Motor design for electric vehicle application using non-rare-earth permanent magnetic materials has become a research hotspot due to cost reduction and environmental issues. Among different motor topologies, permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) with spoke-type ferrite magnets has great potential because of its competitive performance. In this paper, a novel design of a spoke-type synchronous motor using ferrite Y40 and non-magnetic steel material is presented, with optimizations on the overall structure and considerations on the effects of pole numbers. The performance of the designed motor verified with magnetic simulations shows that it has a high probability to be a candidate for replacing the conventional PMSM with rare-earth materials in Electric Vehicles (EV) application. © 2022 IEEE.