How much!!!

 

Yeah and I thought Energica’s were crazy money.

 

Should sell well in France. I guess many people there will want a powerful Verge.

 

Only dicks would want those

 

Hub-less rear wheel design is pretty trick you have to admit. They’ve stuffed it with a fairly whopping battery for a bike too. Not solid-state like that new Ducati though 😎

 

That, and the treatment of the HV wiring is super cool - very EV, unique...

 

That, and the treatment of the HV wiring is ....

.... potentially dangerous.

Not sure they will get away with that in homologation.

What happens in a crash?

 

That wheel makes it simple to lock up at least. Thinking about it if you forgot to unlock could it sit there doing a wheel spin!?

 

Easier to lock to something, yes.

But harder to use a lock that stops the rear wheel spinning. Which seems to be a common physical security approach for bikes.

 

Marks Travels channel on YouTube, took one from Switzerland back to Estonia, via UK (North of Scotland) and Eire.

 

Where do you fit a top-box?

 

They appear to be going out to locations to offer test rides (if not in London), so I threw in my postcode if they are coming this way it'd be rude not to go take a look at one.

Maybe next year, when I come in to money, see what is on the market but worth knowing where the tech is and what's available.

 

It’s strong money for the ‘tech’ though. Looks like it’s running an ordinary NMC chemistry battery, so ~22kWh ish might be quite heavy in the frame.

I should be a stand up advocate for e-bikes… but somehow I’m eternally disappointed by every implementation I’ve sampled and I just love petrol bikes and have done since I was a youngster.

Anyhow. Better get ready for the lynch mob / stoning squad 😂

 

Thanks for that but I’m not really in the market for another bike as I have more than enough already and selling just doesn’t ever seem to be an option. Coupled with that, my useage is fairly limited theee days, getting out for an hour or so once or twice a week on sunny days.

I do like the Z900RS but can’t justify spending and extra £4-5k over the value of my XJR, £40+k would be beyond comprehension to me even if I had the disposable income to hand.

I’m certainly not against admiring the bike and respecting those that do support the company and buy the bike; I fully expect to see bikes with similar technologies at considerably lower price points in the future largely because of what this company and its customers are doing today.

 

Well, not really. It's a few years ago now, but I ran the Homologation Department at Honda UK for several years and whatever testing was required would have been done.

.... which is 'no crash testing' ....

To head off any criticism of "oh the unsprung weight, the horror", have you ever weighed the rear end of a shaft drive motorcycle?

Ironically, like david,

... my 2005 XJR1300.

I had a FJR13, which I weighed on scales

135kg rear, 130kg front.

Heavy bike. That's pretty much what a 20kWh bike will come in at.

Too heavy for my taste, TBH. I sold it because a bike should be 'an occasion' when you wheel it out, not 'a fight with gravity'!

I fear for the future of electric bikes because to get range they either have to have large batteries, which makes them heavy, or rapid charging, which means high voltages which means large batteries which means .... etc..

A 7~8 kWh battery is 160~170kg, which is fine and would get you 100 miles so long as you don't go over 50~60mph.

This is about the ideal, but means a slower world of riding. TBH, for me, I don't mind. Everything is slowed down on the roads, and too easy to get speeding tickets, but it makes motorways a bit of a chore when it gets slower than 60ish, you need to be able to get past trucks, at least.

As soon as you want to go 100 miles at motorway speeds, you need to add more battery, which adds weight, which reduces efficiency, which adds more weight, which reduces efficiency, so you end up with these super heavy electric bikes.

Battery cell's kg/kWh have barely improved in 10 years. The density, L/kWh, has dropped, which is good for cramming batteries into smaller cars, but it is weight that is the bike's problem.

If LiS ever becomes a reality then it will finally make electric bikes 'a real thing'. Until then, with current battery tech, they are either short range/slow urban runabouts or heavy cruisers.

 

.... which is 'no crash testing' ....

Battery cell's kg/kWh have barely improved in 10 years. The density, L/kWh, has dropped, which is good for cramming batteries into smaller cars, but it is weight that is the bike's problem.

First of all, the testing I referred to is to prove conformance with regulations although in the case of Honda with the Gold Wing, also actual crash testing as they developed the air bag for it.

