>This motor has 48 coils, and the ability to change what order and groupings they get powered.
Ok, great, so now you have a bunch of discrete speeds you can run the motor at. How smooth a ride do you think that's going to provide?
If you can't run a motor at any arbitrary speed within its range, it's useless for any kind of vehicle.
>And what is 'battery voltage'? Battery voltage is something like 2.8 volts
No, that's cell voltage. A battery is a group of cells. That battery in your car that produces 12V is a group of 6 cells each producing 2V, with the cells all connected in series. As I understand it, Tesla batteries are rather high-voltage.
>From what I recall, recharging multiple cells in series leads to some pretty big problems when some of the cells are aging faster than others.
Yet somehow it works just fine for car batteries over the last 100 years, and for most every other battery we use these days (laptops, etc.).
>With 48 coils on the motor and a battery pack of 120 or more cells, there are a lot of voltages and currents you could run through the system by reconfiguring instead of inverting.
Yeah, again, if you just want to run at various discrete speeds. How many people are going to want a herky-jerky car like that?