So what's really going on here?

The overall goal is to create a vehicle that is capable of travelling from home to campus(~4mi) and have extra range to spare. That being said, the bike will likely have around a 20 mile range, with a full charge taking just under an hour. Its got to be tough...off road capable, with a full suspension ready to take on stairs, curbs, or anything else in its way. And fast...60mph in under 4 seconds. Of course, this will be accomplished by low weight. Using model RC airplane motors, and batteries the total weight is projected at around 80 lbs.

Exhilarating.

"The project started when the bike was purchased in mid January, the day before I broke my collar bone." said the creator of this project, Kevin Gautier. He started modeling in the beginning of February. Just over 2 weeks after the projects inception, there are already 200 parts modeled. "I like building electric vehicles because they are silent..." said Kevin"...any vehicle thats silent can be very fast and not attract too much attention...the scooter was the inspiration, and this is going to be the next project."

He will build a complete bolt on power kit for the bike that requires no cutting,welding or major modifications to the bike that could not be easily undone. This will be done using AudoDesk Inventor to model the parts. This software will allow advanced manufacturing processes including cnc water jet, and milling in the building of the bike. Most pieces will be water cut due to its precision.

The point was to not cut or weld anything, so all materials had to be chosen carefully. All body paneling will be carbon fiber, with a gloss resin finish on the outside, and a bonding surface on the inside to attach to the back plates. The back plates will be aluminum, and bolt together. All sections will be bonded with adhesives such as epoxy, tapes, and Velcro. The body will be primarily carbon fiber, and glued aluminum. The drive line will be all machined aluminum and off the shelf parts.

And this is the newest update of what it will look like.

Update On the Stinky E-Bike

Just a quick update on the E-Bike build, the wheels have finally been fixed, and a bit more of the bike is complete. The wheels were one of the big challenges Kevin has faced during this design. Initially, they had the 5 foot rule....from 5 feet away, the wheels looked great, but when you would look at them closely, they just weren't quite right. The wheels have been fixed, and the fairings on the bike have been tweaked. The part count is around 80 parts total, and the project is really coming along nicely. Check out the latest pictures

The Greatest E-Bike Build

I've decided to take a turn on this blog...While I will still be talking about EV news and other parts of the industry, I'm going to detail the build of Kevin Gautier's E-Bike. He was who created the second scooter I posted up, and is moving on to his next project.

The plan is to start with his bike, a Kona Stinky, and use his current controller and 2 of the motors he used on his scooter. The battery pack will be full lithium, using the Turnigy LiPoly high performance long packs. He is currently modeling the bike in Autodesk Inventor, and has already made great progress. Attached are some of his renderings so far.

Link to his build thread at Endless Sphere

Questioning The Media

For my questioning the media post, I will be talking about an article found on autoblog, sourced from Automotive News. I'm choosing to question Autoblog's post, as it has more readers than Automotive News, and I feel that it is less based in fact.

The article talks about Toyota's announcement that its fuel cell vehicle in 2015 will cost less than a diesel hybrid. The head of e-drive and future mobility at Daimler, Herbert Kohler confirms this, saying that fuel cell vehicles will quickly decrease in price as the technology matures. The article also talks briefly about Mercedes-Benz's current and future fuel cell vehicles that are out or in the works.

I have a few issues with this article. While Mr. Kohler is a very credible source, my primary issue is the comparison with diesel hybrids, since there are currently NO diesel hybrids on the market. On top of that, there are very few fuel cell vehicles on the market, and I don't believe that there are any fuel cell vehicles that you can buy right now. While Daimler has there A-Class fuel cell vehicles up for lease right now, you cannot buy them.

I interpret this article as wishful thinking, but also as a bit of a hit to EV's. They are playing off of the expensive prices of batteries at the time being, and while stating that fuel cell vehicles are becoming much cheaper in the coming years, they don't give the same benefit of the doubt to EV's.

On the other hand, I've thought diesel hybrids would be incredibly efficient and often wondered why there are none on the market, but this article almost completely discounts them saying that they will quickly become obsolete. My question is where are all the diesel hybrids, and what is the opposition to them?

I'll be on the lookout for the diesel hybrid, fuel cell, and hopefully electric vehicles of the future, and continue to evaluate them, and hold them to the same standards as the rest. While I feel that this article was biased, and unfounded, it does come from a reliable source, and is an insider look into the future of the industry.

http://www.autoblog.com/2011/01/31/daimler-fuel-cell-vehicles-to-cost-no-more-than-diesel-hybrids/

Kevin's Scooter(my first EV's competition or driving force)

As my artifact about my main topic, I'm writing about Kevin's Scooter. When I got my scooter, he also got one, and as we started to modify our scooters, we really began to push each other to go faster. While I chose to use a brushed motor, Kevin chose to go with a brushless motor.

