First electric bike I've come across!

[bikertomm]

This is confusing me....

Says has the power of a 250cc 4 stroke but can be used on a CBT?

What's the licensing laws on these things?

https://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Zero-S-Electric-Motorcycle-/280647798795?pt=UK_Motorcycles&hash=item4157e9900b




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07' Honda Hornet now full powaah! My guide on performing an oil change!

[pinkyfloyd]

Couldnt tell you but I wouldnt own one. For that price I can get myself a seriously good bike with change that will do more than this thing claims.

[bikertomm]

Me too, they definately haven't been out long enough yet.

I just found it pretty interesting/weird, so unpractical, to me doesn't look very nice, and looks quite cheap yet it is the opposite!


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07' Honda Hornet now full powaah! My guide on performing an oil change!

[Howling TerrorOutOfOffice]

The bike i can afford, the extension lead i can't.
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[Polarbear]

Comparable pwer to a 250 4 stroke. Bollox, I would be very pissed off if my 250 ninja did only 67mph.
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[Damon]

I'd very much like to stick a set of knobbilies on that and take it off road. Would make a mean enduro bike with its power delivery

Would last about 5 minutes before breaking though no doubt

[DrDonnyBrago]

I'd like to ride it, but I wouldn't pay even 10% of that to buy one.

[Rogerborg]

Hahaha, niiii.... hahah... niiiiii.... nine thousand pounds?

For something with the speed of a CBF125(*), less range than the tiddliest scooter(*), sod all parts availability, a dubious licensing category, oh, and good luck finding anyone who'll insure it or give you "breakdown" cover when you inevitably run out of charge.

The battery may be "rated at over 80% retained charge for 1000 full cycles", but unless that's a non-time-limited guarantee, then I'd expect to get one, maybe two winters' use out of it before it's junk(**).

£9000 for a disposable toy? I guess some ecomental veetard will snap it up though - probably tow it behind their G-Wiz, for when that runs out of charge.

(*) Here's the science. The battery claims a "nominal" 3.9kWh, and the bike claims 23bhp = 16kW. Let's do the maths! 3.9kWh / 16kW = .24375 hours at full whack. Call it 15 minutes. At 60mph, I make that a 15 mile round trip range, and that's their claim, not reality. So 30 miles round trip is probably achievable in town, but 50? Better hope the last leg is downhill.

(**) Replacement batteries currently cost $5000. Yes, that's the right number of zeros. The manufacturer "expects" costs to come down and capacity to go up. Well, sure, if they stay in business.
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GONE: HN125-8, LF-250B, GPz 305, GPZ 500S, Burgman 400 // RIDING: F650GS (800 twin), Royal Enfield Bullet Electra 500 AVL, Ninja 250R because racebike

[bikertomm]

[tahrey]

I'm with Roge and his mindreading powers - would have said it if he hadn't.

Electric power probably is the future (actually I'm with James May and saying Hydrogen as a renewably-generated energy storage medium), but we're not there yet. We're at about 1910 in terms of cost-to-capability ratio as compared to traditional ICEs.

Besides over more than 8 years of vehicle ownership, 3 cars and 1 bike, I'm not sure i've quite yet paid £9000 in fuel, or in purchase and servicing. (Would have said both them, but probably way over when combined) .... chance of saving any money on this vs a 125cc 2-stroke that would give it a run for its money if you shifted gears intelligently, and particularly in the first 2 seconds? Low. Chance of ended up stranded halfway home in the rain on a dark december evening before even getting to the shops for christmas needs because you forgot to plug in at work? High. Likelihood of DVLA signing it off as provisional / 125-license legal after reading the spec sheet? Zero. You can't ride something with >14hp with either of those, and this has 23. Even the GWiz was capped to 14hp because of the odd french laws that allow it to count as a 125 bike there thanks to its microcar status.

Nine grand on a bike... which still won't have the same acceleration as my £1000 2ndhand cage (itself costing ~£9500 new), runs out of puff in less time/distance than it takes said car to burn a gallon of fuel, can't go much quicker than it can in 2nd gear, and hardly any quicker than my actual 125 bike on the flat. Except the electric is probably hardlimited to not go anymuch over 68 even downhill, but the petrol one can nudge 80 on a big decline.

[iooi]

That must be real old tech they are selling....

[G]

Plenty of people are building DIY electric motorbike. Use some cheap batteries and you can get VERY cheap commuting through a town.

But no way I'd go for a new/performance version.

As for 90% efficient - maybe, but then however that electricity was generated will be far less efficient.

[tahrey]

Get me one with 11hp, can do 65mph or more, has at least a 50 mile range (= half a gallon of petrol in a 125... or not much more than a bottle of coke's worth) off a couple hours' charge (so I can ride to my dads, juice it back up over a cuppa and a chat, and get back home, or get to and from work with a detour to the shops / around an accident without having to plug in whilst there), and doesn't weigh any more/handle any worse than an equivalent petrol one, and will still be usable in 10 years without replacing the main power source outright... oh and costs less than £2000 to buy, or just £1 less over the course of its reasonable lifespan vs an equivalent petrol on purchase vs resale, general servicing/repair and fuel... then we'll talk.

