Sorry, might be a stupid question, I have literally no idea about bikes!
What I'm looking to do is figure out whether there are any modern-ish ebike motors on the market that I could swap my current motor with (I'm assuming I'd be swapping all the other innards to fit that motor too, so dw about battery compatibility and the like). All I know about the current Motor is that it's a 250W Panasonic motor from around 2011. I asked the mechanic at my bike shop whether I could just toss one of those Bafang conversion kits on the bike but he said the way that my pedals sit within the motor would be incompatible with that and I'd need to get an actual ebike motor, not a conversion motor.
So now I'm trying to find information on current Panasonic motors and what sort of frames they need to fit, but I'm having a hard time because I have no idea how to even call this kind of spacing on the frame. Does anyone have an idea on what to call it/describe it as? Or is is a proprietary thing that I'd need a welder to rework? (Totally an option if push comes to shove, I know a guy)
Some more pictures from as many angles as I could get into (should I be getting measurements of any of these?):
spoiler
I was thinking that maybe this part could have been a bottom bracket at some point (it's at least a hole that goes all the way through, no idea if it's stable enough to hold whatever it needs to hold), but seems kinda unlikely
I even found an archive of the Catalogue that my bike was sold in at the time hoping that maybe that frame was designed to be used for either an analogue or an electric bike, but it seems like only the electric bikes had that frame as an option 🥲
If it's a tube and right size, it should have the strength for the crank. Though maybe you can fit one of those old style one piece crank if the size is right and you're going in that direction.
Something like this:
But from what i can see here, that mean the crank would need to move an inch or two up, might make the bike a bit hard to ride i feel like, since the bike is design to have that bottom bracket position right at the motor.