Though our scooters shared the same base scooter, and batteries, that is where the similarities end.

Kevin had decided on the motor pretty early. The Turnigy 80-100 HXT is a 1/4 scale model plane motor, meaning that this motor is designed to make a model airplane that is 1/4 scale of the real plane fly. Two small controller attempts ended in flames, but showed the potential of this motor, with the scooter reaching massive speeds before bursting into flames.

This brought Kevin to his next and final controller, a Kelly KBL-48201, a much beefier, but much more expensive controller. This controller has specs in line with my controller(48v at 200amps), but is a brushless controller, instead of brushed. In order to use this controller, he had to modify the motor and place 3 hall effects sensors around it to convert this motor into a 'sensored motor' and make it compatible with this controller.

A couple days and a few machined parts later, and Kevin's scooter is operational. Both of our scooters are very compatable in power, though his would typically be downtuned further than mine was(while my scooter was running at 68%, he was running at 40% to have similar speeds). The brushless motor proved to have much more torque than my scooter, and made a very different noise. His motor and controller also has regenerative braking, meaning that he can slightly charge his batteries by slowing down, or using the motor to brake down hills.

Many people had questions, including "what is the top speed?," "what kind of range do you get?," and asking him about the motor hitting the ground(see video to see how close it comes). Some people gave suggestions to problems he was having with heat, and eventually the thread went into his next scooter project(which has since been discarded to build an E-Bike)

The information in this post came from Kevins original post on Endless-Sphere, with his permission.

Though I've already posted it, here is the video I referenced in this post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NUuBaM0uFY

The Big Idea

For my class project I want to explore the differences in EV's portrayal in the media, and what of that is fact or fiction. These ideas include but are not limited to: are EV's worse for the environment that gas cars, range is a limiting factor of EV's, EV's are slow, and EV's are the future. As I come across articles criticizing EV's for whatever reason, we'll dig deeper and find out if this is the truth, or if it was just objective media.

My First EV

While the content is a little old, I feel there is a lot to be learned from my first EV project.

I started with a GoPed ESR750EX a friend found on craigslist.

The first modification I did was larger batteries. The scooter was originally designed for 7ah (amp hour) SLA(Sealed lead acid) batteries, but the EX (extended range) version that I had was designed for 9ah batteries. This was not nearly enough so I put 12ah batteries in it, which required slight modification to make them fit.

With an increased range, I now wanted to increase the speed. To prepare for this increase in speed, I bought Kenda street tires, and Hayes hydraulic disk brakes for the scooter.

About this time, a member of GoPed Nation posted up beta signups for a larger motor for the scooter he called "The Torkinator". I was selected to be one of the beta testers for this motor, and received one about a month later. The motor alone brought my max speed up from around 20mph, to about 27mph(when geared more for speed). Still not satisfied, I started looking for more power.

This would come in the form of a new motor controller. The scooter was originally designed to run at 24v, with a roughly 30 amp continuous draw. This created around 750 watts of power, or roughly 1 horsepower. The new controller, a Kelly KDS48200 was rated for up to 48v, at 200 amps peak power, and 80 amps of continuous power. This means I could run at 3840watts continuously, and up to 9600 watts for a short burst. In horsepower, this is just over 5hp continuously, and almost 13hp for a short time. This was much more in line with the power I was looking for, but there was still a problem. The Torkinator I was using was only rated to spin at 6000rpm's, and at full speed, my new controller would let it spin at 7200rpm's. I contacted the creator of the Torkinator, and asked him to make a higher performance version, to which he kindly obliged. By the time this higher performance motor was out, the motor had left its beta stages, and was in full production, known as the T2. The higher performance version is the T2S.

After many hours of wiring, and custom fabrication the scooter was working, and nearly complete.

Here are a couple of pictures of the scooter during construction, though it has been significantly cleaned up since then, as well as a video. In the video, the camera is mounted to my scooter, and the rider and scooter in view are my friend, who took a slightly different approach to modifying his scooter. Needless to say, they are both very fast. In this video, we had speed limited in software to around 40mph(roughly 65% of the possibly power). I'm hoping to do a write up on his scooter soon.

I never got to ride with a fresh set of batteries, so I don't know the true range on a fresh set of batteries, but at speed, I could generally get about 3-4 miles of range, at roughly 40mph.

Unfortunately, I toasted my motor a few months ago by not breaking in the brushes properly, and damaged the commutator. It is fixable, but required new motor parts, and the commutator to be remachined smooth again.

This will eventually lead to the final phase of modification on this scooter... Lithium batteries. I will post up in the future as this idea comes to fruition, and the rebuild of the scooter in all of its glory.

For more reading, check out the build threads of how this thing was created:

Original Build Thread

Repost at Endless Sphere

Race video thread