My guesses on the Magneto's drivetrain were dead wrong. I was thinking about two different supplier offerings which have been recently announced. The first one is the Magna eBeam electric drive axle.
I first thought of a Wrangler with electrically driven axles front and rear. (BTW, the eBeam is what many suspect the battery electric Ford F-150 will use.) According to Magna's press release, "To support electric four-wheel drive, Magna also offers several complete powertrain solutions incorporating an electric drive system at the front of the truck, including advanced software and controls for seamless integration." The bench racer in me imagines a single motor front axle and Magna's "Twin motor, single speed including torque vectoring" axle at the rear.
My second guess was something from the Jeep and Ram Truck supplier ZF, who will be providing the hybrid transmission for the Wrangler 4Xe plugin hybrid. ZF offers an electric drive for HD trucks called the CeTrax. Lately, ZF has been testing a smaller version of this technology, the CeTrax Lite. According to ZF:
Electric Central Drive for Light Commercial Vehicles (in development)
CeTrax lite is ZF’s compact and lightweight drive system for minibuses, vans and light trucks. Electronic control unit and inverter are fully integrated. When it comes to the electrical components, ZF relies on scalable solutions from the passenger car sector and validates them for commercial vehicles. CeTrax lite can be combined with standard axles and common ratios.
Advantages
- 150 kilowatts peak perfomance
- Light and compact
- Inverter and electronic control unit fully integrated
- Flexible integrable in existing vehicle platforms with conventional driveline layout
ZF states the full sized CeTrax has an " Electric motor with integrated, tried-and-tested planetary stage from ZF-EcoLife." The EcoLife is a six speed automatic transmission used in busses. Keep in mind the CeTrax is for HD vehicles, so using a planetary gearset from that transmission shouldn't be a surprise. I have no idea what "transmission", if any, a production CeTrax Lite will incorporate. I'm reasonably sure it won't be a manual transmission. ZF does make a EcoLite manual transmission for trucks, but they don't connect them to electric motors.
The things I like about the Magneto are the battery packaging and overall appearance. I don't think an EV needs a six speed manual transmission connected to a four speed transfer case. Of course the dissident in me would want an EV having a manual transmission with an easily removable motor and battery packs for a dystopian future. Then I could drop in a Hemi in the thing.
Back to reality, I think the ZF setup could be production feasible in a Jeep Wrangler BEV. If I was in the market for a vehicle and if something like that was available, I would seriously consider such a beast, but in something trimmed more in line to the Islander, not a bare bones rock crawler.
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