If you mean front loader... Hoover Zodiac 480 and 490 is pretty much what you have described. They are still around on Gumtree from time to time if you want one. Short wash (by front load standards) and three rinses, two spins. All over in maybe half an hour or not much more.

Pacific front loaders (made by Gorenje) from the 1980s and possibly the 1990s were similar technology too. So were lots of Bendix models sold here.

It would be a massive step backwards from modern machines.

There is a limit to what you can achieve with simple, single phase induction motors and no electronics - that is a spin speed about 8 to 10 times the tumble speed. So if tumble speed is 50 rpm then spin speed will be no more than 500 rpm. That is with a 2pole/16 pole motor. (Or maybe 18 pole max.) The more poles you have, the slower it turns, but the motor gets bigger with more poles, the 2/16 pole motors are HUGE and heavy, that takes up space in the cabinet so you can only fit a small drum, and limiting it to a simple 2 or 3 speed motor means you can't have a sophisticated distributing/balancing regime so you need lots of space around the drum to allow room for the drum to jump around. => small load size. You can't just change pulley size to make it spin faster - this makes it tumble too fast in wash, the clothes go around but never drop. Pacific tried this in Australia briefly - in response to customer complaints about poor spinning, they offered a larger motor pulley to make it spin a little faster. It ruined the wash, the idea was soon dropped.

These are hard limits, and they are the reason why appliance manufacturers changed to brush motors and later to multi-phase computer controlled motors and stepper motors. These modern drive systems achieve what you genuinely can't do with simple induction motors.

The advances in electronic control in the last 30 years have been fantastic. A Hoover Zodiac 480 used to consume about 500 Watts to wash and for spin about 600 to 800 Watts. My current Miele (which still had a universal brush motor, with electronic control) washes with around 100 Watts, often less, and spins with about 200 Watts. Yet it washes much better, spins dramatically faster, and has proven to be more reliable, has a larger load size in the same size cabinet.

Hi Adam

The Electra has an electronic control module in it.

It is an electronically controlled 2-speed induction motor (the exact same motor as a 480) but with electronic control to give variable speed.

Here's how it works...

The motor pulley is much larger than on the 480, almost twice the diameter. This makes it spin faster, at 800 rpm.

This would make it tumble way too fast, and this is where the electronics come in and do their magic.

On wash (tumble) the electronic box feeds the motor a different voltage and/or wave form to make the motor turn slower.

I don't know exactly what the change is, whether it is a slower Hz (maybe 30 or 35 Hz??) or if is just pulsed 240VAC 50Hz which is a horrible thing to do to an AC synchronous motor. I do know they are extremely inefficient - I played with an Electra very briefly, it used a ridiculous 900+ Watts when washing!

On distribute, I think it just feeds a few bursts of normal 240V 50Hz to the slow winding, then switches to the fast winding to spin. The spin can be electronically mucked about with (500 RPM) or normal 240V 50Hz (800 RPM.)

Just to be clear - (your post suggests you may not understand distribute??) - the distribute phase is an intermediate phase between wash and spin - it is a faster-than-wash tumble, the idea is to get the wet clothes evenly spread around the drum before launching into spin, to prevent unbalance and vibration. So distribution is always done with clothes already wet, because it comes after the wash. Sorry if you already understood that.