Motorcycle crash testing is in any case largely superfluous as in an accident the rider is usually separated from the bike so how the bike then behaves is irrelevant from the point of view of rider injuries. Those are more dependent on clothing worn and for leathers and other safety gear, actual crash testing would be a necessity and in the case of helmets, strictly controlled and certified.

Battery energy density, i.e. per weight and per volume is all rapidly increasing. Where did you get the idea it is not. Density is almost always quoted in Watt hours per kilogram and has risen by at least a third in that time to well over 200 Wh/kg, with manufacturers like CATL (not known for lying) claiming I think 300 Wh/kg to soon be available. Meanwhile lab testing continues to promise twice that. There is never any mention of wH/Litre that I've come across.

Besides which, energy density by weight and by volume tend to go hand in hand. More Wh/kg will also mean more Wh/l. What they do with that increased density is another matter. IMO trying to achieve huge range is counter productive when other factors mean we need to take a break in a journey. Fast charging then becomes critical so we can obtain all the charge we need while we take that break.

Whatever the energy density, it is far harder to package it into a motorcycle than a car so electric motorcycles will always suffer greater compromise - until micro fusion reactors become a thing.

If I was to take another European tour, I would take an ICE bike, but apart from that, pretty much all my riding could be catered for by what e.g. the Verge provides in terms of range.

Any EV has shortcomings. If for whatever reason you want to drive electric, you simply learn to deal with those shortcomings. If you're sitting on the fence (or anti EV) then those shortcomings can (will) be a deal breaker. It all depends on what you want to achieve.

 

Tech Specs;-

FWIW, I just checked my most powerful bike in the garage and it has a total reduction gearing to the wheel of 0.07 (i.e. each 1000 revolutions of the engine is 72 revolutions of the wheel.

Peak engine torque of 80Nm. So peak rear wheel torque is 80 Nm/0.07 = 1140 Nm.

Electric motors tend to deliver maximum torque at low speed and at peak V/Hz they ramp off. As the peak power of this bike is given as 150kW so that implies peak V/Hz (i.e. the highest speed at which 1000Nm is delivered) is 150 rad/s = 86k revolutions per hour = 192km/hr = 120mph.

So, either this bike has torque limited at lower speeds (and actually much higher 'is possible', but dangerous so not mapped; at something a bit past 1000Nm a typical bike ~1.4m wheelbase will do prompt wheelies or burnouts if not a wheelie) or it delivers its full torque to near top speed, and could probably go a lot faster.

I'd expect a bike of this sort with 150kW to be able to do (let's say 'at least') 165mph, so I think perhaps both the torque and the speed are limited.

I don't know the bearing design, I expect its top speed is limited and to do with some engineering feature, like that (the larger the bearing, the slower the peak speed .. think of how fast bearing elements have to roll/slide/spin if they are way out at a radius, than right in the middle).

 

Speed would be limited by the fact that it's essentially a single speed gearbox.

 

On the contrary, my point was that the V/Hz is only just maxed. That is to say, it only just reached a point where it needed any field weakening.

Most PM motors need to start field weakening half way through their speed range.

The data might not be right, but I don't see any reason it could not run faster for electrical reasons. So I assume the speed limit is a mechanical design reason.

If it was (say) a 48 pole 3ph motor (I'd have a guess at, most larger hub motors are that sort of design), then it would be switching 16 times a rotation at 24 rotations/s, around 380 Hz. This is bog standard for 440 Hz industrial inverters, it is 'bread and butter'. 40 times fundamental for the PWM switching brings losses down to virtually nothing, so a mere 20 kHz inverter would have that thing spinning over 150mph.

That's the thing about direct drive, it doesn't take much to get it spinning up to speed. If it went through a x5 reduction ratio (like most EVs, something like 10,000 rpm motor with the wheel going at 40cps) then it has to be switching over 100kHz and things start getting more tricky.

 

The video appears to show a 24/20 motor. So, a mere 300 Hz 3ph sine wave (needing no more than a 15 kHz bridge frequency) would get that sucker up to 168 mph.

I can't see/guess how the bearings work from that image.

 

@uekengb, I think your maths must be wrong re the LEAF battery. By your reckoning, the original 24kwhr battery weighed 3 tonnes.
That can’t be right surely?