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This, or a miniaturized version thereof could change the game for light electric vehicles - imagine an electric motorcycle that weighs substantially more like

• mperham 11mo ago
  There’s no area in the world that allows e-bikes with more than 750w motors. A 3kw motor is illegal (cf Surron), unless you are talking about an e-moped requiring registration.
  • bhhaskin 11mo ago
    There is a big issue in the US currently with people buying electric motorcycles that look like e-bikes.
    • eikenberry 11mo ago
      What is the issue? I've seen people on those bikes and they look fun to ride.
      • RajT88 11mo ago
        I see kids blasting around at high speeds without helmets. Kids treat them like fast bikes you do not have to pedal. Wiping out on a bike at 13mph is a very different proposition to wiping out on a bike at higher speeds. I saw just a couple nights ago some kid doing what appeared to be about 40mph on an eBike. Wind in his hair, not pedaling, just blasting it. I am sure new regulations will come to speed limit them, but at the cost of dead and disabled young people. ETA: I went to go look up laws requiring speed limiters on bikes, and the top hit was about how you can disable them: https://goebikelife.com/how-to-remove-ebike-speed-limiter/ https://goebikelife.com/how-to-remove-ebike-speed-limiter/ Article states typical eBike speed limiters are 20-28mph. That is the kind of sustained speed Olympic cyclists can maintain for some period of time, and much faster than kid's toys need to be capable of. And these are the mandated limiters!
        • bhhaskin 11mo ago
          And here is the problem. They are already supposed to be speed limited if it's an e-bike. It's easy to tell the difference between a bicycle and a motorcycle, but the difference between an e-bike and electric motorcycle is far more subtle. And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes.
          • RajT88 11mo ago
            > And most electric motorcycles lie and market themselves as e-bikes. Because they have pedals which nobody uses. In theory, it's pedal assist, but kids aren't really pedaling eBikes, they are using them like electric motorcycles. You might think: Hey, how can you tell the difference between somebody using an eBike with pedal assist if so many of them look just like regular bikes? I don't really see young people pedaling bikes at all of any kind. It's adults who don't have cars, or adults who are exercising pedaling bikes.
            • gambiting 11mo ago
              >>I don't really see young people pedaling bikes at all of any kind. It's adults who don't have cars, or adults who are exercising pedaling bikes. Where do you live - over here(North of England) most kids ride bikes, especially to school. And not ebikes either - actual regular pedal bikes.
              • RajT88 11mo ago
                Chicago suburbs. Cultural difference, mayhap.
        • CamperBob2 11mo ago
          Kids these days
        • fukka42 11mo ago
          [flagged]
      • nsxwolf 11mo ago
        My neighborhood is full of kids on these things. The safety dynamics of driving around have changed completely. Small children flying on and off road at high speeds. It's crazy.
      • Rebelgecko 11mo ago
        The issue is they're mostly ridden by teenagers with still-developing frontal cortices. The death rate is still lower than cars, but they're much more dangerous than a "real" bike (or ebike)
  • rconti 11mo ago
    Okay, but is it difficult to extrapolate the weight saving benefits of a "legal" power e-bike motor?
  • MadnessASAP 11mo ago
    Listen, your world may not allow you to sell an e-bike with a 1000hp motor on it. But my world allows me to put a 1000hp motor on an e-bike and not tell anyone. Now hold my beer...
    • doubled112 11mo ago
      There's a difference. I've noticed that people seem to believe as long as they bought something it should be safe. If you're smart enough to build something, I have to hope you're at least smart enough to realize that there might be consequences. Take your beer back, I'm going for a rip next.
    • usrusr 11mo ago
      So that you can flip over in an uncontrolled wheelie at an even lower fraction of the throttle? Even if there was infinite energy throughput (aka power) at zero mass, the main limiter for power per total system mass would still be the battery. In any practical setup, even in super short runtime designs, getting, say, twice the power would not all that dramatic a runtime hit if it was achieved by scaling the same motor technology and paying for the extra mass with a little battery capacity. Unless of course you want to actually use that power increase for any meaningful fraction of the runtime, then you'll obviously drain the battery fast. But a zero-mass power increase would not change that a lot either. Increasing power density (of the motor) just isn't worth much when it does not happen to coincide with an increase in efficiency (and then the battery mass saved for achieving the same range will quite literally outweigh the mass saved by a smaller engine for achieving the same power) The good news is that those striving for power density aren't really at liberty to completely ignore efficiency in the process because cooling is a key issue for them.
      • lazide 11mo ago
        Honestly he’d probably just pretzel the frame underneath him, assuming he gunned it. That’s enough power to potentially do that to a full size car frame.
  • carlosjobim 11mo ago
    He said motorcycle. That's a market of hundreds of millions to one billion customers.
  • SR2Z 11mo ago
    They are not allowed, but still commonly owned and used. The law needs to catch up. There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to. They can't be treated like bicycles because they're too fast but aren't nearly as dangerous as motorcycles. We need a new category for light motorcycles. The real problem, IMO, is that the law is generally not deferential enough to cyclists and already forces them off sidewalks, onto the street, and to follow traffic laws designed for cars. There's not much else to take away, and the rules right now are unreasonable enough that cyclists always break them. I think what I would like to see are explicit requirements for insurance and licensing for powerful e-bikes, but made significantly cheaper so that people will actually bother. Requiring helmets for the insurance would also make it much more straightforward. We can require them to take the street or a dedicated bike lane and fully mandate that they have to be walked on sidewalks.
