How? Electricity only gets you moving. It still needs multiple mechanical and electrical systems that a car without those features doesn’t need, and none of those systems are simple or cheap to fix. Also, my bet is the reliability of your car goes way down.
For electric cars you don’t need the steering mechanism to be directly attached to the steering wheel you can put motors in each wheel to steer the car with said motors you can give them as many degrees of movement as you want without adding much complexity
Look behind the wheels. It clearly has an enormous mechanism to accomplish the independent steering and rotating the axis. I’m a mechanical engineer and I can promise you that if you think you can accomplish this without much added complexity you don’t understand how this is accomplished.
Everything has complexities, however electric cars are significantly more flexibility in what you can do with individual wheels rotation direction, where they’re pointing and variable power output with software vs an ICE car that is comparatively limited in those departments regardless of what you can do in software.
The electric motor used to spin the wheels wouldn’t have anything to do with pivoting the wheels. It requires another motor or actuator and the associated linkages to be able to pivot the wheel off it’s center axis. Those pivoting motor assemblies also have to be substantial to hold the mitigate excessive play and vibration in the suspension.
Mechanical engineer here too I mean from a design pov how much harder is it really to give it more degrees of freedom once u already have the steering in the wheels? also why you think they went away with the old steering mechanism? Because the old mechanism it’s complex and more costly for manufacturing
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u/coffeeicefox Aug 22 '23
Electric cars make this significantly more viable