not only is this super cool for electric cars, this kind of technology makes mecha and other robots slightly closer to reality. i'm no engineer but i'm pretty sure its difficult to convert the rotation impulse from an internal combustion engine into multiple different axes of movement throughout a vehicle (imagine a car transmission but for every joint in a robots limbs instead of 4 wheels turning in mostly the same direction, probably too complicated to ever be practical) but is much easier to do with electric motors, the batteries of which usually have much less energy density than ICE fuels (easier to power several smaller electric motors, distributed between the various joints, with the same battery or array of batteries, than it would be to fuel a bunch of smaller similarly distributed ICE motors with the same fuel tank).