To create enough force to lift the car using linear motors requires massive copper coils and rare earth magnets, which is heavy and expensive. It’s also wasteful, because in real world drive cycles peak force is only needed for short periods of time and at relatively low linear velocities. Further, linear motors require significant packaging space which requires the chassis be designed around it. Instead, we use a much smaller motor and a high “gear ratio” using hydraulics to achieve high forces via mechanical gain. This reduces raw material cost by a factor of >10x while achieving similar performance.
If I recall it was heavy. I think speculation had it adding over 20% to the weight of the Lexus.
And those electric motors and control hardware would not have been cheap. But nobody knows how to estimate it - just that it would be prohibitively expensive.
What does that mean? Was it too complex or costly to make it back then? Did that change now with your developments?
Better tech is nice but if it's to expensive or hard to mass produce then it could end up the same way as with Bose.