Electric Motor Manufacturing: Hand Winding to ABB Robots

Electric motor manufacturing is getting more attention than it has had in decades. Every electric car needs at least one traction motor, China's limits on rare earth exports have pushed startups to design motors without rare earth magnets, and in September 2026 Hyundai Mobis opened a plant in Slovakia with production lines for stators, the wound outer part of a motor. Motors also decide a lot of energy use: ABB, citing the IEA, says industrial motor systems account for about 60 percent of industrial electricity demand. This post looks at how motors were wound by hand, how hairpin stators changed the job, where ABB robots such as the IRB 1300 and IRB 6700 fit, and what is still hard.

A worker guides a large motor on a hoist at ABB's IEC low voltage motor plant in Shanghai. Photo: ABB

How motors were wound by hand

The motor is older than any factory that makes it in volume. Michael Faraday demonstrated electromagnetic rotation at the Royal Institution in London in 1821, Thomas Davenport patented a DC motor in 1837, and Nikola Tesla received his induction motor patent in May 1888. Building motors stayed manual for a long time. Most motors need coils of insulated copper wire laid into slots in a stack of thin steel laminations, an approach Siemens & Halske used for rotors in the 1870s to cut iron losses. A 1926 photo of the armature winding shop at the Randwick tramway workshop in Sydney shows a long hall of benches where that work was done by hand.

The armature winding shop at the Randwick tramway workshop in Sydney, 1926. Photo: NSWGR Archives / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Winding was skilled, repetitive work, and in wartime much of it fell to women. In April 1943 photographer Marjory Collins pictured a woman winding the armature of a trolley motor, and the same year a young woman was photographed winding armatures in a munitions factory in South Australia. At the Tennessee Valley Authority's Wilson Dam in Alabama, workers in 1942 wound the stator of a new hydroelectric generator on site. Winding machines later took over much of the routine work on smaller motors, using methods such as flyer and needle winding to lay round wire into the slots.

A woman winds the armature of a trolley motor, April 1943. Photo: Marjory Collins / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Electric cars changed the winding itself. Many traction motors now use hairpin stators: instead of long round wire, the winding is built from short, flat copper pins bent into a U, like a hairpin. On a typical line, machines straighten and strip the flat wire, cut and bend each pin, line the stator slots with insulating paper, insert the pins layer by layer, twist their ends and laser weld them into a circuit. The forming station on a thyssenkrupp prototype line makes one pin every 2.1 seconds. Flat pins pack the slots more tightly than round wire, but every step depends on placing each pin exactly where it belongs.

The electric motor of a Nissan Leaf shown at the 2011 Drive Electric Tour in Washington, DC. Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robots on today's motor and stator lines

New motor plants are still opening. Hyundai Mobis began mass production at Nováky in Slovakia on September 2, 2026, after investing about 250 billion won. The plant has lines for stators and inverters and can build up to 280,000 PE systems a year, each combining a motor, an inverter and a reduction gear in one drive unit, for Hyundai, Kia and other carmakers. In the United States, Modal Motors told TechCrunch on September 23 that it wants to build motors with no rare earth magnets at all, starting with small motors for drones, fans and actuators, because domestic magnet supply is still years away.

The rear drive unit of a BMW i3, with its electric motor, on a display chassis in 2012. Photo: LunchboxLarry / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

ABB robots work on lines like these. ABB says its robots, functional modules and modular cells cover magnetic rotor and stator assembly, quality and leak testing and the power electronics box, with mobile robots moving parts between stations. When Ola announced its electric scooter factory in India in 2021, it picked ABB as a key automation partner and planned IRB 6700 robots for assembly and material handling in its battery and motor areas. For lighter work, the IRB 1300 carries 11 kg at 0.9 m reach or 7 kg at 1.4 m on a 220 by 220 mm footprint, and ABB says it cuts cycle times by 27 percent compared with the IRB 1600, a size that could suit loading pins, rotors and bearings in tight cells.

An ABB IRB 1300 small industrial robot with an operator holding the FlexPendant. Photo: ABB

ABB also builds motors in its own factories. It calls itself the world's leading maker of NEMA motors, sold under the Baldor-Reliance name, and runs IEC low voltage motor plants in Bangalore and Faridabad in India, Shanghai in China and Vaasa in Finland. In 2025 the Vaasa plant cut its electricity use from 19 to about 17 gigawatt hours while making more than 10,000 extra motors, and it reuses waste heat from impregnation and casting to heat its buildings. In Bangalore, projects such as replacing pneumatic torque tools with electric ones helped cut electricity use by about 3.8 percent in a year. Our post on ABB robots in EV battery assembly covers the battery side of the same cars.

An employee beside finished motors on the line at ABB's IEC low voltage motor plant in Vaasa, Finland. Photo: ABB

What comes next for motor lines

The next step is flexibility for smaller batches. Large lines insert hairpins with dedicated machines, but a 2026 paper in Procedia CIRP describes collaborative robots inserting hairpins instead, which lets one cell handle several stator types. That could matter to makers who build many motor variants in modest volumes, such as motors for robots, drones and pumps. An ABB GoFa or single-arm YuMi IRB 14050 could do that kind of insertion in a pilot cell next to a technician, though ABB has not announced such a project. Paths for new stator types can be planned and tested offline in RobotStudio before the cell is changed.

Two employees check a motor at one of ABB's IEC low voltage motor plants in India. Photo: ABB

For homes, the motor story is mostly hidden inside appliances, heat pumps, fans and e-bikes, and in new rules. New US Department of Energy motor efficiency standards arrive in 2027, and ABB used the Turbomachinery and Pump Symposium in Houston in September 2026 to show NEMA Premium 4 motors built for them. Rare earth supply is the other force. If more makers move to designs without rare earth magnets, as Modal Motors plans, rotor lines will change, and the robots on them will need new grippers, new programs and new checks for parts that look different from today's magnet rotors.

A heat pump outdoor unit beside a house; its fan and compressor are driven by electric motors. Photo: Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Cost, safety and skills remain open problems. Dedicated hairpin machines pay off at high volumes, which is why research on cobot cells for small batches matters to smaller motor makers. Laser welding of hairpin ends needs enclosed cells, and heavy stators need lifting aids whether a person or a robot moves them; on ABB controllers, SafeMove can limit a robot's speed and working zones where people stand nearby. Each new stator design also means new paths, grippers and inspection steps, so plants need technicians who can set up and adjust the cells as well as operators who run them.

A technician at work on a motor at ABB's Vaasa motor plant. Photo: ABB

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