Normally, you wouldn’t expect to find a Lordstown Endurance electric pickup in rural Slovenia—or, for that matter, anywhere at all. So it felt like a borderline fever dream hustling two of the world’s 70 surviving examples around a racetrack near the small Balkan village of Čeplje.
But I wasn’t there for the truck. I was there for the technology. Lordstown’s trucks were the canvas for Elaphe Propulsion Technologies, a Slovenian company developing in-wheel electric motors that can deliver and adjust torque at each wheel completely independently.
Electric motors—paired with their inverters—convert the energy from the battery pack into rotational kinetic energy at the wheels. Most modern EV motors are already torque-rich and operate efficiently across a wide RPM range, but their architecture still leaves performance and packaging potential untapped.
One radical idea: move the motor from between the wheels to inside the wheels themselves. That’s exactly what Elaphe is working on.
In theory, in-wheel motors could transform the EV experience. Does it work in practice? That’s what I went to Slovenia to find out.
(Full disclosure: Elaphe flew me out to Slovenia and covered lodging. The cats in the town outside the hotel were very friendly. I briefly considered smuggling the orange one to the States in my backpack.)
Flying To Slovenia To Drive An American Pickup Truck
Photo by: Elaphe Propulsion Technologies
In-wheel motors (or “hub motors”) aren’t a new concept. Ferdinand Porsche’s earliest electric cars produced over a century ago used them. But in the modern era, almost every automaker has defaulted to a transaxle motor, where torque travels through a single-speed gearbox, CV joints, and half-shafts before reaching the tires. That’s true even in most quad-motor designs. These setups are compact compared to internal combustion drivetrains, but traditional engines are a pretty low bar.
By integrating the motor directly into the hub, you bypass those components, improving the overall efficiency, packaging and torque application.
Without the mechanical coupling of a gearbox or driveshaft, in-wheel motors reduce parasitic losses and can respond to throttle inputs up to 20 times faster than a traditional EV powertrain. This opens the door for more advanced stability control, torque vectoring and dynamic driving modes that simply aren’t possible with transaxle motors.
In comes Elaphe Propulsion Technologies. It’s an electric vehicle technology firm headquartered in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. The firm designs and manufactures in-wheel electric motors along with the software supporting them. Elaphe employs around 60 team members and is led by a former executive at Bosch, which is fitting, considering the company supplied the four motors for the Rivian R1 Quad Launch Edition vehicles. Elaphe, also a supplier, has delivered motors to other automotive startups, like Lightyear and Lordstown Motors.
At the Vransko test track, Elaphe rolled out three vehicles fitted with its in-wheel drive system: a Lordstown Endurance, a Mazda MX-30 and a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The production MX-30 and Ioniq 5 both use conventional transaxle motors, so these test cars were proof-of-concept conversions—familiar vehicles, hiding radically different drivetrains.
Most immediate benefits to using in-wheel motors would require the car to be built from the ground up as an in-wheel motor EV, so this is a compromised setup.
If the car was designed to accommodate in-wheel motors, Elaphe reckons it could deliver a 5% lower roofline, a better optimized drag coefficient, and a significant interior volume increase. Since the electric motors are moved to the wheels, there will be less hardware underneath the front and rear sections of the car, thus opening up more space. In theory, that could translate into about a 3% range gain at highway speeds.
Note, however, the hub motors also come with some compromises. Putting the heavy electric motors in the wheels means that their mass is now “unsprung.” While “sprung” weight on your car is supported by the suspension, and thus easy to control, unsprung weight—including brakes, tires, and hub motors—has a large effect on handling and ride quality. Manufacturers using hub motors, therefore, would have to deal with that problem from the beginning.
In the retrofitted Ioniq 5 and MX-30 I drove, the packaging and aero advantages of a hub-motor design are not noticeable. This is because the overall structure of the vehicle remains the same. But where things get interesting—and where in-wheel motors impress—are in the way the cars drive.
What’s Different With In-Wheel Motors?
Photo by: Elaphe Propulsion Technologies
If you’ve ever driven an all-wheel drive electric vehicle, you’ll notice that the car will have good grip. That’s because electric motors can adjust their torque delivery down to the hundredth of a second. Therefore, if the power control unit senses a wheel is slipping, the car can quickly cut power and then reapply it when traction returns. All-wheel drive internal combustion engine powertrains aren’t as quick to respond and their systems will typically need to rely on the friction brakes to slow down a slipping wheel (some more advanced systems can retard the timing of the engine itself to reduce slip).
In-wheel electric motors hone in on this attribute and take it to a whole new level. The benefit of Elaphe’s powertrain is that each motor can be controlled independently. If the system notices one wheel losing traction, it can instantly reduce the torque or even provide negative torque—aka regenerative braking—to just that wheel. Elaphe also says its in-wheel motors can have up to a 20 times greater response time than traditional electric powertrains.
