A team member from our HydroSense project sent along a link to this article, Start-ups are racing to get electric motorbikes to market, in the LA Times. He has a contact at Mission Motors, who is featured in the article. Mission Motors just recently unveiled a prototype (pictured above) for its 150-mph, 150-mile-range electric motorcycle at the TED conference in Long Beach last month.
Highlights from the LA Times article:
The Electric Motorcycle Scene
Since 2007, when Vectrix of Middletown, R.I., first rode onto the scene with its battery-powered Maxi Scooter, a growing number of U.S. start-ups have entered the plug-in two-wheeler market. They’ve invested millions of dollars in vehicles, many of which are poised for production within a year. Honda and Yamaha have said they’ll be coming out with electric motorcycles in two years. Though a rapidly deteriorating global economy and relatively low gasoline prices may not seem like ideal conditions for launching or ramping up a company in an unproven field, many of the two-wheeled-EV start-ups say they have benefited from it. Craig Bramscher of Brammo Motorsports in Ashland, Ore., says he raised $10 million in venture capital last year — all of it after the financial system froze up in September.
Why Electricity?
“It’s amazing how inefficient the vehicles we’re driving today really are,” said Forrest North, founder and chief executive of Mission Motor Co., a San Francisco company that unveiled the prototype for its 150-mph, 150-mile-range electric motorcycle at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference in Long Beach last month. “Electricity is just so many orders of magnitude more efficient that it’s the only way to go,” said North, a former mechanical designer for Tesla and leader of Stanford University’s solar car team in the mid-1990s.
Like many EV entrepreneurs, North, 33, had looked into hydrogen and biodiesel as power sources but found them impractical. Hydrogen is abundant, but turning it into fuel and developing a distribution infrastructure are costly. Biodiesel can take more energy to produce than it generates.
With electricity, the infrastructure already exists: Electrical outlets are abundant. Battery technology is also improving about 8% each year, North said, allowing bikes to easily upgrade once the chemistry comes along. Already, electric two-wheelers get the equivalent of about 300 to 500 miles per gallon. As technologies improve, they’ll be able to generate even more energy with less weight and cost.
The Price?
Most currently available production electric two-wheelers cost less than $10,000. Vectrix was the first company to manufacture a production electric two-wheeler. Since introducing its $11,000, 62-mph Maxi Scooter in August 2007. This spring Vectrix will roll out a third scooter model, the $5,195, 30-mph VX-2. Zero was the second manufacturer, after Vectrix, to make a production electric two-wheeler. Founded by Saiki, a former NASA engineer, and funded in part by former Sun Microsystems executive Gene Banman, who now serves as Zero’s CEO, the company has sold 200 of its $7,500 Zero X models — an off-road electric motorcycle with a 50-mph maximum speed and 40-mile range off a single charge. Brammo’s Enertia claims a top speed of 50 mph, a 35- to 45-mile range on a single charge of its lithium-ion battery pack and a $8,995-to-$14,995 price tag. The cheapest version reflects a battery-lease program that reduces the bike’s cost, bringing it more in line with similar, gas-propelled products.
