The electric drive unit (EDU) is the core of the powertrain of electric vehicles. The EDU characterizes the vehicle’s performance, driving comfort, and efficiency. Today, many EDU concepts exist. Many use high-speed asynchronous or synchronous electric machines; some come with low-speed axial flux machines. A well-balanced design process is necessary to identify the optimal combination of inverter, electric machine, and transmission for a specific use case. Today, the corresponding design process relies on highly qualified experts from multiple fields of expertise who try to solve complex interdependencies in the EDU design. Bringing this multidisciplinary knowledge together in an easy-to-use software is desired to achieve a fast and reliable design process. Currently, there is a scarcity of tools concentrating on the holistic optimization of the EDU. This study discusses trends in the design of electric drive units concerning performance and other key performance indicators such as efficiency, acoustics, and cost. Under these conditions, a methodology for synthesizing and optimizing EDUs for battery electric vehicles based on a broad and reliable data basis is the primary motivation of the consortium project Opt4E. The project combines the experiences from the previous projects, Speed2E and Speed4E. In these projects, essential findings for EDUs with maximum input speeds of 30,000 and 50000 min-1 regarding the influences and interdependencies of the operation at those speeds were derived.