A Bit Shocking!
30/11/09
At the 2009 NEC motorcycle show it was very apparent that several companies are considering electric traction for two-wheeler propulsion. The 2009 TTx GP, which saw electrically powered motorcycles doing a lap of the Isle of Man’s 37 mile TT circuit at an average speed of nearly 90 mph, seems to have tipped things to a point where some companies are willing to risk dipping a toe in the market. Vectrix, an American operation out of Rhode Island, demonstrated electric scooters a few years ago at the NEC and had a well finished, refined product that was very compelling as a commuter solution, except for its price tag of nearly £7000. BMW learned the hard way that the scooter market is very price-sensitive when it introduced the C1, the rotax-engined scooter-with-a-roof. Vectrix have subsequently gone bankrupt but aren’t quite dead, in much the same manner as General Motors. Intriguingly, BMW have recently strapped the Vectrix driveline into their C1 and are in the process of launching the C1-E although it wasn’t at the show.
Electricycle have two primary products with two different types of battery. Both are scooters in the Vectrix mould, but are lighter, simpler and not such strong performers. They are, however, relatively cheap at a shade under £4000 although still not really adequate to use as inter-city transport. Danny Tendler, an earnest Canadian, explains that the base scooters come from China but are modified for charge balancing and motor control in the EU.
Ecolve, a London-based outfit have similar scooter offerings and a prototype sports bike they call “bolt”. They claim, somewhat ambitiously in my opinion, that this 15 kW machine will do 150 mph and appear not to have heard of aerodynamic drag. Apparently another company has tested a bike using similar running gear and Alex Herman, a chirpy cockney, assures me they have achieved 160 mph. I can’t help thinking this other company might have meant 160 kph, which sounds much more plausible on 15 kW – 20 horsepower in old money.
Nevertheless, despite the chicanery and the unknown build quality for these largely Chinese offerings (Vectrix are the exception, building their bikes in Wroclaw in Poland) I can’t help thinking that electric power is a good thing for motorcycles. Electric vehicles I’ve driven, including the Vectrix and the Tesla Roadster, have terrifically sharp ‘throttle’ response and this makes for superb “performance feel”. Indeed, one of the cheap tricks that Dynojet pull is to take out some of the smoothing from the manufacturer’s calibration to make the engine feel much more perky than previously, which is why satisfied customers report enormous increases in perceived performance for very small dynamometer gains. Recent hardware with switchable engine mapping, such as the BMW S1000RR, gives aggressive throttle response that has no doubt taken a lot of development to achieve; electric traction delivers it for free.
If the electricity comes from a clean and renewable source then electric traction is part of the solution, but we need not to kid ourselves that it’s “zero emission” at the moment when we’re still burning coal and gas to make electricity. Some people also have reservations about the consequence of retrieving large quantities of lithium for batteries, which seems to bear some thinking about. As for me, I think that electricity as an energy storage and delivery medium is not a bad step to make, as it will decouple transport from primary energy production.
Jeremy Clarkson, however, disagrees. Instead of engaging in a debate about the facts, though, his primary tactic seems to be to construct ridiculous things out of old milk floats, then compare them to ridiculous products like the G-Whizz, and conclude the whole thing is ridiculous. It looks to me like he has an agenda to make the Sun-reading majority embarrassed to consider electric traction.
Good for him!
Words: Damian Harty
