Well, as long as we're on the subject of electrics, here's a new one from Brutus Electric Motorcycles. This one has a lot less of the enviro-geek look we see too much of and instead appears to be a massaged and somewhat portly Ducati Monster. Yes, it could be cleaned up a little, but it actually looks pretty cool.
The DC motor runs on lithium polymer batteries and sends power through a 5 speed gearbox. The bike has a 100+ mile range when ridden aggressively according to builder, Chris Bell.
The bike shown here is Brutus 2, the second iteration of the design and it looks to be pretty nicely done. Interesting.
Link: Brutus Electric Motorcycles via Autobloggreen
Videos below:
Brutus 2 on the road
Brutus 1 first coming to life
Tin Man 2 says
Nice to see a”normal”looking electric bike, get rid of the “Rocker”style rear fender treatment and you have a good looking bike. Many will argue the need for a gear box on an electric bike, but a good part of the riding expierence comes from using the gear box. If you ever want a product to be successfull, you need to make it desirable to the people with the money to buy it.
kim says
‘Normal looking’? Maybe on your planet, but not on this one. It reminds me of the Vorta,, successor to the ill-fated Hesketh, That said, I do actually like the neobrutal style.
kim says
That was ‘Vortan’, not ‘Vorta’….
Les says
I’m reminded of the Ducati Diavel, which seems to be selling ok.
It looks like it has decent ergos (to this naked sport bike lover) except maybe for the low bucket seat and wide frame. To my eye the rake looks really steep for what I’ll call a cruiser.
I hope this bike has another design stage to go through. It’s currently full of eye sores. The fenders, the engine cover, the clutch casing… even the frame looks strange. My OCD demands one more triangular spar up near the head.
WestOfBen says
Good to see another leccy bike. The design is not quite cohesive enough for me though. It needs to decide whether it is a Ducati Monster or an Indian cruiser and stick with that.
B50 Jim says
I agree with Les. The tractor seat doesn’t go with the sportbike vibe, and the rear fender would look better on a Victory. And some extra triangulation would stiffen the frame considerably. Still, this is a good first effort, and 100 miles of range under aggressive riding (how else?) is pretty good. That would translate to about 150 miles under conservative riding, which makes it highly practical for everything but long-distance hauling. I applaud Brutus for building an electric that doesn’t look like one. The transmission might be superfluous but that’s what riders like, so with proper engineering a gearbox can make the bike even more efficient, plus provide tire-smoking acceleration for riders who don’t mind burning a lot of electrons. With more development, this will be a solid, viable bike that will easily compete with the increasing number of e-bikes that are sure to roll out of the factories.
todd says
A transmission makes plenty of sense on any type of motor. Any time you can add mechanical advantage, take it. Lower gear ratios create greater torque at the rear wheel for greater acceleration while the higher ratios allow higher overall speeds. What’s not to like?
I’m not here to critique styling.
-todd
BoxerFanatic says
An electric motor makes full available torque from nearly Zero RPMs up.
Maybe an overdrive gear to lower the electric motor’s rpms and current draw at higher road speeds, but electric motors are not the same sort of animal as an internal combustion engine.
And the weak link in any electric drivetrain, is storing the electricity, not the motor that uses the electricity.
Unless you can harness a bolt of lightning like Doc Brown, electricity is a transitory power format, it is generated somewhere, for use somewhere else, or stored temporarily in a capacitance device.
But capacitance devices are not more energy dense, in terms of energy potential per pound of weight, they suck in terms of charge cycle time, and finite lifespan.
You can fill an empty fuel tank in just a few minutes, it only weighs a few pounds in motorcycle terms, and it has more energy potential, and thus range, than electricity, even considering internal combustion’s thermal inefficiency wasting much of the chemical energy in the fuel, as waste heat.
A battery of acceptable capacitance tends to weigh ten times as much. (compare Lotus Elise fuel tank, full of fuel, compared to Tesla Model S’s 900lb battery assembly, that takes hours to charge, and has lower range.) And it is still powered by an off-site power plant, and transmitted over lossy power grid infrastructure.
There is no free lunch, and the back end of electric motivation is much worse than the performance aspects of an electric motor itself, which is actually pretty good, considered all by itself. But one can’t just ignore the rest of the system.
Fred M. says
No, a multi-speed transmission does not “make plenty of sense” on an electric motor. You may “feel” like it does, or your gut may tell you that it doe, but it still does not (except from a marketing standpoint, as you’ve demonstrated).
When the 2011 Isle of Man electric TT race is won two years in a row by a single speed, cost-is-no object electric bike (the MotoCzysc TTZERO) it’s rather obvious that a multi-gear transmission does not “make plenty of sense” on an electric motorcycle. Further showing that is that the bike had trap speeds of 149+mph and, according to the rider, was at half throttle to conserve the batteries.
