Perhaps timed artfully around this coming weekend’s Rolex 24-hour race at Daytona, where Don Panoz’s DeltaWing DWC13 will again be on the grid to start (and this time, perhaps finish) an endurance race, DeltaWing announced that it has cemented a partnership with a company called DHX Electric Machines.
Don’t know DHX? The company makes beer-can-sized motors that produce 20 horsepower. Slightly larger ones, the size of a gallon of paint, produce 80 horsepower and 195 pound-feet of torque. Panoz inked the deal to work with DHX last March, but this most recent announcement moves DHX headquarters to the Panoz campus in Georgia and gives Panoz exclusive license to use the motor tech in its passenger cars.
DHX’s breakthrough is in shedding heat, a huge enemy of power efficiency with electric motors (why so many EVs need very sophisticated cooling tech both for their motors and their batteries). Panoz/DHX claims the patented Falcon motor is 75 percent smaller than conventional ones, and that the changed construction removes more than 10 times the heat that ordinarily plagues other electric motor designs. This allows it to be far smaller and lighter, a guiding force for Panoz’s DeltaWing ethos, where the chassis’s ultra-narrow front track and rear-engine placement allow miniaturization of steering, braking and front suspension while increasing slipperiness and, in turn, allowing smaller, lighter propulsion.
Panoz showed off a DeltaWing GT concept this past fall and has teased sedan studies as well, neither of which are ready for prime time but do hint that that the company is pushing its ideas beyond the track.