The coming of the electric motorcycle

from Motorcycles (334 articles)

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The petrol-engined Derbi on the racetrack

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May 31, 2005 Electric motorcycles are in their infancy but there’s a realistic promise of electric motor performance that is more suited for the racetrack than that of internal combustion engines and infinitely better suited for the road. As the first electric bikes find their way onto racetracks and begin mixing it with two and four strokes, it appears you need three times the horsepower in a gas-powered motor to get a bike as fast as an electric bike. And then there’s the new 500bhp 67 Kg Symetron electric motor which should really kickstart performance electric automobiles and bikes. Personal electric vehicles have always struggled to capture the attention of the masses. While electric vehicles held their own in the early years of motoring and indeed held the land speed record for a time, battery technology was simply not ready and electric vehicles eventually perished against the power and range of vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine, not to mention Henry Ford’s cost efficient mass production techniques.

In the early years, mobility was the unique proposition which drove sales of all automotbiles but as penetration rose to the point where most people had a car, mass marketing was called upon to stimulate demand and since that time, automobiles and motorcycles have been largely sold on emotion.

Most registered road-going conveyances can do at least twice the speed they are legally allowed to do, and there’s a growing percentage that can triple the speed limit. For motorcycles, that percentage is much greater than with cars.

A high performance internal combustion engine snarls and growls and appeals to base emotions. Electric motors don’t snarl. In their most familiar form they drive rather than power a range of domestic appliances we do not equate with passion or brute force - electric toothbrushes and carving knives, hedge trimmers, can openers, screw drivers and, heaven forbid, dentists drills.

Despite a rash of high performance fuel cell, hybrid and electric prototype show cars from Honda, Toyota and Mitsubishi designed to promise the future, electric power is still largely regarded as the domain of tree huggers and greenies and the radical left. Performance electric cars are seen as at worst fictional, and at best, rare and expensive and they are not made by Ferrari, McLaren, Lamborghini, Koenigsegg or Bugatti. No-one would sell the children to buy one.

Which leaves a rather large gap in the market, because the time is already here when electric motors can “do the business.”

Brutally powerful electric motors are already here

Raser Technologies, a technology licensing company that develops and licenses advanced electric motor, controller and related technologies, released independent test results last month at the Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress in Detroit that measured the combined effectiveness of its P2 Symetron motor and controller technology working together as a drive system.

The test was at an independent dynamometer testing facility in Detroit and showed that a Symetron P2 motor driven by a matching Symetron controller consistently delivered more than 420 ft-lbs of torque on numerous test runs. In each test run more than 420 ft-lbs of torque was measured for a minimum duration of 60 seconds.

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