Inside some of the world’s most advanced electric machines sits a component still made by a process that looks surprisingly close to sewing: thick copper wire must be pulled, bent, and threaded around a magnetic core 🧲
Tesla’s answer in patent application US 20260162879A1 is almost disarmingly simple: if winding the wire is the bottleneck, stop winding wire altogether 🎯
Instead of treating the winding as something that must be wrapped around the core, Tesla redesigns it as a rigid structure assembled around it. This shifts the challenge from controlling flexible wire to controlling geometry, opening the door to a manufacturing process built far more naturally for robots 🆒
⏱️ If you don’t have 60 minutes for the full deep dive, here’s how that simple idea becomes a new manufacturing architecture in 60 seconds:
🧩 The winding becomes a conductive jigsaw.
A U-shaped plate wraps around three sides of the magnetic core, while an I-shaped plate closes the fourth side and connects one section to the next. Repeating this pattern creates a continuous, multi-turn conductive path without threading flexible wire through the toroid.
⚡ The fragile core escapes the strain of wire winding.
Because the conductors arrive pre-formed, heavy-gauge wire no longer needs to be pulled and bent around sharp corners. This could reduce assembly stress on the conductor insulation and brittle, high-permeability materials such as nanocrystalline ribbon cores.
📐 The housing becomes both a fixture and an electrical design tool.
Perpendicular grooves act like a mechanical comb, holding every plate in position and controlling the spacing between adjacent turns. That geometry helps engineers control alignment, parasitic capacitance, and the safe distances between energized conductors, known as creepage and clearance.
⛓️ Temporary tabs turn loose conductors into organized panels.
Break-off tabs can keep multiple stamped plates connected while they move through the factory. Robots can process an orderly group of conductors instead of repeatedly handling and aligning numerous loose pieces.
🤖 Winding becomes a repeatable robotic sequence.
Flat surfaces give vacuum nozzles and robotic grippers reliable pickup points. Machines can position the plates around the core, lock them into the housing grooves, join them through laser welding or other methods, and remove the temporary carrier tabs afterward.
📈 Copper can be added exactly where the current demands it.
The plates can vary in shape and thickness within the same component. Additional layers can be joined in parallel where more current capacity, lower resistance, or better heat spreading is needed.
🔌 The winding absorbs the surrounding interfaces.
The stamped conductors can extend directly into PCB mounting feet, electrical taps, crossover connections, thermal paths, and rigid blade-style terminals. Functions that normally require separate parts can become part of the winding itself.
❄️ The conductor becomes part of the cooling system.
The broad plate surfaces can behave like cooling fins. Openings in the PCB can also give air, heatsinks, cooling structures, or thermal-interface materials more direct access to the underside of the assembly.
Taken together, these features transform power magnetics from individually wound components into configurable structural assemblies. Current capacity, electrical spacing, terminals, mounting points, and cooling paths can all be designed directly into repeatable stamped parts instead of added through separate components and secondary operations.
If Tesla can validate joint reliability and electrical performance at scale, the larger prize is not just a different inductor. It is a common production system for power magnetics across vehicles, chargers, energy storage, and humanoid robots, with each component customized through geometry rather than an entirely different manufacturing process.