Lightning

by Michael Alba at https://www.engineering.com/ 2 Wheels and 218 Miles per Hour: The World’s Fastest Electric Motorcycle His bike wasn’t rumbling beneath him as he rolled up to Alice’s Restaurant. The California air was heavy with sun and the black exhaust of the Harleys, Yamahas and Kawasakis purring all around him. His name was Richard Hatfield, and he was a computer engineer turned bike builder who was taking the first test run of his first prototype. It was an old Yamaha R1 bike frame fitted with an electric motor and stuffed with lithium iron phosphate batteries. The year was 2006, and the bike was the first lithium battery sports bike ever built. Richard would have revved the engine had there been one. Instead, he turned left at Alice’s and pointed his bike toward the top of the Woodside hills. He gunned it, then it gunned him. It was the fastest acceleration he’d ever felt on a bike, and in an instant, the Yamaha shot noiselessly up the hill. Richard felt fast as lightning. Lightning Motorcycles There’s nothing easy about building an electric motorcycle. There’s limited space for components, yet electric vehicles need one component in abundance: batteries. Hatfield retrofitted his Yamaha R1 with 28 lithium iron phosphate (LiFePo4) batteries, each one weighing 6.6lb and storing 90Ah at 3.2V for a total capacity of about 8kWh. The batteries took 7 hours to recharge and offered a range of 80 miles at 65mph. The whole project cost him $15,000. It may not have been pretty, but it worked. That test drive at Alice’s Restaurant convinced Hatfield that electric bikes were the way of the future, an “unquestionably” better biking experience. “For the first time, I experienced that electric torque and thrust without any noise or vibration or sound,” Hatfield recalled. “And the […]