Photo: ZF
There is already a great deal of electric vehicles on the market, enough of them for almost everyone to have favorites. For me, at the top of the list is not some Tesla, but the German-made Porsche Taycan.
On the market since 2019, the model is presently available on the U.S. market in no less than ten variants, starting with the simple Taycan and ending with the mighty Turbo S Cross Turismo. Between them, the models offer various performance and comfort levels.
Depending on the variant, customers get access to various power and torque levels, but it's the latter that's of interest to us today. As it stands, the most torque any Taycan in factory form can deliver today is 1,050 Nm (Turbo S version). Yet someone managed to fit an electric drive system on such a car that spits out a staggering 5,200 Nm of torque at the rear axle.
That someone is German company ZF, which during the Global Technology Day it held at its headquarters in Friedrichshafen presented a new type of e-drive that could have a significant impact on the electric vehicle market.
The design is called EVSys800, and it's a complete modular 800-volt drive, with silicon carbide power electronics, the electric motor and a reduction gearbox. And the things we now know about it paint a pretty exciting picture.
Tipping the scales at 74 kg (163 pounds), the system is one-third (40kg/88 pounds) lighter than the most modern incarnation of the ZF 800-volt series drive, while delivering the same output.
In numbers we can all understand, the output is 206 kilowatts of continuous power and 275 kilowatts of peak power. But that's not even the impressive bit. What's really impressive is that ZF rates the e-drive at a staggering 5,200 Nm of torque sent to the rear axle. That's 70 Nm for every kg (2.2 pounds) of the system!
ZF did not just show the e-drive and let us marvel at it, but installed it in a Taycan which it renamed EVbeat. It's unclear what are the company's plans for the vehicle, but the numbers above, especially the torque levels, apply to the concept.
In this application, the EVSys800 does not use rare earth elements for the motor, and cooling is not ensured by fluorine-based refrigerant, but by propane and oil flowing directly over the copper rods.
The way in which the system was built, combined with an AI-based management system that can learn "the behavior of drivers and […] anticipate the probability of individual driving profiles" should allow for an increase in range by up to a third compared to current technologies, when the car is operating at cold temperatures above freezing point.
We'll dive deeper into this tech and try to learn more about it in the days ahead. What's important to note is that, exciting as it seems, the EVSys800 is still a far way off from becoming a reality. ZF anticipates the first real-world application of some of the tech shown on the Evbeat to become available sometime in 2026.
Depending on the variant, customers get access to various power and torque levels, but it's the latter that's of interest to us today. As it stands, the most torque any Taycan in factory form can deliver today is 1,050 Nm (Turbo S version). Yet someone managed to fit an electric drive system on such a car that spits out a staggering 5,200 Nm of torque at the rear axle.
That someone is German company ZF, which during the Global Technology Day it held at its headquarters in Friedrichshafen presented a new type of e-drive that could have a significant impact on the electric vehicle market.
The design is called EVSys800, and it's a complete modular 800-volt drive, with silicon carbide power electronics, the electric motor and a reduction gearbox. And the things we now know about it paint a pretty exciting picture.
Tipping the scales at 74 kg (163 pounds), the system is one-third (40kg/88 pounds) lighter than the most modern incarnation of the ZF 800-volt series drive, while delivering the same output.
In numbers we can all understand, the output is 206 kilowatts of continuous power and 275 kilowatts of peak power. But that's not even the impressive bit. What's really impressive is that ZF rates the e-drive at a staggering 5,200 Nm of torque sent to the rear axle. That's 70 Nm for every kg (2.2 pounds) of the system!
ZF did not just show the e-drive and let us marvel at it, but installed it in a Taycan which it renamed EVbeat. It's unclear what are the company's plans for the vehicle, but the numbers above, especially the torque levels, apply to the concept.
In this application, the EVSys800 does not use rare earth elements for the motor, and cooling is not ensured by fluorine-based refrigerant, but by propane and oil flowing directly over the copper rods.
The way in which the system was built, combined with an AI-based management system that can learn "the behavior of drivers and […] anticipate the probability of individual driving profiles" should allow for an increase in range by up to a third compared to current technologies, when the car is operating at cold temperatures above freezing point.
We'll dive deeper into this tech and try to learn more about it in the days ahead. What's important to note is that, exciting as it seems, the EVSys800 is still a far way off from becoming a reality. ZF anticipates the first real-world application of some of the tech shown on the Evbeat to become available sometime in 2026.
Google News