| Author | Message | ||
     Marc |
I just watched the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" which I got from netflix and am motivated to save the planet and reduce my carbon footprint. As I was reading the 2009 1125X requests thread, my mind jumped to something a bit more futuristic than the 1125 Rotax motor. Those who have ridden the 1125R say that with its 2,000 to 10,500 rpm range it gave the 1125R an "electric motor" like feel....so why not an electric motored Buell? Fortunately there are already some entrepreneurs and garage tinkerers out there who are building electric motorcycles. I'd like to see Erik Buell and his engineers spend some R&D dollars on electric and see if they can create a mass centralized high performing electric motorcycle. Here are some great links I found on electric motorcycles. check out the $5800 Super Motard http://electricmotorsport.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUXhJZZRUIg not to cool, but their heart is in the right place. http://www.hybridtechnologies.com/products/motorcy cles Cool bike demos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrFPMLAfs3s&eurl= http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMUVCeHCt9g&NR=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c8eLH8x_-Y&NR=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c8eLH8x_-Y&NR=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUXhJZZRUIg Permanent Magnet Motor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnRbF6eMSPU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Lnhs7caCo I'm certainly not going to electric convert my 2006 Ulysses, but the next time I see an old 1990's era sportbike with a good frame and a dead motor, I might think twice about buying it and converting it to electric over the winter! Enjoy. | ||
| Windrider |
I would love to see an electric Buell ! | ||
| Reepicheep |
After watching that "kilavolt" crash video, I did a little research on the batteries the guy was using. *Very* cool technology, and ready to be shipped to your door. So I did a little math, as there are more XR-650's then there are XR-650 motors (contrary to Honda official mythology, your average XR-650 motor is pretty much approaching toast at 15k to 25k miles, and if you don't rebuild it before it has a catastrophic failure, it's cheaper to buy a new bike then try and buy a new motor). Anyway, I dug a little into building an electric dirt bike. The short answer is that you could make something that is great fun for playing around in a field, but not a practical means of transportation. Heres the thumbnail sketch of the problem. Lets use my 1985 KLR-250 for a starting point... it will never be accused of being anything but anemic, but it actually is a very usable street and dirt bike. It makes 17 HP at the rear wheel on a *good* day. 17 HP is 12,665 watts. Oh my. Thats 1,055 *amps* from a 12 volt battery assembly. A lithium battery pack about the size of a cell phone is about 26 watt hours. So to run a motorcycle for just one hour with the amount of power my KLR-250 makes, you need 506 of these packs. For just an hour. And those packs are $80 each. Thats $40,000. And did I mention it will only run for an hour? And that it will take (at least) another hour to charge back up before you can ride it again? And that the life cyle of those batteries may be only a few years before you need another $40,000 pack? So the technology is very cool, and I look forward to it maturing to the point of being useful today, but for the time being, the combination of Gasoline (with its huge amount of energy stored) and internal combustion engines (with their reasonably effecient and highly cost effective chemical to mechanical energy conversion capabilities) are going to be *darn* hard to beat. Thats why the most credible hybrids still have gas motors in them (just crazy efficient ones). Gasoline is one hell of a good battery. | ||
| Reepicheep |
(note you could probably get the number of batteries down and the cost per cell down... that $80 was pure retail... but I think you are still looking at $10,000 worth of batteries to reproduce the power of a $500 dirt bike that already gets close to 60 mpg). |
