What's Driving the Micromobility Market?

­Since 2015, more than 195 countries have adopted the Paris Agreement, an international treaty that seeks to combat climate change and its resulting effects. As signatories seek ways to slash carbon emissions, boost urban air quality, and reduce noise pollution in urban areas, interesting mobility solutions have been appearing, one of which is the electrification of vehicles.

With electrification increasingly being seen as contributing to sustainable urban mobility by both enhancing vehicle energy efficiency and supporting the shift towards public transport and active mobility, the use of electric vehicles has been rising in many cities around the world in recent years.

In fact, according to Bloomberg NEF’s Electric Vehicle Outlook 2022 report, there are over 1.3 million commercial electric vehicles, including buses, delivery vans and trucks, and more than 280 million light electric vehicles (LEVs)– or micromobility solutions – such as electric bicycles, scooters, motorcycles, and three-wheelers currently in use around the world.

Increasingly Popular

Nowadays, new materials and technologies enable greater power efficiency, smaller size, lighter weight, and lower cost solutions, and the fact that micromobility solutions are gaining favour around the world is seen as a reflection of the increasing recognition that cars and other vehicles have adverse impacts on the health and quality of life of city dwellers, particularly in terms of congestion, air quality, and noise pollution.

Additionally, as LEVs are considerably more accessible than electric cars and far easier to store, they are believed to hold the promise of being a convenient and affordable way to fill gaps in public transport routes, providing a practical and popular answer to the perennial first-and-last-mile challenge.

Aside from changing how people move around urban areas, LEVs are gaining popularity as they can help reduce road congestion and contribute to the more efficient use of parking and other shared public spaces. Of course, their adoption is also a substantial move toward meeting the carbon reduction goals of the Paris Agreement and beyond.

Impact on Carbon Emissions

Road transportation is one of the biggest contributors to carbon emissions in cities – in 2019, transport was responsible for 122 metric tons of the 455 metric tons of CO2 emissions produced in the UK. LEVs have great potential to significantly reduce CO2 emissions from conventionally fuelled vehicles as their increased adoption means fewer vehicles that emit smoke, carbon, and other harmful gases.

A study by scooter operator TIER found that for journeys of a mile or less in London alone, e‑scooters could reduce daily car trips by over 1.2 million, reducing daily CO2 emissions by up to 233 tons – the equivalent of 240 return flights from London to New York.

Similarly, Singapore-based e-scooter rental firm Neuron Mobility, which runs schemes in three UK regions, announced that it replaced 3 million car journeys globally in 2021, saving 844 tonnes of carbon emissions, whilst a report by the German Aerospace Centre found that substituting cars for LEVs for everyday mobility would result in the reduction of 57 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, or 44% of greenhouse gas emissions produced by car trips.

These figures are impressive and reassuring and make a solid case for the increasing adoption of micromobility solutions. However, the impact of LEVs on carbon emissions does not end there – they not only reduce CO2 emission levels because of their electric propulsion systems, but they also require less energy because they are smaller and lighter. This means that they can function with smaller batteries, and they require fewer raw materials for production. Essentially, they are more sustainable throughout their lifecycle than other transport options without sacrificing individual mobility.

Additionally, the use of LEVs can help reduce levels of air and noise pollution. While noise pollution, which is caused by excessive noise from people, transportation, construction equipment, neighbourhoods, and nightlife in cities may seem trivial, long-term exposure has an impact on residents’ health and wellbeing.

Exploring Efficiency

The world has relied on traditional micromobility solutions such as conventional bicycles for decades, meaning that the concept of micromobility is not revolutionary. The primary factor driving the current micromobility trend is electrification. Thanks to advances in technology, control systems and electric motors, complete electric powertrains, which are light and compact, can be easily integrated into LEVs.

Fundamentally, LEVs need a power source and motors to move,and what we need to consider is whether LEVs are truly efficient? For many e-bicycles and e-scooters, powertrains have already become commodities. In this instance the priority is cost, not efficiency. However, low efficiency reduces payload and range, which means more charging. This contradicts the objective of introducing LEVs, namely lower energy use, in the first place.

While LEVs are inherently complex systems, their performance can be significantly improved with intelligent system-level design. Reliable motors, in particular magnetically geared motors, are a key enabling technology for micromobility solutions to ensure efficiency.

Since the first developments with high-efficiency magnetic gears were presented, interest in their application in transportation, mainly in electric vehicles, has increased significantly.  Typically, in an LEV, the mechanical power from the electric motor is transferred to the drive wheels via a single ratio transmission performed with a mechanical gearbox. Unlike the gearbox in a wind turbine, the gearbox in an LEV has only one driving gear operating as a step-down transmission to provide an appropriate speed and torque to the traction wheels of the car.

Magnomatics offers revolutionary magnetic gears which have been implemented in a range of innovative industry solutions, including offshore wind, marine propulsion, and light rail. Having achieved success at large scale the company has turned its attention to much smaller machines, including drives for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft for urban air mobility and for personal micromobility vehicles such as e-scooters and e-bicycles.

The company’s patented Pseudo Direct Drive (PDD) – which is designed to overcome the torque limitations of conventional direct drive electrical machines – consists of a magnetic gear mounted inside a stator. The outer magnetics of the magnetic gear are attached to the inner bore of the stator, and copper windings in the stator are used to drive the inner rotor of the magnetic gear.

Click image to enlarge

Figure 2: Patented Pseudo Direct Drive (PDD)

This is a relatively high-speed electric motor with a relatively low load, which results in low currents and hence, low temperatures. This in turn brings great efficiency, long life, and prevents demagnetisation of the outer magnet array. The torque in the inner rotor is then geared up in the novel polepiece rotor, typically by between 5 and 10:1. The result is a very compact and highly efficient electric motor, which is perfect for micromobility vehicles.

Advantages of Magnetic Gears

Magnetic gear technologies have important advantages over their conventional mechanical counterparts. They can perform the speed change and torque transmission between input and output shafts by a contactless mechanism with a quiet operation and overload protection without the issues associated with conventional mechanical gears.

Additionally, and of particular importance to the LEV market, they boast drastic reductions in motor size, no minimum cooling requirements, and reduced maintenance requirements. Efficiency is also improved as there are no gearbox losses and, of course, gear wear is eliminated altogether.

Ultimately, the lower mass and compactness of the PDD generator, when combined with partial load superior efficiency, low speed, high torque technology and improved reliability, makes it ideal for meeting the requirements of the broad range of new LEVs being developed.

In the pursuit of increasingly light yet powerful, sustainable and efficient micromobility solutions, the addition of innovative magnetically geared motors can be a game-changer as it enables greater reliability and efficiency at a smaller size and lighter weight.

Supporting Sustainability

Although there is a strong case to be made for the efficiency and related benefits of LEVs propelled bymagnetically geared motors, micromobility as a concept goes beyond vehicle requirements – it is about providing more people with more accessible, versatile, and sustainable modes of transportation.

Along with changes in mobility patterns and technological advances, efficient vehicles are an important element in reducing the climate impact of the transport sector. The continuing adoption and evolution of micromobility solutions present a great opportunity for cities keen to address some of the most troubling transportation challenges facing urban areas today, including emissions, congestion, air quality, and unequal access to transit.

The development of LEVs and other micromobility solutions shows no sign of slowing down. As stakeholders look for increasingly innovative systems and technologies, the use of magnetically geared motors will prove to be a key differentiator in ensuring efficient, reliable, and sustainable micromobility solutions.

Magnomatics