Hello,

This issue includes an article by Murray on traction motor technology that features two rotors driven by a single stator. Interesting. One configuration is an in-wheel hub motor, so I've looked into the archives for a few more of our articles on the topic.

Alan takes us through considerations for improving manufacturing of electric vehicles, while in this week's Inside Electronics podcast, Alix and his guest cover software defined vehicles and all the stuff that seems to keep us from making a car that our sons and daughters can afford to buy.

Color me a skeptic, but I'm pulling my "get off my lawn", grumpy old guy, card out and am still of the opinion that we, as engineers, are enabling stuff on cars that is not essential for getting low-income humanity from point A to point B.

Recall, a bit over a decade ago, that I was inspired to design a <$10 LED bulb by visiting a Thai village in Isaan, where homes had ONE light bulb, the family had a $10 a day income, and LED energy saving light bulbs at that time were 50 bucks apiece. North America was fat dumb and happy spending $500 for light bulbs in the house, just as Detroit now seems to think a $100,000 pickup truck is ok. Time for that light bulb moment, kids.

I think that we, as engineers, need to enable adoption of sustainable, clean, energy-efficient widgets, en masse and not pile on even more fluffy junk that homes in on a massive building that needs a nuclear plant to run the servers in it in order to decide whether or not to use the car's high beams.

Let's build it simple and where 2 billion kids can get to school, and their parents can travel to work, and then worry about talking about our life's problems to our friend - the family car.

I'm of the radical opinion that we can be innovative with tech in order to improve the quality of life of those who are struggling to barely survive - what challenge is there in throwing an $800 4GHz GPU at a problem when a $0.35 microcontroller can accomplish the same result with less power and resource consumption? It's just turning a space heater on and off...

Keeping with the crusty old guy theme, Bill Wong muses about the use of AI, exclusively, to write code - "Vibe coding". Seems he planted a seed out there, because Vibe coding appears to be a topic for articles everywhere I turn since he wrote his.

I got a preview of some truly awesome and advanced tech by a crew of absolutely brilliant engineers, yesterday. It'll be a few weeks before I'm allowed to tell our readers about it. Get us old folks excited and you have some great tech.

enjoy,

-andyT