As EV traction motors trend toward higher power and torque, losses and heat generation have increased markedly, making thermal management a key technical challenge for sustaining vehicle performance and ensuring durability and reliability. Conventional indirect cooling can be insufficient to secure adequate thermal margin under high heat-flux operation, motivating the adoption of direct cooling technologies that deliver coolant directly to major heat sources such as the windings and stator core. Although leading global OEMs have introduced diverse direct-cooling architectures in stator and rotor components, an established and broadly applicable strategy for optimal selection and benchmarking remains limited. Moreover, electromagnetic design modifications can alter loss distribution and cooling effectiveness simultaneously, which complicates structure selection based solely on empirical experience. This study addresses this gap by systematically surveying, classifying, and quantitatively assessing direct-cooling structures implemented in the latest EV traction motors from five major global OEMs. First, representative stator- and rotor-side direct-cooling configurations are investigated and categorized according to their coolant delivery paths and target heat- source regions. Next, coupled electromagnetic–thermal–fluid simulations are conducted to evaluate each configuration in terms of temperature distribution, peak-temperature reduction, cooling efficiency, and variations in key electromagnetic performance indicators. The comparative results are used to identify OEM-specific design tendencies and structure- dependent trade-offs between thermal mitigation and electromagnetic performance. The outcomes of this work provide 1) a structured taxonomy of recent OEM direct- cooling designs, 2) benchmark-level quantitative comparisons across representative architectures, and 3) practical design guidelines to support rational selection of direct- cooling structures for future high-power, high-efficiency EV traction motors.