In these days, the Indian start-up Chara Technologies has presented the first motor for electric vehicle fully made by using aluminium, copper and steel available in India, without using rare earths. In the specific case, it is an electric reluctance motor with artificial magnets. To make these powertrains work, some magnets are in fact necessary and rare earths are needed to manufacture them. Rare earths, besides being expensive, hardly extracted and managed, have a chain that China controls by 90% on a global scale. It is a strategy with which India is going to emancipate itself from the dependence on the supplies of minerals from foreign Countries: semiconductors are the only part of these motors recently presented imported from abroad.
Moving to Europe, we remind that in June 2022 Vitesco Technologies presented its new electric powertrain, a unit of EESM kind (externally excited synchronous motors), which does not need the use of rare earths and it is expressly conceived to be more efficient than PMS (Permanent Magnet Synchronous) units, especially at high speeds.