Ebike Industry Updates

Looking down at the odometer on my Luna X-1 I realized that I had just turned over 2000km on the clock. For normal ebikes 2000km is not much of a milestone, but considering how I only ride my X-1 on trails and thrash on it pretty hard every day I thought I would do an article on how it has held up and the good, the bad and the ugly about this bike. There is a lot of components I have replaced due to failures or just because I wanted to, there is nothing that I have done to this bike that I have regretted. I bought the X-1 on June 2019 and paid $3305 for it from Lunacycle. At the time of purchase this was the most money I had ever spent on an ebike by a far margin. The X-1 is no longer sold but has been superseded by the X-2 and the X-2.5 which I have not ridden.

A very well loved and more than slightly abused 4.5 year old Lunacycle X-1 with the Ludicrous controller

My morning routine is always about the same, I wake up and get on my double diaper (chamois shorts) on and head out the door to ride. I go biking before I eat or turn on a computer or do anything else because I know if I don’t get out to ride in the first part of the day, I probably won’t get to ride that day, and the dude cannot abide.

My biggest complaint about the X-1 is the noise that the steel gear makes. It’s a bit loud, and not super stealthy like the BBSHD with the nylon gear. The newest X-2.5 (available here) uses a peek/carbon gear which should be a much quieter. The other issue I have had is there is a large ring bearing in the front faceplate that occasionally makes a lot of noise. It has already failed once and I could not get the bearing pressed out of the faceplate so Luna just sent me a new faceplate with a bearing in it. Every issue I’ve had with this ebike Luna has been absolutely incredible with helping me get parts for it at a very reasonable price. I would give their service department a 10/10 rating.

The metal piece that the rear through axle screws into has stripped threads so if I don’t tighten it down super tight it gets loose on its own. This has never been enough of an issue to try to fix, but the axle is on so tight that I can’t get it loose on the trails without special tools.

This is a 6-seat electric aircraft that uses four “stowaway” rotors for initial lift, and one rear-facing propeller for sustained flight. Several years ago they started with a prototype that did not have any of the vertical-lift features, called the CX300. It also used a single rear-facing propeller, which would take off and land on conventional runways.

Over two years, the CX300 has flown 22,000 miles, and has been evaluated by FAA and military test pilots. It has flown 386 miles on a single battery charge. The CX300 is designed for short-haul medical, cargo, and passenger operations at a lower operational cost. Its design is based on an operational niche where the FAA stated that “More than a third of all global flights today are actually less than 500 miles”

Several companies have demonstrated a working “solid state battery” prototype, and not only are SSB’s fire-safe, They allow rapid charging and over a 50% increase in range per volume. Every EV industry will be affected by the improvements that SSB’s provide, but the Aircraft industry will be impacted the most by viable SSB’s.

BT said the cost to fly the CX300 about 150 miles was $17 in electricity, and the conventional turbine plane that flew next to it cost Beta $700 worth of Jet-A fuel.

___________________________________________________

I like hybrid electrical powertrains, so I was excited to see these being produced. Some of our readers may remember an article I wrote on the history of hybrid cars and in that article I listed quite a few of the newest hybrids that are available to the public (click here to see that article)

Don’t get me wrong, I still do love EV’s, but…by me supporting hybrids, it allows both sides to hate me! But are there any “real” benefits to a hybrid? I’d say yes, and I think the major one is the charging infrastructure. I live in a small town in central Kansas, and if I bought any kind of EV, I’d need to have my own charger in my garage. I don’t know what someone would have to do if they lived in a rental, and it seems as though the entire next generation will have to rent while being unable to afford to buy a house.

That being said, as you cross the country, sometimes the public chargers are full with a waiting line, or they are broken and don’t work, or they are even the wrong type of charger. (To see our article on charging plug standards, click here). With a hybrid drivetrain, there is no range anxiety, because you have an engine on board to drive a generator.

A “parallel hybrid” is like a Toyota Prius that allows a motor OR engine to drive the transmission, but…the Edison trucks have a series-hybrid drivetrain where the engine only drives a generator. Edison uses a large battery pack, which also makes it a “plug in” hybrid, meaning it has the capability to operate as an electric only drivetrain for short ranges, and this is my personal favorite style.

In fact, the series-hybrid drivetrain is well known from cargo-train locomotives all across the world, and also from WWII submarines. I was a crew-member on a nuclear-powered submarine from 1978 till 1981, and even though the reactor simply made steam for a very simple turbine drive, we also had a series-hybrid diesel-electric back-up system, and that Fairbanks-Morse diesel was a part of my job. I’m sure it’s obsolete tech by now, and we used a very large room-sized lead-acid battery, but…none-the-less…my submarine could make it home on the diesel-electric drive if needed.