In everyday driving, the in-wheel powertrain isn’t going to be noticeably different. However, it will be noticeably different on wet and low-traction surfaces. Elaphe fine-tuned the software on its electric motors to ensure wheel slip is nearly impossible to elicit, even on the slipperiest of surfaces.
The AMZS Motorsports Center track included a low-μ (mu) surface to demonstrate how a car’s motor control system handles slippery conditions. The Greek letter μ represents the coefficient of friction. The higher μ, the better grip that surface has. Dry pavement is around 0.8, while ice can drop to 0.1.
One of the tests set up for us was the split-μ test. In this test, the left half of the car sits on high-grip asphalt, while the right side rests on a wet nylon surface. The idea of the test is simple: you floor the accelerator pedal and watch how the traction control system responds. I did this with Elaphe’s modified Hyundai Ioniq 5.
Without a sophisticated motor control algorithm in place, the car should veer to the side that has more traction. You’d also expect the traction-lacking wheels to spin endlessly until the vehicle completely migrates to the well-tractioned side. In an emergency situation, this could be deadly on the road.
Not here. From a standstill, I floored the accelerator pedal, and the Elaphe’s powertrain worked its magic. There was no tire slippage or drama. In fact, the motor control system was so precise that I could fully let go of the steering wheel and the Ioniq 5 would track dead straight. Obviously, the control software limited the power delivery off the line, but the car was able to accelerate somewhat rapidly, all things considered.
Wizardry In Action
Photo by: Elaphe Propulsion Technologies
Where Elaphe’s powertrain really excels is in the corners. When you turn, there’s a phenomenon called load transfer. When you enter a corner, the load or the “weight” of the car will shift towards the outside wheels. The outside suspension is compressed, the inside suspension is extended and the body resides at an angle pointing down towards the outside wheels.
In-wheel motors can capitalize on this phenomenon by applying more torque to the outside wheels. If there’s more downward force on the exterior wheels, more torque on those wheels means you can have higher cornering speeds.
But you can also do the opposite: if you provide more torque to the inside wheels than the outside wheels, you can counteract the load transfer, creating an anti-roll effect. Therefore, it can keep the car balanced in corners with little to no body roll. On the track, this delivered a peculiar sensation. No matter how much I pushed the car in the slalom, the car stayed flat like a gimbal. It was like I had entered a physics cheat code.
But the brains behind this all lie within the software. With the push of a button, Elaphe’s motors could work either way. Whether you want less body roll or better grip, the software can make the electric motors perform very differently. It’s not subtle either: it’s like driving two totally different cars.
Lots of Tricks
Ioniq 5 Tank Turn
One attribute that EVs lack is the mechanical vibrations and “soul” of pistons exploding upwards thousands of times a minute. Some prefer the serenity but others miss the drama. But in-wheel electric motors can actually emit sounds and vibrations that give the car a more raw feel. Fundamentally, an electric motor is a speaker. It consists of magnets and a coil with electrons flowing through them. To create the sound, all you need to do is adjust the frequency of the inverter.
Elaphe says these sound designs can be downloaded and flashed onto the motor control software. The Ioniq 5 I drove mimicked an internal combustion engine, using the regen paddle shifters on the steering wheel to “shift” gears. It was different from the Ioniq 5 N in that the sounds were from the exterior and the vibrations were far more intense. After my hot lap, one of the engineers rerouted the signal to the infotainment’s audio source, turning the motors themselves into giant speakers.
But this isn’t only for entertainment purposes. This feature could take the place of an external speaker for the pedestrian warning system at low speeds. Elaphe even claims that you could ditch the subwoofer entirely and allow the wheels to manage the bass.
Conclusion: The Future Of Motoring?
Photo by: Elaphe Propulsion Technologies
While it seems as though we are reaching the technological peak of what electric vehicles are capable of, Elaphe’s tech proved to me that the bar can be pushed further. We can have more power, improved vehicle packaging, better traction control, and more customizability just from the propulsion source alone.
But reaping all of these benefits requires the car to be designed from the ground up as an in-wheel motor EV. While not every company has access to the hardware and software, Elaphe aims to position itself as a supplier to automakers seeking its advanced propulsion method. Still, it’s not going to be a rapid shift towards IWM electric cars. Product development cycles are long and supply chains are set; this idea is so new, and so different to how cars have worked so far, that it will take a minute to catch on—if it ever does.
To fully materialize the packaging efficiency benefits, the entire design of the car must be re-thought.
Regardless, in-wheel motors not only improve the driving experience, but they can vastly transform it. This platform can allow an Ioniq 5 to go from a family hauler to a formidable force on the race track at the click of a button. I think they’re onto something here.
Elaphe’s tech demo proved to me that software isn’t all about the infotainment or features we tap or swipe. This software we’ll never see, but it shapes how the car feels and drives. In the past, performance gains came in the form of beefier brakes, better suspension, and more powerful engines. Now, the most dramatic improvement might just come from some well-written code and four motors.
