Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) built a working electric motor coil entirely from carbon nanotubes (CNTs), with no copper or rare earth metals anywhere in it. The team, led by Dr. Dae-Yoon Kim, used a new purification process called LAST (Lyotropic Liquid Crystal-Assisted Surface Texturing) to strip metal catalyst impurities out of the nanotubes during manufacturing—the contamination issue that's kept CNTs out of real hardware for decades. The result is that conductivity jumped 133% to 7.7 megasiemens per meter (MS/m), and the coil weighed just 78.75 mg versus 379.08 mg for an equivalent copper coil—an 80%+ weight cut. The team proved it out by powering a toy car to 1.7 ft/s (0.52 m/s).

For plant managers and OEMs watching copper and rare-earth costs climb—along with copper theft being a real facility risk—a viable metal-free winding is notable. It's still early-stage (the motor ran continuously for just 60 minutes in testing), but in this video, YouTube channel Joe Scott walks through how conventional motor coils work, how the CNT alternative compares, and where the remaining hurdles are before this shows up in production equipment.