My good friend Laurence Clarkberg is the one who destroyed my life about a decade ago by selling me my first ebike. He decided to build an ebike that could take him and his wife Judy across the country in comfort and style so he built the Sun Pony. I love this build because it reminds me of what is possible if you ignore what everyone else is doing and think outside the box. Watching this ebike go down the road brings me so much joy it’s hard to describe. This build reminds me of seeing Amish time traveling back from the future. Ironically a lot of Amish communities have been embracing ebikes and solar panel\powerstations for charging which I have to admit I totally love.

One of the main thing that makes this build unique is that it has 3 different shark packs paired with different motors giving it triple redundancy. The two mid drives are TSDZ2 systems which work well with this trike because they actually allow you to pedal backwards which is necessary to activate the coaster brakes that come stock with this tricycle. The BBS02/BBSHD have a double clutch system which means when you pedal backwards only the pedals move and the chain does not move. The mid drive batteries are plugged in continuously to the solar panels which each have their own Genasun 52v lithium battery MPPT charge controller from Grin (max charging speed is 8 amps).

Here you can see the left mid drive and 2 sharkpacks

Originally the trike came with a large drum brake in the front wheel, but Laurence replaced it with a Grin All-Axle motor and a separate shark pack. This Direct Drive motor allows the trike to have regen braking to help recover energy that might otherwise be lost going down hills. Laurence did not like how weak the rear coaster brakes were so he custom welded a brake attachment point on the front steel forks. Also the Grin All-Axle motor comes with a large built-in torque arm so you don’t have to worry about the dropouts ripping out from all the torque on the front motor.

Here you can see the custom welded front disk brake with a huge rotor for better stopping power

I’m not going to say that making a motor from scratch is “easy”, but…if you decide you simply have to build one, then the Lebowski Axial is probably the “easiest” one to make, and I have been studying these things for a while. Most motors are “radial flux” which is like a cup spinning inside another cup that’s slightly larger. However, there are some axial-flux motors that are available to buy, and the axials are configured like one plate spinning next to another plate (as seen in the pics here).

If this interests you, I recommend that you first take a quick skim through the pictures in our article “Motor tech, Learn the Terms”. Many common questions you might have about motors will be answered in that article, so I’m writing this as if you have already read that.

I believe inrunner radials are more popular for non-hubmotor applications because they are easier to cool passively with the stator having the outer aluminum fins attached to it. Outrunner hubmotors can add ferro-fluid to dramatically increase passive cooling. If you can increase the heat-shedding in a motor design, this means you can temporarily use massive amps for acceleration. For a short while, Zero motorcycles used an early Motenergy axial-flux design that had a single rotor in the center, and two stators with one on each side. Adding air-fans or liquid-cooling can help, but having the hot coils near the airflow around the vehicle helped the passive heat-shedding.

The downside of an axial-flux is that in order to make the motor more powerful, you can keep adding stators and rotors of the same diameter (which makes the motor wider), but…the stators nested in the center of the motor have a difficult time passively shedding heat. Once an engineer adds liquid-cooling to the equation to get heat out of the core, the added complexity, weight, and cost can make other designs more desirable.

My interest in non-hubmotor DIY motors is because of my concern that in the future, there might be a trade embargo affecting products from China. To be fair, you would still need to buy Neodymium magnets and also the enameled magnet-wire to build this, and both of those are likely going to be found as manufactured in China.

One of the most often asked questions about any electric conversion is “what controller should I use?”. Controllers are the last remaining voodoo in electric systems, and they are not easy to understand. I have picked up a few bits and pieces over the years, but to be honest, I have to trust in the opinions of other people who are more experienced than me when it comes to controllers.

Our custom builds article (click here to see that) shows several examples of ebikes using RC controllers, which for some reason are called “Electronic Speed Controllers” or ESC. They are tiny compared to the amount of peak amps they can flow. However, they typically could not provide high amps for long, since they were never designed to power an ebike.

These expensive tiny controllers used proprietary software, so…in 2014, a Swedish electronics engineer Named Benjamin Vedder designed an “open source” ESC-style of controller. This meant that anybody could build one from scratch and could also program it with free shared software. You could even alter the software to improve it or add new features. This type of controller is a Vedder-ESC, or VESC.

The first ones were very small for operating a powered skateboard, and similar devices. However, it is easily scalable to any size, and “3shul Motors” is a company in India that has slowly increased the sizes of their VESC models to the point where you can now get one that uses 126V and provides a peak of 1400 phase amps.

