Guy converted a GPR 50 into a direct drive electric bike.

Video is about 4 minutes: talks about the bike a bit, then takes us for a ride on it.

0-60 in about 9 seconds, 75 mph top speed

Again, I realize some GS members have already seen this

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ForkenSwift cheap electric car conversion- Geo Metro fuel economy mpg modifications

that's way cool. Did he ever say what his range is?

I would guess the range is in the 20-30 miles the etek motors are not that efficient and he has a pretty heavy frame and battery set to haul around.

Of course, if he used an actual transmission he could have a much longer range.

Jan - did you know that Mike Dabrowski can get 25+ miles using an Etek at 48V to push his Honda Insight - probably 3-4x heavier than this bike. (Granted this is at about 30 mph.) http://www.99mpg.com/TheBestHybridmix/

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ForkenSwift cheap electric car conversion- Geo Metro fuel economy mpg modifications

Range is around 15 miles, according to the comments under his video. Doesn't say at what speeds. Says it's due to the batts.

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ForkenSwift cheap electric car conversion- Geo Metro fuel economy mpg modifications

Yeah they have a lot of power but they will not last too long - brushes and lots of cooling required which are wear and inefficiency problems you don't want in a car. If you look at the battery energy calculate the kwh of the pack - in my eCycle powered scooter with lossy 10 inch tires I get about 20-25 miles per kwh of energy. Cars should get about 1/4 that distance on a kwh of energy. Another problem with NiMh batteries is their inefficiency and self discharge - charge them too much and they cook reverse charge from over discharge and they loose a lot of capacity and the bigger the back the more energy you loose - get a couple of kwh of battery and you have to loose more energy that you can imagine. The implimention of the 5th wheel is nice and I thought about doing exactly the same thing in my xB since I have room in back. You don't want to be putting a tranmission on an electric motor if you don't have to because it just adds losses - usually a single reduction with a gates belt or chain is preferred. A hot setup would be a solid slot double stack eCycle rated for 400 amps continuous with maybe the water cooled option to really allow you to push it but air cooling should work just fine. Another thing is to do the math on the life of the batteries and the gains and pretty quick you will find that it doesn't pay.

That is f'in awesome, and implies that an electricified velomobile could weight less, have better acceleration, and much better range with the same setup.

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NOW you have the right idea - really slick aero and a 1 seater with 2/3 wheels plus you invest in a good quantity of Li-Ion cells and the thing would have a range of 100+ miles easy and still be light and the cycle count would be way up there better than lead.

I made a few comments on that video.

Ever hear of Craig Vetter?

yeah but to be useful you have to have some room and be comfortable!

Not to worry, as they designed their faring in such a way that it could be modified to that purpose, at the expense of having a lower frontal area.

Doing such could theoretically yield an 80 mile range bike using lead acid batteries, that achieves such range at real highway speeds around 65-70 mph. NiCds, double that. Thunderskies even more.

I went back and piddled around with numbers/cost for a few battery types, and in price per mile, lead acid batts like the L16H are the cheapest hands down. At the 75A rate they'll run for 3 hours and 45 minutes, and to push a heavy duty WAW'ish deal at 50mph at that rate we'll need three of 'em on the safe side. Cycled to 80% capacity, that gives us ~150 miles per charge, and supposedly, over 700 cycles ~100k miles of life. More if we can keep the speed down.

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968 lbs for 8 6v batteries is a lot of weight and that takes a lot of the power that they contain to get them moving. With that much weight and the weight to support it you are looking at a car size vehicle so derate the range to maybe 75 miles at a 4 hour discharge rate (300ah) . . . add more powerful motor and controller and now 48volts at 75 amps is only 5.5hp (3600 watts) and you are under powered - lead has this effect . . . you hit the wall of power and weight.

I don't think we'd need that many batteries. Something like the WAW needs ~1k watts at 55mph, so if we increase the weight by a factor of ~2, then it'll need ~1100watts@50mph and weight ~700lbs since the 10N difference in rolling friction is small compared to the ~55N required to overcome fluid friction, so an extra ~350lbs only increase the power required at 21.5m/s by ~15%. A L16H will provide 75 amps for 3.75 hours, and three of them, 225 amps, which is 1.35kw at the battery, enough to go ~50mph for ~3 hours assuming we drop to 80% DOD, so ~150 miles.

The advantage being the battery pack will only cost ~$1k and will go over 100k miles, compared to anything else which will require load balancing, cost more, and may not loast as many cycles. The cost being ~1 cent per mile, maybe less as time goes by depending on if the rider doesn't mind having less and less range over time past the 700 cycles. If they can stand the range dropping down to 50-75 miles, the pack may last ~150k miles. Costs would drop even more with the cores on the used batts.

If we're going for high performance, going with NiMH or Li-poly/ion would be the best bet, but they are more expensive per kwh, won't run as many 80% DOD cycles, and are relatively fragile. We can also reduce the reference area, but this impacts the cargo space and relatively large size of the vehicle. Provided the motor/controller last as long as they are rumored to, this setup (extreme economy so to speak) should be half the cost of a gasoline setup during the same timeframe.

I've seen a NiMH that comes close to the lead acidsetup, >1000 cycles at 80% DOD, .1C rates. But it requires the rider to average ~25mph, or else get a really big pack since going ~25mph at .1C rates requires ~200-300 of these 1.2wh batts. A nice advantage is being able to pull 300W from each, for a total of 7.5kw of peak power, much more than a comparable gasoline setup (a gx25 I suppose). But, neway, if the same pack is taken to 50mph, the number of cycles drops down to the 400-500 range, so they cost twice as much as the deep cycle sla. What's really nice about batteries is they can be scaled w/o the loss of efficiency associated with the different sizes of gasoline engines available.

edit- i don't even use proper units when i'm not making mistakes.

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