Full-size road bike all electric

BY RANDALL WALKER - KAPITI OBSERVER

A Paraparaumu man has combined his passions for electrics and motorbikes into what he believes to be a New Zealand first - a full-sized, fully electric, road-legal motorbike.

Lighter than it was with a petrol engine, with a range of up to 150 kilometres, and costing only $1.40 to run for 100km, the bike is not just a gimmick either.

Iain Jerrett spent about a year converting a Triumph Daytona motorbike into an electric bike in his garage-cum-workshop.

Using the Triumph's frame and running gear, he fitted 27 batteries and an electric motor, controller and battery management system into the area the engine and exhaust system had been  ending up with a slightly lighter bike.

The biggest challenge had been fitting it all in, while keeping it strong and handling like the real thing, he said.

The result was a quiet - silent when not moving - emission-less road bike capable of getting to Lower Hutt and back on one charge, or further around town.

Around town at about 50kph it did 150km on one charge.

"If you go for a spirited ride over the Paekak Hill and back it will do 80 to 90km."

It did not have the performance of the Triumph, which reached 270kph, but it was no slug either. The 8kWh power supply produced up to 37kW and 130Nm of torque.

That equated to a top speed of about 160kph, and zero to 100kph in about nine seconds.

"It's a blast to ride. It's totally different, there's a bit of a whine and that's all you hear, so when you're doing 120kph ... all you hear is wind noise. There's no other sound and it feels like you're going a lot faster."

Plugging it into the wall at home with a standard charger, the bike took about eight hours to fully charge from empty. But it could be charged in 20 minutes with an expensive high speed charger.

It was his first such project, but after many years working as an electronic technician and engineer and a life-long love affair with bikes, it was, perhaps, destiny.

He worked through his home-based consulting firm, and for the past 2 1/2 years had been working with renewable energy.

"I do a lot of evaluations of products ... and one of them was electric scooters ... They were a lot of fun, but they would only do 50kmh, and I thought, 'what would it be like to build a full sized electric sport bike?' At that stage there was a few guys starting to look at it overseas, but this one's the first full sized bike in New Zealand."

It was certified and registered as an electric bike.

It was powered by a United States-made electric motor, originally designed for racing golf carts.

A 27-cell lithium ion phosphate battery pack stored 8kWh of power and was controlled by a system designed by Mr Jerrett's company, Astara Technologies.

The system monitored each cell's condition and reported it to an electronic readout on the dash. The battery pack delivered its energy via a fully programmable motor controller.

The motor could spin at a wide range of speeds, allowing it to go from zero to 160kph in one gear.

It also allowed for programmable regenerative braking, meaning power was returned to the battery when the rider decelerated or braked.

Mr Jerrett had been tempted to make a full electric race bike, given the introduction of an international race series for such bikes in Britain's Isle of Man last year, but thought a commuter bike was more practical.

He was enthusiastic about developing the technology further and eager to start on another project, be it another bike or a car.

"The intention at this stage is to get people interested in the whole technology. Electric vehicles are going great overseas as far as development is concerned ... the point of this was to evaluate the technology and see whether what they're saying about it is actually correct, whether the cells will go as long as they say, how long they will last."

The bike was a head turner with the word electric written across the side of it, and "gets people thinking about zero emissions", and the cost aspect.

While not cheap to build, it was to run  costing about $1.40 in electricity for 100km, he said.

The bike featured about $25,000 worth of parts, mainly because of the cost of the batteries, and had taken about 500 hours of labour, he said. But it was a prototype and to make commercially would be a lot cheaper.

He said the project had underlined how New Zealand needed to catch up with Europe and provide charging stations to encourage electric vehicles.

"I think as a country we have to start looking forward, away from fuel, regardless of whether it's peak oil or not. There's [still] the pollution that comes out of the exhaust."