Rare-Earth Magnets Still Rule EV Motors: but Engineers Are Finding More Ways Around Them

Highlights

• NdFeB permanent magnets remain dominant in high-performance EV motors, but magnet-free alternatives come within 1.3% driving range in real-world cycle testing.
• A 2024 prototype ferrite IPM motor achieved ~96% peak efficiency and 23% lower material cost than a rare-earth benchmark, signaling commercial viability.
• BMW launched wound-field synchronous motors in 2025 for its Neue Klasse platform; Renault has used rare-earth-free wound-field motors commercially since 2012.
• Heavy rare earths Dy and Tb face the steepest substitution pressure as engineers use grain-boundary diffusion and improved cooling to cut intensity before abandoning NdFeB entirely.
• Forecasting EV rare-earth demand from unit sales alone is increasingly unreliable as motor topology becomes a critical-minerals strategy decision.

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Rare-earth magnets remain dominant in electric-vehicle motors, but engineers are getting much better at designing around them. In a new Energies review, Giampaolo Devito, Stefano Nuzzo and Davide Barater of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (opens in a new tab) examine permanent-magnet, wound-field, induction, synchronous-reluctance and other traction-motor designs across passenger cars, racing vehicles, trucks, mining equipment and tractors. Their conclusion is more nuanced than “rare earths are disappearing”: NdFeB permanent magnets remain extremely difficult to beat when compactness and power density matter most, but magnet-free alternatives can come surprisingly close in real driving efficiency.

REEx Insight: Rare-Earth Demand May Fragment Before It Falls

The most important implication for the rare-earth industry is not that electric vehicles will suddenly stop needing NdPr, Dy or Tb. It is that automakers now have credible leverage to choose where they need rare-earth magnets and where they do not. And frankly, this distinction could reshape demand at some point.

Think of the future traction-motor market as a performance ladder. At the top—high-performance vehicles and applications where every kilogram and cubic centimeter matter—high-energy NdFeB remains extraordinarily valuable. Further down the ladder, where cost, supply security and manufacturing flexibility matter more, wound-field synchronous motors, synchronous-reluctance designs and ferrite magnets become increasingly credible, as Rare Earth Exchanges® (REEx) has chronicled in previous reports.

The biggest strategic impact could occur in heavy rare earths. NdFeB traction magnets principally depend on NdPr for magnetic strength, while Dy and Tb can be added to improve coercivity and high-temperature performance. Motor redesign, improved cooling, grain-boundary diffusion and lower-heavy-rare-earth magnet grades can therefore reduce Dy/Tb intensity even when an automaker continues using NdFeB.

REEx sees two substitution curves, not one: total elimination of NdFeB and reduction of rare-earth intensity within NdFeB. The second may advance considerably faster. That means forecasting EV rare-earth demand from EV unit sales alone is becoming increasingly unreliable.

What the Researchers Actually Reviewed

The paper is an expert, design-oriented review rather than a systematic meta-analysis. The authors searched IEEE Xplore, Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, MDPI and SAE, supplemented by OEM, supplier, government and motorsport sources. Their literature search covered 2014–2026, while retaining older foundational research.

They organized 944 records into eight thematic blocks, ranging from conventional motor benchmarking and rare-earth-free machines to magnetic materials, windings, additive manufacturing and heavy-duty applications. Peer-reviewed studies supplied the quantitative comparisons, while company sources were used primarily to establish commercial deployment and industry claims.

That distinction matters: this is a broad engineering synthesis, not evidence that 944 individual studies were formally screened and statistically combined.

Magnet-Free Does Not Necessarily Mean Inefficient

Permanent-magnet synchronous motors still dominate electrified light vehicles because they combine high efficiency, torque density and compact size. But the review highlights an important finding: peak efficiency is not the same thing as vehicle-level energy consumption.

In one representative like-for-like comparison, equal-rated permanent-magnet, wound-field and synchronous-reluctance machines produced driving ranges within roughly 1.3% of one another. The authors consequently argue that the efficiency disadvantage of magnet-free motors can become surprisingly small when evaluated over an actual drive cycle rather than simply at peak operating points.

There are trade-offs. Wound-field machines need rotor excitation and introduce additional losses and thermal-management complexity. Reluctance machines can suffer from lower power factor, potentially requiring larger inverters. Permanent-magnet motors remain particularly attractive where maximum power density must fit inside minimum space.

Ferrite Is Another Wild Card

Rare-earth-free does not necessarily mean magnet-free. A separate 2024 IEEE study highlighted in the review built and tested a full-size 80 kW ferrite interior-permanent-magnet motor. The prototype achieved roughly 96% peak efficiency, with researchers reporting about 23% lower material cost than the rare-earth benchmark. Over the studied WLTP driving cycle, it also produced lower modeled energy losses than the benchmark design.

Ferrites have much lower magnetic energy density than NdFeB, so designers typically need more magnet material, more sophisticated rotor geometries or greater motor volume. But they remove rare-earth exposure altogether.

BMW and Renault Show This Is No Longer Just Laboratory Work

The shift is already reaching commercial vehicles. The review notes (and REEx in past reports has updated) that BMW began series production of sixth-generation wound-field synchronous motors for its Neue Klasse platform in 2025, while Renault has commercially used wound-field technology since 2012. Suppliers including ZF (opens in a new tab) and Valeo (opens in a new tab) are also developing rare-earth-free motor architectures.

This makes motor topology itself part of critical-minerals strategy.

The REEx Bottom Line

The paper does not make the case that NdFeB traction magnets are becoming obsolete. It makes a subtler—and potentially more consequential—case: rare-earth magnets are moving from an almost automatic engineering choice toward a strategic design choice. For rare-earth markets, that means EV growth and magnet demand may gradually decouple at the margin.

The winners may therefore be suppliers capable of delivering high-performance, qualified NdFeB in the applications where its performance premium genuinely matters, while lower-performance applications migrate toward magnet-lean, ferrite or magnet-free architectures. And within NdFeB, watch Dy and Tb intensity closely. Engineers have multiple incentives to engineer these expensive and geopolitically vulnerable heavy rare earths downward before abandoning NdFeB itself.

That may be the real disruption hidden inside this review: the first rare-earth demand to be engineered away may not be the bulk NdPr market. It may be the most strategically constrained kilograms of Dy and Tb.

REEx Connect

Organization	Key People / Activity	Why It Matters
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia	Giampaolo Devito, Stefano Nuzzo, Davide Barater	Authors; traction-motor and rare-earth-reduction research
BMW Group	Neue Klasse electric drivetrain	Commercial wound-field synchronous motors
Renault Group	Rare-earth-free wound-field motors	Long-running commercial alternative to NdFeB motors
ZF	I2SM technology	Magnet-free traction architecture
Valeo	Rare-earth-free high-voltage motor	Supplier-scale wound-field technology

Study: Devito G, Nuzzo S, Barater D. Rare-Earth Reduction in Electric Traction Motors: A Design-Oriented Review Linking Topology, Magnetic Materials, Soft-Magnetic Cores and Windings Across Ground-Vehicle Segments. Energies. 2026;19(18):4316.

Read the full study (opens in a new tab)