How much are these home-made ones, and what sort of speed/range do you get out of them? I can commute across town very VERY cheaply by breaking out the pushbike and generating some muscle power after all, and manage 10+mph average even though i'm a chubby unfit bastard in a hilly town. Not sure how much CO2 that pumps out tho!

You're right though, you have to consider well-to-wheel or the equivalent (mine to wheel, etc). Even the storage device for your "fuel" itself is a heck of a lot more complex, expensive and environmentally damaging than just a metal box after all, and to get said fuel to you involves digging up, refining, burning some other power source (in the vast majority of cases*), heating up water til it undergoes a phase change to steam, using the expansion of said steam to push a generator round, chucking the electricity from that through a transformer, a multi-kilometre set of power cables, another 2-3 transformers, your domestic wiring, then probably yet another transformer or at least a rectifier to juice up the battery (doubt too many electric vehicle power systems use raw 230v AC connected directly to their batteries). That's, at best, another 90% efficiency, lowering the total to 81%. I haven't the specs on fossil burning power station efficiency, but I doubt it's that high, otherwise why not introduce the same technology in a miniaturised form to domestic hybrid vehicles and make an absolute killing? I bet a lot of the reason why electricity seems much cheaper than petrol is that they're not paying fuel duty on what they burn, as well as buying it in massive bulk (you don't measure a station sticking out megawatts - or, at least a couple thousand horsepower - in single-figure gallons-per-hour...). I wonder what the equivalent cost is for electric vs petrol in America? In Dubai?

Whereas for the direct fossil burn, you dig it up, refine it, put it on a similar-ish kind of transport system as some of it may take to get to the generating station (oil/gas may be pipelined but coal rides a train same as petrol rides a truck), dump it into a tank, then you siphon off a little into your own and burn it. The machinery you use to turn the chemical energy into forward energy is pretty much made as efficient as possible within the profit margins the manufacturer can accept (because of competition) which is nowhere near what it can ultimately achieve. That sort of thing was seen in the evolution of the steam car where stuff that was amazingly more efficient on fuel and water and far more practical for the everyday user was developed right at the death before ICEs killed them (it was still LESS efficient than them, but practically space-age vs a typical railway engine). Thing is, electrics have it easy because even a simple, insanely cheap motor is pretty efficient in of itself, so long as the electrons you supply it with are affordable and you haven't made a massive hash in the design and turn most of them into heat. And, once the development process is complete, something even more efficient like a brushless AC motor is quite cheap to produce thanks to electronic controllers and most of the materials being exactly the same, just arranged a slightly different and none too complex way.

* The big thing is being able to use renewably produced, or at least far more environmentally friendly (biomass, nuclear, etc) sources of electricity. You can't run your petrol engine on diesel, let alone uranium or tidal flow, but an electric (...or hydrogen fuelled) motor can effectively accept pretty much anything so long as you have a way of capturing electron charge out of it.

[Raffles]

Recently, whilst in San Diego, I noticed a lot of hype promoting this ugly, inefficient beast that has been developed by Siemens in collaboration with Orange County Choppers:-
https://www.psfk.com/2009/08/siemens-partners-with-orange-county-choppers-to-build-an-electric-motorcycle.html
The future's bright, the future's orange
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A good loser will always be a loser.

[tsmith]

now this is more like it
https://www.brammo.com/empulse/

[G]

tahrey: you can spend as much or as little as you want, results will obviously vary. Some people have done it pretty much free with blagged stuff, others spent a fair bit.

I was thinking I could quite reasonably convert an old frame I've got to do my 6.2 mile each way commute (max limit 40 apart from one tiny bit) and not spend too much short or long term.
Was thinking top speed around 45-50mph with a usable range of around 20 miles - giving me a chance to overtake if someone speeded up and to go the shops at lunch time.

However, I think push bike based electric bikes make a lot more sense. Of course, you do have to register them for any kind of sensible power.

[Polarbear]

[Rogerborg]

[G]

[dazarooney]

As with most the comments here, I wouldn't get that.
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Scooter Batteries

[tahrey]

The chopper thing ... no. It looks like a piece of medical equipment - rather fittingly, given that's one of Siemens' main money spinners after mains power generators (wonder why they're backing this, eh?). Will 27hp reliably get you over the ton, btw? My back-of-an-envelope maths suggest 26 should just about do it, but my figures are not at all scientific and it could be much more. Plus that still only gives like a 102mph absolute Vmax, IF the motor is geared to produce max power at max speed, rather than over-revving in the name of having greater off-the-line torque.

