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The Electric Motorcycle Thread

If the swappable battery standard is just being adopted, you can't expect battery swap stations soon, but they're probably a long term goal. Who knows if we'll get there or things will take a different direction.

There are swap stations supporting Leaf & other EVs in the Bay Area now. If there were a similar consortium pushing a swappable electric car battery standard it would help both car & bike battery swaps to take off.
 
HadesOmega said:
Not anytime soon, but the EV charging infrastructure has been $hit for the last decade. If they could just install EV chargers at every gas station...
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It would be cheaper to install a couple of L3 chargers than to stock up on enough batteries to supply a swapping station on top of also needing chargers to charge them back up at some point.
 
R3DS!X said:
It would be cheaper to install a couple of L3 chargers than to stock up on enough batteries to supply a swapping station on top of also needing chargers to charge them back up at some point.
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Agree. Not to mention that, if you are physically lifting the battery yourself, it won't really contain enough energy for any reasonable range anyway.
 
It would be cheaper to buy a bike with modular battery packs too
 
This summer I plan to ride up to San Francisco from the Peninsula, ride around town then back home. I've been using my EVSE Level 2 charge cable and it's great. I stop for around an hour, eat something, take a piss and then get back on the bike.

PlugShare is a great app that shows all the charging stations around me. ChargePoint is my main source, but I've used others as well. I'm pretending my bike is a dual sport. I have a CA moped plate and when I want to just be an ebike I remove it.
 

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R3DS!X said:
only if it didnt come with a pack.
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Well let's see my Light Bee is $4k and the battery is say $2k, you can buy an Energica Eva for $13k.

So I could buy the bike and have 4 batteries for the cost of an Eva and if we're talking a Ribelle 8 battery packs.

There are not many bikes out there with modular battery and no superbikes but in the future there may be, there's nothing to compare currently to with your hypothesis if "it didn't come with a pack."

That also leads to another reason why modular packs are good is different configurations. You can packs configured for more power or more range. Like the Litespeed bikes sells a sur ron pack that is 60V and 72V same size just configured differently on for more amp hours and one for more voltage. The 72V pack is for more power and speed and the 60V pack would have less power but more range. Having modular packs give you the ability to use different types of packs.

Let's say for a race you don't need that much range, you need enough power to complete the race so you could put a battery that is configured that way so you aren't lugging excessive weight on the bike. I think that's how the motoczysz bike worked they had modular battery pack, but not sure if you can reconfigure them.

The battery is always the biggest limiting factor on an electric motorcycle, it can only handle so much punishment.

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You might think it costs a lot of money now but because these companies are getting together to make a battery standard for them it will increase supply and drive prices down.
 
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Here is trade show video showing a battery swap station for electric scooters. They say in the video they do 200,000 battery swaps a day in Taiwan for this platform.

[youtube]C2zh5f71O8o[/youtube]
 
Also with modular batteries you could lease batteries, no more worrying if your battery will deteriorate after time.
 
Great day for some Door Dashing on the Light Bee flowers are bloomin! I'll take deliveries that go up into the foothills just to ride up here :)

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HadesOmega said:
Well let's see my Light Bee is $4k and the battery is say $2k, you can buy an Energica Eva for $13k.

So I could buy the bike and have 4 batteries for the cost of an Eva and if we're talking a Ribelle 8 battery packs.
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Yes you could also buy several buddy 125's for the cost of one Panigale.
 
Well you are trying to say that a bike with modular battery packs could cost more that's an example. There is no superbike example yet. You're trying to say it's expensive to be modular but it's not. Sorry if you don't see the potential of modular packs but there is great potential.

Also think about it a Light Bee can go about 30 miles with one battery pack if I have 5 batteries I can go 600 miles. Where your Eva will only go like 60 miles. I just need a way of carrying them.

Then just think if in the future when battery tech gets better if you had a modular pack it is easy to upgrade. So let's say Energica just came out with the 21kwh pack and you had the option to buy a Ribelle or just upgrade/swap your battery to the 21kwh pack you wouldn't do it? Let's say that Energica leased your battery and your lease is up and you want to upgrade to the 21kwh pack you wouldn't do it? You wouldn't want that extra range and lighter weight? But no your stuck buying the Ribelle because the Energica doesn't have modular packs. Like who knows maybe next year Energica will come out with a 50kwh pack. That's why this is important because it establishes a battery standard all the bikes that use that battery will benefit from this. It's like devices that use AA or AAA batteries.
 
Swapping of standardized packs requires an intense concentration of compatible motorbikes that we’re unlikely to ever see in the US.

Gogoro’s model works in Taiwan because a substantial fraction of the population rides scooters to get from point A to B and it’s not practical for many of them to charge at home. The battery swapping kiosks are conveniently placed all over Taipei because tons of people own Gogoro scooters and they bought the scooters because of the convenient swapping kiosks.

It takes a high critical mass to overcome this inherent chicken / egg problem, and very unlikely to happen in the US where most people ride recreationally, can easily charge at home, and want 100+ mile ranges that would require the swapping of 8 or more Gogoro-sized batteries at a time.

The rectangular batteries wouldn’t be space-efficient in the frame of a Zero, Energica, or Livewire, and there’s no way a network of kiosks flung across the greater Bay Area could be convenient and profitable. It’s a great idea on paper, but it’s a total non-starter for these and many other reasons.
 
HadesOmega said:
Well you are trying to say that a bike with modular battery packs could cost more that's an example. There is no superbike example yet. You're trying to say it's expensive to be modular but it's not. Sorry if you don't see the potential of modular packs but there is great potential.
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No that's not what I'm trying to say. I was only stating that the bikes with modular batteries could only cost less if it didn't come with a battery. The batteries are expensive to make whether they are modular or not.

I'm aware of many potential upsides to modular packs but also aware of many downsides as well. I'm not strongly against them per se I just don't see them as something that will be widely adopted across the industry enough to warrant hot swapping stations to come into existence.
 
My step son and I always get stoked when we see an electric bike split traffic by us.
 
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