The KillaCycle team has been working on their electric drag bike for some years now and it has gone through many evolutionary changes. Designed and constructed by engineer Bill Dube’ it now has a battery pack from A123 Systems consisting of 880 2.3 amp-hr Lithium Ion cells. Each 3.4 volt cell puts out 150 amps! If you’re not an electrically oriented person, trust me, that’s a LOT! The cells connect to a Zilla 2K-HV motor controller, made by Cafe’ Electric which sends a 374 volt, 1350 amp flow of electricity from the battery pack to 2 modified 6.7 inch Model L-91 Advanced DC Motors.
The bike weighs 625 pounds, uses about $.05 worth of electricity per run, can be recharged in 12 minutes, which is a charger limitation since the batteries can actually be recharged in 5 minutes, and it can make 6 runs per charge (not at full power).
What does it all mean? Last December it powered the KillaCycle to an 8.76 second quarter mile at 145 mph, a new record for electric vehicles of any kind, car, motorcycle or anything else. 0-60 mph is 1.4 seconds. Except for the whine, pretty quiet, too.
That kind of performance, impressive by any standards and improving fast, means we’ll be seeing more of this kind of racing performance from a lot more vehicles. It also brings in a new group of racers, a group very comfortable with electricity, electronics, computers and all of the latest technologies which can only be a good thing. If you turn down the power on one of these motors the batteries last a lot longer, too, which brings electric motorcycles into the realm of practical vehicle. Electrics are getting closer all the time.
Video of record run and links below:
UPDATE: KillaCycle Lowers Electric ET Record to 8.16
Link: KillaCycle via AutoblogGreen
Related: Electric motorcycles
Related: Electric motorcycle from Derbi GPR 50
sfan says
This nano li-ion battery technology looks like it may well be extremely disruptive to many markets, including the vehicle industry. (Take a look at: http://www.a123systems.com/html/home.html)
There are a few of these start-ups and they look to be tantalizingly close to mass commercial availability. Power-to-weight ratio, extremely rapid recharge, safety, broad temperature operating range, … what is not to like?
It looks like plug-in hybrid cars may be driving mass commercialization withing a couple of years. In bikes, I expect that commuter scooters would be a logical first form factor for the technology.
There have been many false/unrealistic hopes in the field of alternative-energy vehicles. This watcher is cautiously optimistic that all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles will be a big part of a mainstream solution sooner rather than much later.
Sean says
WOAH! That was FAST! I honestly can’t believe the power those batteries put out, and I can feel the onslaught of electric powered scooters very quickly. This is going to be the future of automobiles, I feel, with instantaneous torque and if you keep the watts down, long ways to go before recharge. Remember that battery that set the starter motor on fire on a massive V twin custom? Anyone else thinking what I’m thinking?
Willie Schmitz says
Shazam! The electric guys are for real. The power they getting now is awesome! Love those plasma balls!
http://www.speedace.info/white_lightning.htm
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~reginald/ball_l.html
ElectricMotorcycles.net says
Welcome to the future.
KillaCycle is featured in the April edition of Hot Rod Magazine on page 33. Look for it at newstands.
kneeslider says
The AutoblogGreen post I linked to mentions that Hot Rod article. The more electric vehicles get covered in the mainstream performance mags, the more quickly they’ll be accepted by everyone, not just alternative energy folks, and that’s a win for everyone.
Joe says
Very slick that Dragbike!!!
I saw also the video of the electric motorcycle GPR 50.
It goes fast that`s true but what a awefull noise it makes.
No thanks I like better a bike with open pipes running on Bio-ethanol!!
Loud pipes saves lives can not be saying on a electrical bike.
Richard says
I am very glad to see the progress with battery-powered vehicles. I look forward to the time when we will have a practical system of non-polluting vehicles, but I have a life-long fondness for the internal compustion engine and I will miss it if it ever goes away.
PS to Joe. Loud pipes definitely don’t save lives; they just piss off the neighbors.
Joe says
Quote:PS to Joe. Loud pipes definitely don’t save lives; they just piss off the neighbors.
Smile!!
chris says
a lot of companies seem to be jumping on the electric bandwagon. and where i cannot deny the beauty of their power delivery, or the simplicity of their powerplants, so many are overlooking alternative combustion techniques that are already available. ethanol and biodiesel, and to a limited extent – hydrogen. these are all viable renewable resources that wouldn’t require a wholesale change in the way we manufacture and drive our vehicles. in some cases it would require no change at all. but the majority of the focus seems to fall on electricity. which is going to take a lot longer to catch up to our current method of travel. or maybe i’ll just miss the sound. because if/when we go away from combustion, i will MISS that sound.
Sean says
Please don’t immediately think that the alternatives are always good. Ethanol is destroying food crops, and actually creates more pollution while being processed and converted than it saves. It also gets terrible mileage, so it’s not the magic bullet. Biodiesels good, but it also has some of the same problems. This is all off the top of my head, so don’t take it as fact, but everything that has benefits has problems.
