The three motor stator windings are connected in a star network. The motor is controlled by an apparatus 13 in accordance with an aspect of the present disclosure that includes a controller and drive stage. The drive stage 27 of the apparatus 13 comprises a three phase bridge forming a switching stage. This is shown in FIG. 3. Each arm of the bridge comprises a pair of switches in the form of a top transistor T1, T3, T5 and a bottom transistor T2, T4, T6 connected in series between the battery supply rail 2 and ground line. The motor windings are each tapped off from between a respective complementary pair of transistors. The transistors are turned on and off in a controlled manner by a control and drive circuit to provide pulse width modulation (PWM) of the potential applied to each of the terminals, thereby to control the potential difference applied across each of the windings and hence also the currents a, b, c flowing through the windings which depends on the duty cycled for each phase 17,18, 19 of the motor. This in turn controls the strength and orientation of the magnetic field produced by the windings, and in turn the motor torque. In fact as shown in FIG. 3 the motor has dual lanes, so there is a duplicate of the three phases and the three phase bridge. The two lanes can be run in parallel, each providing one half of the motor torque, or used one at a time.
