Test riding a prototype all-electric motorcycle

Slows down, as you'd expect it too; smooooth. Partial throttle gives you partial power, and no throttle and you coast to a stop. It does have engine braking, but it's more mild than an inline-2 or inline-4, and again, very very smooth.

Wow! This sounds absolutely awesome.

I'd love to see where this one goes. :)

80mi range isn't bad. This sounds pretty close to prime time and I am NOT a EV lover by any means, and think hybrid cars are stupid ideas. But in a vehicle as light as a motorcycle, this seems like a great idea.

Agreed. Electric was phased out a century ago because of its major weaknesses... but if an engineer can make it work, then that's awesome.

Well, to be fair, electric technology has come a long, long, LONG way in 100 years. And petrol-based fuels were cheap as dirt for most of that.

If battery technology can get small and light enough to give equal range and speed as gas cars? Everyone will ditch gas cars.

I am an EV-lover, just not an early adapter... well, okay, I guess that makes me an EV idea lover. I think this is great too... an 80-mile range puts it within spitting distance of some good, small commuter bikes these days.

One thing to watch out for is the speed at which you can get this range: if the 80-mile max is only available by cruising under 35mph, that limits its utility, and most EV makers these days try to downplay the practical limitations.

Nonetheless, if they put this in a Sportster or SV650, that'd make it an awesome commuter. I'll be watching this one! OP, thanks for the post!

Wow, this is exciting! I'm a fan of hearing the engine growl but the smooth is good too!

Do want!

wow you're a lucky man!

wah wah boring safety brigade PSA

"The bike has a top speed of 100mph, and I got very close to that speed, very very fast."

"Didn't need earplugs!"

Was this test performed in a vacuum? Please be aware wind noise above ~40 can cause serious hearing damage.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=motorcycles%20wind%20noise%20hearing%20damage

Please protect your ears!

+1

Wind noise is the major noise I hear on my VFR (with cam gear noise being #2) I don't hardly even HEAR the exhaust note. I almost always wear earplugs as the wind noise becomes annoying in any trip over 5 miles. (I usually don't wear earplugs on local city trips as speed is much lower and the trips so much shorter).

Tire whine and chain whir are also going to make a bit of noise. If your exhaust noise on a motorcycle is so loud that you can no longer hear that there is a significant wind noise/engine whir/tire wail/chain whir -then you probably are riding a bike with an exhaust so loud that it is bothering just about everyone else on the road (and beside the road and maybe even 1/2-mile away from the road...)

The whole thing about how the Hybrids are so quiet that blind people are getting run over is BS. Tire noise on most new cars is way more loud than the engine noise. Motorcycles should be as quiet as cars to passersby if we want to survive as a publicly-acceptable activity. It is bad enough that we have a serious image problem due to safety and hooliganism. Adding our obnoxious noise into the mix just adds flame to the fire.

Potato-potato-potato! (at 139dB)

Loud pipes save what, now?

By the way, there was a recent short discussion in which I solicited opinions on others' experiences with loud pipes. Here's one example. Do you have experience on both loud and quiet bikes that would serve as informally-collected data for want of better statistics? Would you be willing to share it, or is this pretty much just a strongly-held opinion?

(We have to differentiate with you, because most of your "ranting" style opinions are just plain stupidly wrong... as in this comment, where you were proven wrong in pretty much the very next cresponse.)

We also had a short debate on the subject in this thread, to which you also might like to respond, too: I'd be interested to hear a quiet-bike advocate respond to my comparison to a helmet, as the commenter there didn't really do so.

Re: wah wah boring safety brigade PSA

I commute 80mi per day, and wear earplugs all of those 80mi. For this ride I left them off to get more feedback from the bike.

The bike at 80mph is considerably less noisy, to the point that I felt the earplugs were not necessary for my /comfort/.

Sounds cool. But 300 recharges wouldn't last me much more than a year or two. And the batteries probably cost what my VFR did.

In another 10 years we might be driving decent electric vehicles. Hopefully we'll start building some nuke plants to provide the power and not just building more oil-fueled plants like we are now.

The 300 charges are full charges. 80mi x 300 = 24,000 miles. Yeah, some people can do that in a year or two. I think that's why they're shooting for 150mi range x 500 for production bikes. 75,000 miles is about as much as many people get out of their bikes at all...

Also, if you don't fully drain it, requiring a full charge cycle, the number of charges is supposed to go up very quite a bit.

I=E/R

"It charges in 6-8 hours on household 120v, or under 2 hours with a transformer for 240v."

This statement is a little bit misleading. You can't simply just plug a transformer into a 120v circuit and make 240v and decrease the charge time. Yeah, you COULD do it -but you are NOT going to draw any more power from that 120v circuit using such a setup than you would otherwise.

The limitation of your average household 15A 120V circuit is going to be the breaker or the fuse. The over-current device (breaker or fuse) will trip after pulling 80% continuous load which is 12A. 12A x 120v = 1440 watts. That is all you are going to be able to draw from your typical 15A 120v receptacle. A 20A receptacle will be able to draw 16A on a continuous load or 1920 watts.