GenWaylaid says
Chris,
The leading edge of technology is always several steps ahead of what’s currently in the showrooms. We need to be working on electric vehicles now precisely because they’re not an easy fit with our current infrastructure.
The main advantage most alternative combustion fuels have is that they’re not oil. Some–particularly biodiesel and hydrogen–are also a cleaner than the petroleum alternatives. While it helps to have more options at the pump, merely trading fuels will only get you a few benefits.
Electric vehicles have many new design possibilities like hub motors and “skateboard” chassis that are already starting to unleash all kinds of creativity. Because electric drive systems are so simple, they eliminate many of the design compromises that internal combustion cars have lived with for decades. There’s also the promise of radically less maintenance and the reduced on-road pollution and noise. I live next to a highway, and I definitely will NOT miss that sound (though the main culprits are usually Harleys and police sirens, and nobody’s going to tell them to be quiet).
Alternative fuels will probably have their heyday until electric vehicles are ready for widespread use, though every year that heyday seems to be getting shorter. Alternative fuels have to be manufactured and delivered, so they’re going to involve the consumption of some oil along the way unless all the stages of the process run off of alternative fuels as well. This makes many alternative fuels less appealing, as the flap over ethanol demonstrates.
Producing electricity isn’t totally clean, either, but I hold onto the hope that that’s a much more tractable problem. At least electricity doesn’t need tanker trucks. It’s already possible to deliver high volumes of electricity nearly anywhere with almost no additional pollution.
The biggest sticking point for electric vehicles lately (besides battery cost, which is largely a supply/demand thing) has been the time it takes to get the electric energy into them. The new A123 batteries have power-recharge capacities high enough to take a big bite out of that problem. The last step to be covered is from the grid to the battery pack, which has interesting safety issues.
Suppose you were driving a Tesla electric roadster and ran the 50 kilowatt-hour battery pack down to 20%. To recharge it in five minutes (roughly on par with the time it takes to pump gas) would require 480 kilowatts of electricity. At a typical electric car voltage of 288V, that’s 1667 amps of current. Compare that to a household circuit at 10 or 20 amps! Safe handling of kiloampere currents would require cables over an inch in diameter and protections against surface electron flow. The alternative is to wait a few hours for a charge, but what American is that patient?
It’s an interesting question whether it would even be safe to fuel both combustion and electric vehicles at the same facility. Gasoline and lightning traditionally don’t mix.
sfan says
Thanks GenWaylaid for your very informative post. I agree with your prognosis and appreciate clarification on the recharge rates. I will admit that electricity is a somewhat nebulous area for me; someday I will force myself to get comfortable with amps, watts, volts and ohms. Until then a few 101 questions:
1) Using a 50hp internal combustion engine as a power benchmark and 200 km (120 miles) as a range benchmark, a) what combination of electric motor and b) battery capacity would be needed for an equivalent electric bike?
2) Using a standard household outlet, how long would it take to recharge for the next 200km range?
3) Could multiple plugs reduce the recharge time proportionately (assuming the bike had a recharge adapter that could accommodate this)?
chris says
GenWaylaid, i must admit, every time i hear the pros of electricity and the cons of alternative fuels in the same article, i side with electricity. but when it comes to the actual vehicles using the two types of power, i always side with the alternative fuels. electricity surely makes the most sense. but the passionate car/bike-geek part of me is so deeply in love with combustion, that i’m going to have a hard time letting go. it’s simply the romantic notion of all that mechanical goodness. of course the performance of these near future electric cars will almost definitely blow away the current combustion vehicles, and that’s what i’m truly passionate about. i can see the Barrett-Jackson auction 40 years from now: “Here we have a mint, un-restored 2007 Toyota Corolla, that’s right, this is one of the last fully combustion engined examples – we’re going to start the bidding at $250,000!!!” woe is me. . .
GenWaylaid says
Chris,
The internal combustion engine will always have a special place in enthusiasts’ hearts, and I wouldn’t expect it to vanish overnight unless regulators threw their weight on it. Today you can still buy a new car with a manual transmission and rear live axle, or a motorcycle with a non-unit transmission and rigid rear suspension. Plenty of carburetors are still on the road, too. The latest technology is never for everyone.
Sfan,
Let’s try turning those benchmark numbers into electricity. First, 50hp at 748 watts/hp is 37 kilowatts. It’s worth noting that an electric motor would get far more torque than a gasoline motor with an equivalent horsepower rating. For reference, Thunderstruck Motors’ ReVolt bike ran a 12.9s quarter mile with motors rated for only ~30hp: http://www.thunderstruck-ev.com/revolt.htm .
Figuring miles per kilowatt-hour is tricky because it relies heavily on the design of the vehicle and the overall efficiency of the drivetrain. One of the best benchmarks for which comparable data is available is the Tesla roadster. The Tesla achieves about 5 mi/kWh, while the closely related Lotus Elise gets 24/29 mpg. This suggests that a rule of thumb would be to take the mpg of an equivalent vehicle and divide by 6 kWh/gallon of gasoline. Let’s optimistically say that the benchmark gasoline motorcycle would get 42 mpg, giving us 7 mi/kWh for the electric version. For 120 miles of range, we would want a 17 kWh battery pack.