What’s not to like:
1. Weight
2. Frictional losses
3. Losses from accelerating the masses of the gears.
4. Clutch wear
5. Loss of acceleration while the clutch is in.
6. Additional failure potential.
7. Additional bearings and bushings that will wear and/or fail.
If you’re going to ask what’s wrong with a 5 speed transmission on an electric motorcycle, I’ll ask you what’s wrong with a 27 speed transmission on a conventional motorcycle. Bicycles have that many gears, so why not have that many on a motorcycle?
todd says
because bicycles have full torque at zero RPM just like an electric motor.
Full torque at the motor is not the same thing as full torque at the rear wheel. Zero RPM = zero MPH. People keep forgetting that force (torque) is not power. If you want power you need to apply that force at a rate. If you can give that force leverage it can do more work.
A conventional motorcycle has zero torque at zero RPM. When was the last time you tried to ride away with the motor spinning at zero RPM? Chances are you fed out the clutch at around 4,000 RPM, close to the lower edges of the engine’s max torque RPM. You accelerate not because you are applying more torque as the engine climbs the tach but because you are making more power. you can reduce the engine torque (gas, electric, or your legs) yet still have more power by using the revs. You do that be reducing the gear ratio.
Multi-ratio gear boxes on electric vehicles is not marketing hype. I have dyno results and road time to prove otherwise.
-todd
BoxerFanatic says
Force is also not work.
A force can be applied, without work being done.
Torque can be applied, without moving something, if the resistance is greater than the force input. If any component parts are weaker than the force, they break.
Work would be said torque application moving the object a measurable distance. Power would be computed by how FAST it moved the object over the distance, introducing time as an element.
A transmission, which is a set of one or many gear ratios, can change force into power, by mechanical advantage. That doesn’t; make it necessary to do so, if the power source doesn’t require it.
Bicycles are human powered, and human legs have a finite amount of torque they can apply through a gear ratio to the tire. Leg power may be able to exert maximum torque at zero RPM, but that doesn’t mean that the maximum torque is all that much, or that a human can produce enough of it to overcome significant drag, resistance, or mechanical dis-advantage. There is also a finite speed at which a human leg can anatomically move, which is narrower than most engine or motor RPM ranges, thus requiring many more gear ratios than most cars have.
Electric motors become less efficient electrically (more current draw per ft.lb of torque output) at high rotational speeds. Some cars, like Tesla Roadster, do have a taller gear to lower motor rotational speed at higher road speed. Some like Chevy Volt have a sprag clutch that engages the internal combustion engine at high road speeds, at a direct drive, or slight over-drive ratio, because an ICE is more efficient at those engine and road speeds, than draining batteries at high C rates, diminishing their range, and their useful life, or overheating the cells with too fast a discharge rate.
Just because a transmission CAN be placed between an electric motor and a wheel, doesn’t mean it is necessary, and the fact that it works, is only due to an electric motor’s flat torque curve over a wide RPM range, regardless of other technical conditions.
Lots of torque and wide RPM range makes ratios redundant. Low torque requires ratios that convert power to torque, and narrow RPM ranges require more ratios to achieve a wide range of road speeds.
Eddy Current says
In electric motors torque is proportional to ampere draw, the higher the torque the motor is putting out the more amps it draws. Electric motors have a wider power band than do internal combustion engines but that power band where the motor is efficient is not infinite, get an electric motor out of its power band and push it hard and it makes a great electric heater and sometime universal obscurant generator, I learned this racing electric RC cars, just a fairly minor change in gearing could make the difference between a hard running car and a quite literally smoking motor.
The number of gears you need with any given vehicle is related to the power to weight ratio and the power band of the motivating device, humans have a very low power to weight ratio (~ 150 lbs/horsepower) and a very narrow power band (60 to 150 or so rpm at the crankset) so require many gears to maximize the utilization of a limited resource.
It is true that electric motors make peak torque at zero rpm, however an electric motor, or any motor for that matter, makes zero power at zero rpm which means that the efficiency of the motor at zero rpm is also zero no matter how much torque it might be generating. If your motor spends a lot of time near zero rpm trying to accelerate the vehicle through a low numerical final drive then it’s going to operate out of its efficient range a lot and use a lot of the very limited amp hours available from the batteries just to heat up. A selectable higher numerical final drive (aka gearbox) can help keep the amp draw down to a reasonable level at low speeds.
An electric vehicle with a low power to weight ratio will benefit from having multiple gears, as the power to weight ratio rises the number of gears needed for relatively efficient normal operating becomes less, at some fairly high p/w ratio the number of gears needed becomes one.
The electric bicycle that won the Pikes Peak hill climb this year is an Optibike, its motor drives through the relatively normal bicycle gearing by turning the crankset, low power to weight with an electric motor means gears are advantageous.
http://optibike.com/
Clawbrant says
This looks like a giant version of one of those old Mustang scooters.
