With the wide use of new energy vehicles, the research and development of high‐performance generators become more important. The claw pole machine is very suitable to be used as an automobile generator because of its unique characteristics. However, its development is limited by the disadvantage of abundant harmonic content, especially when used with fractional slot concentrated winding layout. A novel dual‐direction hybrid excitation generator (DDHEG) is proposed in this paper. It has dual 3‐phase winding layout to reduce spatial subharmonic magnet motive force (MMF). Also, it uses dual 3‐phase rectifier bridge circuit to reduce armature current, so as to reduce copper loss. It uses rotor sleeve to reduce the eddy current loss in the rotor and permanent magnets (PMs) caused by higher order harmonics. It has hybrid excitation from both directions to improve the efficiency and terminal voltage. The basic characteristics of DDHEG are analyzed by finite element analysis (FEA) method. The highlights of the proposed DDHEG are illustrated. The simulation results and experimental results reveal that the proposed DDHEG can effectively adjust the terminal voltage at different loads and reduce the harmonics and loss to a satisfied degree. © 2022 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.