The Empulse would be "very yes", if it wasn't $10k just to get a 60-mile range (which you will NOT see at "100mph+!"... 50mph, MAYBE) model. That sort of money can get me a secondhand petrol bike with similar performance, a 120+ mile per tank range (with sub-5-minute "recharge"), and enough fuel for probably 70,000 miles or more. Will the batteries still be good after 1200 charge cycles? Still, it is at least within reach of the slightly extravagant early adopter, as opposed to the $100k+ Tesla Roadster.


G: Who exactly would I be cadging a high powered electric motor (stronger than anything you can plug into 2-phase mains, if you actually want to achieve 40mph on the flat) and a rake of batteries off, plus charging and power control circuitry? I can't see it being cheap to be perfectly frank. We're straight through Robot Wars territory and out the other side. The only thing I can really think of is ganging 3 or 4 car starter motors together or something, to get up to 50?
(I have a feeling you have to either be american, preferably rural, or have decent connections to agriculture or industry/motor trade ... which I don't. You might, I guess!)

Particularly I wonder if it's worth it - other than for curiosity's sake of course where the answer is definitely "yes!" - when it still won't cost more than about 50p each day doing a 20km round trip on a C90-equivalent. Or about £100 over a working year.


The pushbike ones are interesting but won't offer anything like the performance you're after, unless you're a full olympic / TdF class bike athlete and just want something to help you maintain 10-15mph up even the nastiest hill. I didn't find me dad's ones ever so difficult to control once you got over their quirk of not feeding the power in unless you were already doing at least 1-2mph (presume there's legal reasons involved as well as avoiding motor burn-out). They were just a bit weak, enough so that the motor didn't really make up for the heavy communist, almost victorian cast-iron-and-rivets engineering of the frame, and the range was bobbins. He lived in an isolated ex-farmhouse about 8 miles from Corby at the time and the bloody thing didn't even last a round trip into town. Had to really ration the power as the worst bit was the last half mile uphill to the house itself.
The pedalling-detection ones (ie you can't just mooch along at 10mph feet-off) may be a different story, i do wonder even how they work...


Rogerborg - I share your concern but your figures are a little off. 10kW should get you to 70mph easy if not a little more (11kW probably nudges 75mph) - at least I hope so, seeing as I have about 8kW and can make 60-65mph. If a C90 will just about hit 50mph and chucks out approx 7.5hp peak (but, the gearing has quite a bit of overdrive, so it's probably more like 6.5-7hp), then we're looking more in the 5 - 5.5kW range instead. Which will punt you along quite nicely if the motor's got reasonable torque, given the gearing you'll have to subject it to.

If we assume that you can be flat out for the entire ride as a safety measure (won't be, given the description, but more range is always better than less), plus a 50% fudge factor (further safety, plus it puts less wear on the batteries and accounts for them ageing, temperature, charging faults), that's:

20 miles at 50mph = 24 minutes again = 0.4 hour x 5.5kW = 2.2kWh, x 1.5 = approx 3.3kWh required.
(In an emergency you could probably drag 40+ miles out of them if you kept it down to 35mph, or ~2.5kW)

Doesn't sound like a lot... But it is a 2-bar heater for a little under 2 hours. Or a 100w bulb for 33h... an 11w one for 300h. A far cry from the typical bike battery that's dead in an hour after being left with 60w of lights burning away on a stalled engine.

My laptop battery at last check was rougly 5Ah at 11v, or 55wH. You'd need 60 of them, all fresh and brand new, if you wanted it lithium-ion powered (and so only weigh about 30-40kg to replace the missing fuel tank & transmission plus the part of the engine not covered by the electric motor). Last I looked, I couldn't do much better than £50-60 for a new one, from a slightly hooky looking website - OEM was twice that. So, that's three grand's worth of batteries already. OR you do it with lead acid cells (bike battery's about 4Ah, right? At a little over 12v when under load? So 48wH energy capacity, about the same as my laptop one but considerably larger and heavier) and suck up the weight and bulk. More so if you have to accept a capacity/lifespan cut in order to get them cheap.

If it was requiring 10kW to do it, the proposition would be just silly without either a commercial production line or outright theft being involved. 5kW is vaguely doable if you know the right people, but you'll still straddle the line of expensive vs huge.

A 5kW electric motor at least won't be humongous, but they're not things that people just happen to have lying around. That's definitely "industrial equipment" territory, unless you know a scrappie who'll do you a job lot of starters on the cheap.


ANYWAY. We are happily rushing headlong into the future. We're now looking at batteries based on Aerogel and the like which have insane charge/discharge rates and pretty good storage capacity. Things can only get better. It's just that they're not better YET. My hat's still in the hydrogen ring until said megabatteries come along. It's pretty much liquid electricity... generate it from almost anything, put it in a pressure vessel with set of particular membranes, harvest electrons for motors and circuits.