Ceolwulf says
It ain’t pretty but I like it!
The second video is great, just a couple hotrodders – from some science fiction future – that happens to be right now!
BoxerFanatic says
Is it just me, or does it seem to anybody else that any fork compression at all would jam that chopper-ific front fender right into hard parts of the drivetrain and frame?
Frankly, regardless of the mode of locomotion, that is a weird looking bike… half monster, half chopper, all bizarre.
tim says
Please, please put an Aprilia RS250 tail piece on it to visually balance it, and stop your arse sliding off the seat and onto the rear wheel!
and its sorta cool I guess, if you’re into electric. I’d like to ride an electric someday. I reckon it would be weird with different power characteristics, and none of the aural cues we’re used to. Dont see me buying one, except a specific commuter (where it makes sense to me). but good for them!
Gazberzu says
Who’s the designer ? Is he blind ?
Brian says
I love the electric motorcycle concept. This one, as others have said needs some product styling. The two biggest factors for me ever buying one is, price and capacity (as in mileage and recharge). Until these machines are the cheap, reliable transportation, I will stick with my fossil fuel road burner.
Biker says
It looks great and the range of 100+ miles seems quite good compared to other ebikes.
Mule says
Electric bikes are already getting a lot of resistance. Why go out of your way to make them ugly as well? I’m all for good looking bikes regardless of power source.
Tim says
this.
good looking though: if we could only all agree what that was.
Mule says
For starters….what do you think good looking is?
To me, the Mission Motors racer is one of the more badass looking bikes ever and the power plant (electric motor) actually looks pretty good. The bike performs as well, which makes it even more attractive.
The bike here looks sort of like a cross betwwen a buffalo, a Confederate and an airconditiong unit….with nice brakes. Not my taste.
frederick says
the tank is to hold additional smoke?
imo 2-wheeled evs are an entirely different animal and should look as such …
crisp, modern, elegant, functional and unique.
Richard Gozinya says
I don’t know, there’s plenty of ICE powered bikes that have the fuel under the seat, or in the frame, but still have a faux fuel tank. As long as it’s serving a function, I don’t see the problem. If it’s just there for aesthetics, then it’s a bit disconcerting.
As for keeping it entirely modern, I don’t think most people agree about what that would even mean. Besides, EVs are still in their infancy, and there hasn’t really been any design language established for what an electric motorcycle is supposed to look like. Zero seems to want everything to look like a dirt bike, while Brammo takes a different path. Others aren’t worth mentioning at this point, since the only viable ones outside of Zero and Brammo are built solely for the race track.
dano says
The evolution of bikes and designs have certainly come a long way in the past 100 years. So won’t the Ev product choice. This is finally an EV that at least looks like a motorcycle and not something from the Jetson’s.
Mule, “getting a lot of resistance.” That about sums it up but this one will definetly amp up the field.
I would like to know the mileage range at a fixed speed of 65 mph.
coxster says
I agree with Dano, this electric bike looks less like it’s made of Prius parts
mustridemore says
It looks like there is a “gas tank” on it, why is it that electric bike manufacture’s do this? Is it for range anxiety?
Nick5628 says
I find the 100 mile range ridden hard a bold claim. Bike looks great though.
james Shaw says
The first practical E-vehicle will likely be an E-motorcycle–why? Because bikes need no heat, A/C, or other electronic devices aboard. E-cars won’t be practical until there is some major breakthrough in technology that is not yet on the horizon.
The perceived market for E-cars/bikes is the wet dream of political leftists, “greens” who think electric vehicles will somehow change the world we live in. They won’t.
E-bikes will never work especially well or be popular for the forseeable future. It seems a huge waste of time and resources to pursue electric vehicles.
Mule says
Actually Todd, the human body has a “power band” just like any other engine. In most cases, torque measured on a power meter is very high at super lower RPM’s for an extremely short period of time (that would be up to 25 seconds) if…max effort is applied for minimum duration. I’m talking vein popping, eye bulging power! However, at 85 to say 115 RPM’s, high power can be maintained for extremely long periods of time. This doesn’t yield as high a peak number, but a high maintainable average and is maintained through multiple gear ratios.
So, like an electric motor, asking the motor to supply max torque all the time, shortens the potential time it can be maintained. Range of miles.
On a bicycle, gearing gives the ability to “Stay on top of the gear” while keeping up decent speed. Rpms are the secret to max output on a bicycle, not high effort at low rpms. The system breaks down through low RPMs, high torque, resulting and knee/back problems.
Unlike an electric motor that doesn’t care what RPM it’s at. BUT, a gear box could lessen the power required to accelerate or give what power is available a mechanical advantage.