Transforming to 240v after this will not change anything except lose about 3-5% in I-squared-R losses to heat in the X-former windings.

The reason why a 240v OUTLET will be able to possibly charge faster is because of I=E/R A 240v circuit will have half the current that a 120v circuit would have at equivalent wattage (power). So a 15A 240v circuit would be able to draw 12A of continuous amperage without tripping the over-current device (breaker or fuse) for total of 12A x 240v = 2880 watts. That's twice as much power. A 20A 240v outlet will yield 3840 watts! That's a lot more power available to charge (and thus shorter charge times).

Almost every home/apartment in the US has a 120/240v service (some have a single-phase 120/208v service if they are running on a large 3-phase service in the building, but for all intents and purposes just consider that to be roughly equivalent to a 120/240v service.

This is why electric driers, AC units, Stoves/ranges, and anything that draws a lot of power is run 240v. You can use similar #14AWG wire for a 15A 240v outlet that you can for a 15A 120v outlet and #12AWG wire for a 20A. In order to draw that kind of power through a 120v receptacle one would need to fuse it at 30A or 40A and run #10 or #8 wire and the NEMA receptacle size would be HUGE and expensive. Nobody does this because of the added cost. It's just easier to run a 240v run of 12/2 or 14/2 wire and put in a simple low-cost (smaller sized) 15A or 20A 240v plug in. If you need even more power than that (and electric charging stations often do) then one needs to run 10/2 or 8/2 wire -or wire in pipe, and stick in a 30, 40A 240v outlet/receptacle . If you really want to go big then run #6AWG wire for 60A 240v which will give a whopping 11,520W of continuous charging power! But a 60A 240v circuit might tax many household services. You'll need that much power to charge a real electric car that has range in the 100-200+ miles neighborhood in under 10 hours.

Re: I=E/R

Back when there was aggressive promotion of BEV cars (mostly before the oil companies and car manufacturers gutted the California ZEV mandate), there was some development in high voltage and possibly high frequency AC charging, to get a fairly large amount of power into the onboard charging system without too much of those exact (I^2)R losses you're talking about. A fair bit of engineering went into doing that safely, but I'm not sure whether any of those interfaces were standardized before the big internal-combustion players succeeded in shutting down further development of the technology.

The production BEV stuff I've seen so far for two-wheeled designs usually includes an onboard charging system with a standard 3-prong 120VAC cord that coils up and stores in the under-seat compartment or something similar. The battery packs for those are in the 3-4 kWh range, so that's usually enough power to complete an 80% fast charge in about 2 hours and a full equalized charge in about 4 hours.

One thing to note: Charging NiMH's at high ambient temperatures can seriously damage the battery, or so I've heard from folks who drive RAV4-EV's. The RAV4's lose capacity fairly rapidly if charged when it's over 88 degrees outside, because the internal temperature goes up into the 120's or higher and degrades the cells really fast. Overnight charging is the best plan all around, because of that and because you're using off-peak power which is considerably cheaper (and more environmentally sound) than charging at afternoon peak rates (and getting power from less efficient and more polluting peak-capacity systems). Just FYI. :)

Re: I=E/R

The bike would come with an optional transformer that would convert household 240v to be suitable for the charging system for the bike. Sorry for any confusion.

I'm not sure I'd even find it acceptable at 150 miles... I'm not sure I'm even comfortable with the 220 (to empty) range on my current bike. Touring is a large part of why I own a bike (I know, it's not a touring bike, but that's just too bad for it).

The best math I can do to compare owning and insuring a second electric commuter bike, even if it's fuel was free, would make it cost me more to operate in the long run. Yeah, I'd use less fuel, but at this point, I'm not sure it would be worth it for me.

I'm waiting to see what happens with Switchgrass-based Ethanol (*NOT* Corn-Ethanol) at this point. If it becomes a common fuel and they design some bikes to run on it, I'll be more likely to pick one of those up than an electric vehicle.

I know it's not politicly correct, but I love my gas burning motorcycle. The smell of fuel, the purr (Bonnies are about as loud as a sewing machine), and being able to reheat a burger (don't knock muffler meat till you try it). Plus a fill-up in less than five minutes. 80 miles won't cut it for me I'm afraid. That, and the 300 charges means it might last 1-2 years at most.

I agree. But did everyone miss how this is only a prototype? The production version is supposed to have 150mi + 500 /full/ charges.

If you don't full charge, that number is supposed to be much larger (like 2x - 3x).

I didn't miss that, but 150 is still extremely short unless I'm only commuting, and not going out for entertainment rides. I go out riding with my dad's Goldwing group once a month on average (and those trips are 300-600 mile days), as well as going on my own long trip days on occasion.

Wow! Sounds awesome, can't wait to see the real thing! Lucky dog, you!

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Its great to read this article.

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