Electric Superbike is on the way
from Urban Transport (156 articles)
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Image Gallery ( 17 images )“It depends on what we use and we have some calculating to do before we finalise the first cut of this bike. We are in the infancy of electric vehicles.
“Right now, people look beyond the nearest powerpoint and they don’t know how they will refill an electric motorcycle quickly and efficiently. There are a few but not many hydrogen fuel stations to recharge the fuel cell so it looks kinda barren out there for keeping an electric or fuel cell vehicle mobile, but that will change. I can imagine that the very same thing happened 100 years ago – you can imagine people looking at the first gasoline-powered cars and saying, “ah, it might be alright for downtown, but if you want to go any distance, you need a horse.”
So fuel cells are an option?
There’s every chance we could have a fuel cell on board so that can be topped up without needing to get to an electrical outlet.
“I think in the beginning when the rMOTO is first shown to the market and we’re still in the experimental phase, we’ll see nickel metal hydride batteries. I think at this stage they will be the first batteries we use, but things are happening so rapidly. Working with our partners at Vectrix we’ve seen new technologies that are two-thirds the weight and equal power and less price than what we were using a year ago.
“As a designer and trying to imagine where I can extrapolate this technology, is to build a vehicle like this rMOTO that we can initially we’ll probably put Nickel metal hydrides and then we’ll probably put lithium ion batteries and then who knows what we’ll use in a year or two or three – each time we change the power is going up and the cost and the weight is going down.
“I’d love to see this bike have a consumer version that will get you 100mph and an evening of running around downtown and then there’ll be a version of this thing that’s going to be the exotic superbike and that might have a limited production custom lithium ion batteries and we might see the horsepower of such a motorcycle going off the charts – you could see the Exotic rMOTO running incredible lap times at motorcycle races showcasing the power available from intelligent electronic design.
“I could easily see a fuel cell being used in the RMOTO – it depends on how exotic we want to be – the Vectrix scooter that comes out in the spring of next year is an all electric vehicle but hot on its heels is the fuel cell version. And those things are being worked on today – right now
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