automotive, Automotive Review, Teardown Titan, 2022, Reaction Video, Tesla, video review, Elon Musk, Munro Live, Ask Munro, Technology, Rivian, R1T, R1S, Dual Motor, Quad Motor, rivian enduro motor, Bosch, in-house motors, Powertrain

Id: lPLwRkiOqF8

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 15 2023