Electric Motor Cost/Watt Is Impervious To Size

Is that just within a technology, like PM DC motors? Or are you including induction motors as well?

Most motors are pretty much limited by physics, to the point where, within a category, you can weigh one and make a good guess of its power capability.

As long as it isn't some specialty motor, that doesn't seem to matter much either.

Not that it reduces cost/kW but rare earth magnet motors supposedly have a higher power to weight ratio.

Anyway, back to the issue. As much as copper costs, a working motor fetches at least an order of magnitude more than the same motor sold as scrap metal.

It seems like the production costs of such a high volume item would have been tweaked until the cost of the motor wouldn't be too much more than materials costs.

Bret Cahill

My understanding is that winding coils is a hard job for machines. So it's either done by hand or by machines that need a lot of maintenance.

So at least in the short term, if the robots take over the world they'll need to keep us around to make their motors.

That would tend to increase the $/watt of smaller motors.

One suspect theory is that the economy of volume production of smaller moto rs cancels out the economy of scale of low volume larger motors.

Here's a used motor, a high volume production 80 kW traction motor for $500 :

It is about an order of magnitude cheaper than the range given above so it is an outlier. A third of the delivered cost is shipping so it must weigh something.