I have been hearing about VESC-based controllers for a few years, and I kept an eye out for conversions that used them, and now I am featuring two of those builds here below.

This is big news, but there’s not much to add after reading the title. Tesla did two very important things early on. The first is that they developed a charging system where the design really makes sense for technical reasons. The second thing they did was to build thousands of Tesla “Super Chargers” just about everywhere.

______________________________________________

The Tesla NACS Supercharger Plug

In March of 2021, we wrote about the various proprietary charge plug designs (to see that article, click here)

The CCS “Combined Charging System” on the left, and the Tesla NACS “North American Charging Standard” plug on the right. Right now, NACS already outnumbers CCS charging stations two to one.

I have to confess that I am no expert when it comes to controllers, and when I find someone who has a lot of experience and is honest about the benefits and drawbacks of any given model of controller, I want to hear what that tech has to say.

There are some very good products out there, but if every manufacturer says that their controller is the best, and never tells you why (or they fail to mention any particular weaknesses that it may have) then we can’t make an educated choice.

The reason these tech details are important is because some of the issues are something that we can fix ourselves, and other issues are completely integrated into the design. Plus, most builders don’t have an unlimited budget, so an affordable component that is “fixable” might sometimes be the best option.

I recently stumbled across a youtube channel where they do teardowns of popular EV components, and they spell out the raw data on the guts, both the good and the bad. It’s by Richard, and called “EV Components review (De-bodgery)“

I found his channel looking for info on controllers, and he has quite a few of those. The one in particular that caught my eye is the good review on the Votol EM-150. I pay no attention to someone who says “this is good”, unless they can show me how its different, compared to the one they say is bad….or…I am annoyed of they only tell us the good parts, and leave out glaring weaknesses.

Now that all the electric car charging companies are lining up for handouts from the federal government to expand the US electric charging infrastructure, this is the perfect opportunity for us to force them to implement a handful of things that will greatly improve the integrity and usability of US chargers.

NYC is now spending a whopping $25 million to install ebike chargers for people to use on the streets of NY. I’m not sure how this is going to work and although I understand why they are doing it. They want to cut down on building fires caused by ebike charging in apt buildings that now happen on average once a day. A lot of people have died in these fires so I want to address why they happen and why having ‘ebike chargers’ on the street in NYC are just not going to work.

Installing Electric car chargers to have a small $10 weather resistant 20 amp GFCI outlet on every charger is a no-brainer

The main reason that ebikes burst into flames is because so many cheap Chinese ebikes are built with counterfeit 18650 cells. Unfortudently it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between authentic cells and counterfeit cells made in China just by looking at them. When you build lithium batteries the process for making the cells is very intolerant of moisture as well as any tiny errors in the mixture of elements that make up the ‘jelly roll’ of the 18650. A counterfeit cell can appear like a legit cell from Samsung, LG or Panasonic and can even perform similarly as far as the amount of watts it can deliver on a single charge, but they can be a time bomb waiting to burst into flames at any time.

Can you tell the difference between the fake cell or the real one? No, You really can’t

I was slumming it on Twitter today when I came across the following post:

Say it isn’t so

I started to really think about this chart and started to think about if I agreed with his theory that adding an electric motor on a bike increased the overall load on the bike by 708%. Since most of my time in the last 8 years has been spent repairing destroyed high power ebikes (1000-4000 Watts) I have to actually take this chart into consideration and start thinking about whether throwing on a high power electric mid drive motor really is what has created all this extra time spent repairing ebikes.

When I think about the main issues I’ve had with high power ebikes vs bicycles it really breaks down into these categories (in order of seriousness):

I want to discuss each of these issues individually because they all deserve their own descriptions. This article will not discuss maintenance of motors and batteries, but these items also require a fair amount of maintenance on their own as well that is outside the scope of this article.

These past few months, I have been hearing a lot about the New Talaria Sting, and how it compared to the popular Sur-Ron Light Bee. So many people were impressed by it that I decided to look into whether or not there were any significant differences, and…I did find some important upgrades that I want to desribe here, so lets get to it.

_______________________________________________

Who is Talaria?

I am always skeptical of any new “me too” company that seems to be copying a popular product, but after some digging, Talaria has been importing the Sting for over a year now. The Talaria name is Latin for “winged sandal” which is a reference to the Roman god Mercury, who could fly swiftly because of the magical wings on his sandals. “Talaria Power Tech Chongqing, LTD” does have an office in Hong Kong, but almost all of their operations are in Chongqing, which is located in the mountainous region of central China.

