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News Archive
Monday, May 30, 2005
The coming of the electric motorcycle
News from Gizmag.com
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.
Read the full article...
Sunday, May 29, 2005
Electric Go-Karts
Not news really, just a link to a new electric Go carts website:
http://www.kartelec.com/
It's very French, but it's got some great info.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
Segways at the May 2005 Meeting
Large video files alert: Learning to drive a Segway has video clips from the May 2005 OEVA meeting.
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Electric Cars Keep Rolling
News from Red Herring
Hybrids may be all the rage, but some still long for all-electric cars. And a few companies hope to capitalize on a technology that just won’t die.
With 52 batteries strapped inside their “e=motion” car, Mark Newby and Colin Fallows dream of doing something nobody has ever done before: driving an all-electric car from zero to more than 300 mph.
It’s an ambitious pursuit. The standing record is 245 mph for electric cars weighing more than 2,200 pounds that started from a dead stop, although a team from Ohio State University got to 314.8 mph last year with a push start.
Unfortunately, battery problems and high winds on the Nevada desert delayed attempts by the e=motion team on Thursday, and again on Friday.
As they waited for another chance, their quest became an unintentional emblem of the frustrating setbacks faced by supporters of all-electric vehicles for more than a century.
While many view electric cars as old—even dead—technology, they still have adamant fans. And now, some companies are hoping to capitalize on the loyalty of those consumers.
“People love the feeling of driving electric cars because it’s clean and you don’t feel bad about having fun in your car,” said Alex Campbell, director of communications at Santa Rosa, California-based Zap. His company has become a kind of trading post for electric vehicles.
It also sells electric scooters and is trying to import DaimlerChrysler’s tiny European Smart Car. But Zap has yet to make a profit.
Electric cars like the “e=motion” have been spurned twice. They were invented in the 19th century, but cheaper gasoline cars and low gasoline prices made them obsolete by the 1930s. They found limited use, such as with the U.S. Postal Service, in the 1970s, and were revived again in the 1990s.
Read the full article...
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Giving Hybrids a Real Jolt
News from BusinessWeek
by John Carey
A plug-in gas-electric vehicle may be key in saving fuel and cutting pollution.
Is there a car that can cut America's oil imports to a trickle, dramatically reduce pollution, and do it all with currently available technology? Greg Hanssen thinks so. His company has already built one such car -- a converted Toyota Prius that gets 100 to 180 mpg in a typical commute. Andrew A. Frank thinks so, too. The University of California at Davis professor has constructed a handful of such vehicles. His latest: a converted 325-horsepower Ford Explorer that goes 50 miles using no gas at all, then gets 30 mpg. "It goes like a rocket," he says.
These vehicles are quickly becoming the darlings of strange bedfellows: both conservative hawks and environmentalists, who see such fuel efficiency as key to ensuring national security and fighting climate change. Reducing dependence on the turbulent Middle East "is a war issue," says former CIA Chief R. James Woolsey, who calls the cars' potential "phenomenal."
What's the secret? It's as simple as adding more batteries and a plug to hybrids such as the Prius. That way, the batteries can be charged up at any electrical outlet -- letting this so-called plug-in hybrid travel 20 to 60 miles under electric power alone. Since most Americans drive fewer than 30 miles a day, such a car could go months without visiting the filling station. "The only time you would have to gas up is when you go out of town," says Felix Kramer, who founded the nonprofit California Cars Initiative to promote plug-ins. Run the internal combustion engine on a blend of gasoline and biofuels like ethanol, and it would use almost no oil products at all. "That changes the world," says Frank J. Gaffney Jr., president of the Center for Security Policy.
Professor Frank, 72, first began thinking about a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) years ago. "But now all the pieces are here," he says. Toyota Motor Corp. (TM ) has solved the big engineering problems with the Prius, so "it's a trivial matter to make a plug-in," says Joseph J. Romm, a former Energy Dept official. Greg Hanssen and his colleagues at EnergyCS, for example, replaced the Prius' existing 1.3-kilowatt-hour nickel metal hydride battery with an advanced 9-kWh lithium ion battery pack. They hope to offer a conversion kit to Prius owners. The weight penalty? About 170 pounds.
Car owners might not want to try this at home. Such a conversion will probably void Toyota's warranty. But big companies are building their own vehicles. In a project sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), several utilities, government agencies, and DaimlerChrysler (DCX ), the carmaker is building a fleet of up to 40 PHEV delivery vans.
Read the full article...
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