I have some rules of thumb for translating kilowatt-hours into battery pack size based on lithium batteries. Each kWh would have about 10 kg mass and cost about $1000 at today’s battery prices. That means the batteries alone for our benchmark bike would be 170 kg (374 lb) and cost $17000. Overall motorcycle weight would probably be in the 500-600 lb range with careful engineering.
Recharge times strongly depend on how much current one can pull from an outlet without tripping circuit breakers. Suppose you have a typical three-prong socket which delivers up to 15 amps at 120 volts RMS (“RMS” means root-mean-square and is basically the direct current equivalent to the actual alternating current voltage in terms of power delivery). That socket will trip the breaker if more than 15A * 120V = 1800W is pulled from it. That’s 1.8kW. There will be some charger inefficiencies, so only 1.5 to 1.6 kW will actually get into the batteries. We have to accumulate 17 kWh of energy, which would therefore take about 11 hours.
If you unplugged the washing machine and used that 240V plug, which is probably rated to 30A, the vehicle could charge in a quarter the time, or under 3 hours. Using multiple plugs doesn’t help unless they are on separate circuits, and even then you would need some sort of current-balancing circuitry in the charger to prevent it from attempting to draw the load unevenly.
Owners of electric cars usually have a special circuit installed in their garages for faster charging. A 240V, 100A circuit is the most that can be installed in a typical home. That gives 24kW. I suspect the home-charging system for the Tesla roadster uses about this much power, since they claim a full 50kWh charge in 3.5 hours, and that would include the slower “topping off” phase at the end. An 80% charge usually takes half the time of a 100% charge, so the Tesla’s first 40kWh is probably done in under two hours at a rate of over 20 kW. Since our benchmark motorcycle has a pack one-third the size of the Tesla’s, it should fully charge in about 1.2 hours on this maximum-power circuit, and get an 80% charge in under 40 minutes.
No chance of getting a top-speed charge on the road, unfortunately, unless you carry a 100A breaker modified with external cables and some bolt cutters to break into electrical boxes. Oh, and be prepared to run when someone comes to investigate the brownout you’re causing. That’s certainly being a different kind of outlaw biker.
GenWaylaid says
Oh, I should mention that depending on local electricity rates, a full charge for our benchmark bike would cost $1.25 to $3.00. In terms of cost-per-mile, that’s like getting 120 to 300 miles per gallon! Maintenance costs would also be very low, but even then I doubt you’d recover the cost of the $17000 battery pack over a typical 1000-charge lifetime. The lifetime fuel savings would be $5500 to $7000 at current energy prices, assuming you actually rode 120000 miles.
sfan says
Thanks very much for this tutorial GenWaylaid. It seems as though price & weight are the key variables to watch. Let’s hope that something akin to the price:performance gains in microprocessors and storage may ultimately apply to battery technology.
You mentioned “each kWh would have about 10 kg mass… “. A follow up question; looking at the chart on http://www.a123systems.com/html/technology.html# and in this paper http://www.altairnano.com/documents/altair_anoder_way.pdf, it seems that the nano-li-ion startups are claiming 3kw to 4kw/kg versus “Conventional lithium ion batteries result in power levels of 1kW per kilogram” Does this jive with your 1kWh=10KG rule of thumb? I note they refer to kW and not kWh. I understand the difference between kilowatt and kilowatt hours but, for the intended purposes, it their metric would seem be of little use unless they meant the same application as your metric.
If they do mean 3+kWh/kg, if their numbers are to be believed, and if the technology is capable of efficient mass production, then we seem to be closer to battery packs producing the same power and range per KG as we get from gas.
GenWaylaid says
Sfan,
The battery companies are discussing maximum power draw, which is measured in watts, not energy storage, which is measured in joules or watt hours (1 Wh = 3600 Ws = 3600 J). A standard A123 cell has 2.3 amp hours at 3.3 volts, for an energy content of 7.6 watt hours. This comes from a package with a mass of 70 grams. Allowing a 10% mass increase for wires and connections (which is highly optimistic), that brings us close to 76 g / 7.6 Wh = 10 kg/kWh.
The ability to move power in and out of the A123 batteries quickly is really mind-boggling. You could ride for 120 miles on a 17 kWh pack in our benchmark design, or you could expend it all in one two minute, 510 kW (682 hp) burst! That is why drag racing is a natural sport for electric vehicles.
sfan says
Excellent; thanks again, this has been very helpful.
tina juarez says
Joe Says & Loud engine lovers:
WE at Tina Inc. are already working on that problem. We have a proto type for a mechanical noise enhancer. Our main problem at this time is finding clothespins strong enough to stay on at current speeds.
Our electronic team is working on a holder that will keep the ipod in place.