This is a two-part analysis:
Today, we see how electric mobility has made things equal for everyone. The technology makes things easier but also limits creativity, makes it too easy at times, and lowers the entry barriers.
We sifted through 63 cases and tried to identify patterns. There is a huge concentration of capital deployment as the top five - two in India, one in Taiwan, and two in North America - have cornered 65% of all money deployed. What made them attractive to investors?
Electric Mobility: The Great Equalizer
Here's an experiment: Release an RFQ for 10,000 mid-drive motors targeting 7 - 11 kW output. Depending on your geography, you would talk to 3-15 suppliers offering a spectrum of ratings, costs, and warranties. Again, depending on your state of evolution and how much of a hurry you are in, you can close the deal within 10-15 days. The motors can start arriving within a few days after that and can be deployed immediately, provided you have figured out the controller and the rest of the paraphernalia.
You can also repeat the same exercise for battery packs: say 1.5-2.0 kWh portable packs with LFP chemistry. The number of suppliers would be far smaller, but each prominent geography would have at least 2-3 suppliers willing to meet your quality and warranty demands.
Now, do the same exercise with ICE: Release an RFQ for 10,000 125cc IC Engines for motorcycles.
Good luck with that.
When your purchase team would have scouted around the globe, they would find a handful of suppliers willing to supply crate engines, most of them Chinese. The engines would be of suspect quality levels, and getting them in fully assembled form in crates would be costly. You would have no control over the refinement levels and smoothness of the engines, and defining maintenance contracts with the supplier would be a nightmare.
Nothing like that happens with electric motors or battery packs, a refreshing advantage for electric mobility.
IC engines have been through a 130-year development arc and are smoother, more powerful, and better in every way today. However, it is still nearly impossible to get one out of a crate and expect it to behave universally as any engine of that cubic capacity ought to do. A Honda engine is different from a KTM engine, and it is different from a Yamaha engine.
In contrast, motors are indistinguishable from a customer perspective. Sure, the internal workings may differ, and the efficiency may vary within a small range, but the fundamentals don't differ much. More than the motor, the motor controller and its software have a more decisive say in fine-tuning things. And as soon as the discourse shifts to software, the fundamentals shift - everyone is an equal now.
