Recent advancements of permanent magnet (PM) materials and solid-state devices have contributed to a substantial performance improvement of permanent magnet machines. Owing to the rare-earth PMs, these motors have higher efficiency, power factor, output power per mass and volume, and better dynamic performance than induction motors without sacrificing reliability. Not surprisingly, they are continuously receiving serious considerations for a variety of automotive and propulsion applications. An electric vehicle (EV) requires a high-effficient propulsion system having a wide operating range and a capability of generating a high peak torque for short durations. The improvement of torque-speed performance for these systems is consequently very important, and researches in various aspects are therefore being actively pursued. A great emphasis has been placed on the efficiency and optimal utilization of PM machines. This requires attention to many aspects related to the machine design and overall performance. In this respect, the prediction of iron losses is particularly indispensable and challenging, especially for drives with a deep field-weakening range. The objective of this paper is to present iron loss estimations of a PM motor over a wide speed range. As aforementioned, in EV applications core losses can be significant during high-speed operation and it is imperative to evaluate these losses accurately and take them into consideration during the motor design stage. In this investigation, the losses are predicted by using an analytical model and a 2D time-stepped finite element method (FEM). The results from different analytical approaches are compared with the FEM computations. The validity of each model is then evaluated by these comparisons.