In a car which can accelerate up to speed and brake again every 30 seconds while going through a city with a lot of stop lines, the efficiency of the power components really matters.
If you loose 5% in the motors, 5% in the power electronics and 5% in the battery in each direction, then each accelerate-brake cycle is losing you ~30% of the energy you started with. At town speeds, friction and air resistance losses are tiny, so that 30% is probably actually most of the energy you are using!
Add that to the fact that certain motor control techniques such as field weakening involve every Amp of real power that comes from the battery passing many times though the inverter, since there is a higher circulating current between inverter and motor coils.
Even assuming 100% inverter efficiency you will lose at least 20% in the regen part of the cycle alone.
Eg. See https://cdn.motor1.com/images/mgl/y83JG/s3/tesla-motor-effic...
The only differences between a motor and a generator in practice are cost optimizations and fixed-frequency optimizations. Industrial generators run at fixed speeds, unlike EV motors, so they can be built more cheaply. EV motors are not any less efficient when used to recapture power.
For example, even the simple inductance and resistance of the motor means that at the same speed and at the same load angle you will see a lower voltage at the poles of the motor when acting as a generator. When your motor has high efficiency, these differences can lead to a large absolute difference when running as a generator.
You realize SiC is not the savior for all your problems right?
I'm not saying efficiency doesn't matter, I'm saying this is not gonna improve range significantly, there is a difference.
Both gains seem relevant to me.
Generally cooling ESCs is not that big of an issue, just stick them in the same cooling system as the batteries.
"Drive controller" or "motor controller" are common terms, and while I have seen acronyms like DCU, nothing really sticks. MCU is already taken as an acronym, which doesn't help.
Nowadays ESC simply refers to any circuit you attach to motor and provide with a target speed/torque/power. In common practice yeah ESC/drive controller/motor controller are used interchangeably.
ECU is specifically something else. It's "Engine Control Unit". It refers to the controller for a combustion engine, not a motor.
Trust me, I'm more customed to use the term ESC since I play RC models and I don't drive a electric car, or any car.
A more close to everyday life example would be chargers for notebooks, we now have smaller chargers thanks to GaN FETs, SiC is like GaN.