    • bootlooped 11mo ago
      > The law needs to catch up. There are clearly good reasons for people to want extremely powerful e-bikes and they should be allowed to. I'm not so sure about that. I don't want a 6000kw Sur Ron riding in the bike lane with me. The whole point of the bike lane was to make a safe space for riding a bicycle. I want the bike lanes to be safe enough for children to ride their bikes in, and having something that powerful in it is not conducive to that goal. They are by and large too fast and too unlike a bicycle for bike lanes. Having things that powerful there is going to dissuade a lot of potential (non electric) cyclists. My girlfriend already gets too freaked out by how fast some of the legal e-bikes in the bike lane go. Certainly they shouldn't be on the sidewalk. But what does that leave? Just the road. If that's the case they probably need to just adhere to whatever standards the state has for scooters or mopeds. Which probably means some kind of license, maybe registration, and possibly insurance. But that type of e-bike manufacturer doesn't want to make a light electric scooter that's road legal, they want to make a thing that skirts regulations by being "for off road use only". And the buyers by and large don't want to deal with license and registration, and certainly not insurance. Just because people are doing an illegal thing a lot doesn't mean that the law needs to find a way to make it legal.
  • beefnugs 11mo ago
    Oh nooo i have to put a sticker on it, and only allow my control to go to some arbitrary value when the cops are watching
• mywittyname 11mo ago
  Does this motor design scale down? It's not clear from the article - the article focuses more on the relative efficiency gains over the previous model. A 30lb 1000hp motor doesn't necessarily mean that they can also produce a 3lb, 100hp motor. It would be cool if it did, but I doubt that it does because usually component strength doesn't scale linearly. That being said, these are still valuable for traditional EVs. Even if they are only a modest weight savings in the grand scheme of modern vehicle weight, their ability to improve packaging options will be a boon. One thing the industry has dicovered is that the generic "skateboard" platform doesn't make for the best vehicles, in terms of packaging.
  • NathanKP 11mo ago
    I'm more fascinated by the question of whether it scales up... imagine much smaller and more efficient electric engines for cruise liners and cargo ships.
    • ApolloFortyNine 11mo ago
      Your average cruiseship already has an electric engine, they just have massive generators onboard to power it.
      • lazide 11mo ago
        Notably, it’s probably also not very efficient, and eventually they’ll likely upgrade with some of the improvements from these types of motors to save on fuel.
    • RogerL 11mo ago
      The article and the press release it was derived from says nothing about "more efficient", just smaller. https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-density-world-record-pushing-state-of-the-art-electric-motor-to-staggering-new-59kw-kg-benchmark/ https://yasa.com/news/yasa-smashes-own-unofficial-power-dens...
    • jacquesm 11mo ago
• loeg 11mo ago
  The problem for electric motorcycles is the battery weight.
  • jacquesm 11mo ago
    Indeed, more so because that weight tends to be further off the ground than in a car.
    • loeg 11mo ago
      Well, and the fun ones are power-to-weight monsters. Making them 100 lb heavier (and neutering range) is a recipe for a less exciting motorcycle. Might work for something like a Gold Wing (though limited range would also be a problem there).
  • bigiain 11mo ago
    That can be offset by not requiring the same sort of range that's typically assumed to be required. While I'll be likely be riding my ICE bikes for decades because one of the things I do on them is trips with 1000 or 1500km days, truth is the vast majority of my riding is sub 25km round trips from my place. Most of my friends places, a lot of the places I shop or socialise, and the office (which I pretty much never go to any more) fit inside that range. And most of those trips take place on roads with a 60kmh or slower speed limit. _Maybe_ a few short sections of 80kmh. For all of those short trips, I probably don't even need 2kWHr worth of battery, maybe only 1. The electric motorcycles available around here seem to start at 7 or 8kWHr, and go up to over 20. The downside to that is the smaller the battery capacity, the smaller the short term peak power it can deliver. The sort of cell chemistry and construction typical in those sort of bikes seem to be limited to 10 or 15C peak discharge, so while their 8kWHr battery can peak at 80kW or just over 100hp, if they downsized the same pack to 1kWHr it'd probably only deliver 10kW peak power. On the other had, alternative cell chemistry and construction can look way better. I have a few LiPo drone battery packs rated at 60C continuous and 120C peak. A 2kWHr pack of those would give me 120kW continuous and 240kW peaks. Quite likely though at the expense of much greater risks of catastrophic fire. I've had a few of those pack catch fire while charging and one that self combusted in an almost explosion like fashion when I slammed the drone into a concrete pole at about 120kmh. I can totally see why an electric motorcycle manufacturer with warranties and safety reputation and legal/regulatory obligations wouldn't want to accept that risk. I'd love an electric motorcycle that's "fun" enough to ride, and gets 25km or so reliable range. But it'd need to be at least a bit price and "fun" competitive with my little bikes, a 117kg 125cc ~25kW two stroke and a 138kg 250cc 24kW fourstroke. I have no doubt it'd be possible, perhaps even easy to build an electric bike with the same "fun" power to weight ratio, but right now not down to the sort of price that'd make me take on a project like that.
• kube-system 11mo ago
  Electric pedal bikes are already at the limit of what their chassis’s support even with small motors. 10kw+ is comparable to starter gasoline motorcycles in the US (or midsize motorcycles elsewhere) capable of going on the highway. At that point, you need to start scaling everything, like brakes, tires, and the size of the chassis. The livewire has a motor large enough to drive a car.
• soperj 11mo ago
  > This, or a miniaturized version thereof could change the game for light electric vehicles - imagine an electric motorcycle that weighs substantially more like an electric bicycle. Sounds terrible for every other user of paths currently.