Sandy Munro is a former Ford development engineer who takes cars down to the smallest detail and then explains how they are constructed. He and his team have already done this with hundreds of vehicles and created extensive dossiers, but he only became known worldwide in connection with electric cars.

He has even been received by Elon Musk lately, even though he praised indeed Tesla's electronics, but rejected the body shop and paintwork. His tendency to compare the electrical technology of the electric vehicles tested with that of Tesla is unmistakable.

Now VW has sent him a complete ID.4, knowing full well that he would not be silent in the event of a negative judgments. The video below, like Munro's others, is a bit confused, but allows one to check the principle that has been repeatedly expressed that Tesla is supposedly so much further ahead.

First of all, it is determined that the VW drive consists of five individually replaceable components, while at Tesla there is always a drive that can be completely replaced. Munro attributes this to the much greater spread at VW across different vehicle classes.

Munro then points out a peculiarity at VW, namely the lack of bearing at the entrance to the gearbox. Thanks to a very low-backlash connection between the gear shaft and the motor shaft, this construction manages with just three bearings.

When the gear housing is dismantled, the gasket is noticeable that seals on the one hand to the outside and on the other hand also seals the cooling channels in the motor and gear housing. You can discover the flow of coolant at VW, first to the inverter and then in an S-shape through the motor housing.

Instead, Tesla cools with gear oil, which needs its own pump, an additional filter and a heat exchanger at this point. Here, too, the heat generated cannot be fed to the battery when required, which would save energy.

If you take a closer look at the stator, you will notice that the windings at VW are designed as so-called hairpins with a rectangular instead of a round cross-section. This means that more wire is possible in the same space, which makes less rare earths possible in the rotor.

The principle of the reluctance motor seems to be realized in both drives. However, the discs that make up the rotor are grouped into four packages at VW and three packages at Tesla however, two of which are identical in their arrangement. The more packages, the better the transition between the individual torque boosts.

Munro then praised the division of the VW inverter into several parts, which Tesla is all soldered onto a circuit board, but criticizes the many screws. On the other hand, if you read through the comments, VW's approach is more likely to be praised because it is easier to repair.