_______________________________________________

Today we’re talking about something near and dear to our hearts: saving cold hard cash. Specifically, how the US Postal Service can save a ton of money by switching from 40 year old Grumman LLV death traps to e-bikes. Now, I know what you’re thinking, “The Postal Service is a government entity, they don’t care about saving money.” Well, you’d be surprised. You see, the Postal Service is actually a business and like any business, they want to cut costs wherever they can. And let me tell you, switching to e-bikes is a surefire way for them to do just that. Not only will they save money on fuel and maintenance, but they’ll also be doing their part in saving the environment. So, strap on your helmets and let’s dive in to how the Postal Service can save some green while going green.

One of several electric vehicles the USPS is testing for mail and package deliveries, I think this design might have a few too many wheels

Fuel and maintenance savings for ebikes compared to gas powered vehicles are insane

The Post Office is still using those gas-guzzling Grumman LLV’s to deliver the mail and those things are about as efficient as putting a drag chute on a submarine.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, “Those Grumman LLV’s have been delivering the mail for 4 decades, what’s the problem?” Well the problem is that they’re not just outdated, they’re costing the Postal Service a fortune in fuel and maintenance costs. But don’t just take my word for it, let’s do some math.

The Post Office has a fleet of thousands of Grumman LLV’s and each one gets around 12 miles per gallon. That means they’re spending about $0.33 per mile on gas. Now, let’s compare that to an e-bike. E-bikes have a cost per mile of less than 1 cent. That’s a saving of over $0.32 per mile. The USPS 208,000 vehicles drive more than 1.1 billion miles each year, using 114.3 million gallons of fuel. If you assume $3.50 a gallon for gas that means they burn through over $400,000,000 a year, if they could swap out even a small number of their mail delivery vehicles in urban areas with ebikes they could cut that number by up to 97% for the fuel savings alone.

I see announcements once in a while about some new EV thing, and when I google it, every EV news outlet just has a copy/paste of the same info over and over. I think this particular motorcycle is very newsworthy, and I decided to see if I could find out some of the details, and here is what I found…

_________________________________________________

A review of Ducati history

The Italian company Ducati is famous for two things. Winning races with advanced tech, and…not making a profit selling road bikes to the public. So, lets start at the beginning.

They are based in the city of Bologna, in northern Italy. This was useful to them, because one of the things Bologna was famous for was their university. Believe it or not, the university was founded in 1088, so that was on the leading edge of every new engineering field. Just after the first world war, the Ducati family formed a small company to make radio components. Their electronics factory was eventually destroyed in WWII, and to survive after the war, they decided to buy small motor kits from “Cucciolo” [*Puppy] and attach them to bicycles, which were desperately needed, since many Europeans could not afford a car at the time.

Electric cars are getting most of the buzz these days, but as much as I like them (and I DO like them), I think for the next twenty years a plug-in hybrid has a LOT going for it, and I like the take this opportunity to explain why it’s not a bad idea. My son now has a Tesla Model-3, but before that he had a Chevy Volt for many years, and when I drove it a few times, I was really impressed.

Parallel Hybrid: The engine or the motor can each power the wheels directly as needed.

Series Hybrid: The engine only powers a generator, a battery powers a motor that drives the wheels.

Plug-In Hybrid: Its an electric car that has a smaller battery than normal so the price and the weight can be lower. Most trips are not long distance, but if you ever need to drive on a longer trip, the auxiliary engine/generator will keep the battery topped off.

_____________________________________________________

Energica was formed in 2014 by Giampiero Testoni, head engineer for CRP Racing, which had won several European championships in the popular 250cc motorcycle class (they are also involved in F1 car racing parts design and production). He was approached in 2009 by the organizers of the TTXGP zero-carbon race (held on the Isle of Man), to encourage them to participate and design an electric race-bike. For the TTXGP electric race series to be successful, they needed several different credible competitors, and CRP was identified as a team that had the resources and a standing in the racing community that made them a good fit.

One year later in 2010, the “eCRP 1.4” bike won the European electric championship, so…I guess they figured out that whole “electric racing” thing…

Testoni’s team was able to build a running prototype of a production model for sale to the public, in time for the 2011 EICMA show in Milan. Based on the overwhelming interest shown, he forged ahead with plans for a series of production motorcycle models. They have their headquarters in Modena, right in the middle of the “motor valley”. This is also home to to Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini…along with dozens of smaller custom design and manufacturing companies that serve the sports vehicle industry.

On the left is Livia Cevolini, a mechanical engineer and CEO of Energica. On the right is Giampiero Testoni, mechanical engineer, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Energica. And yes, they both ride…

__________________________________________________

I’ve always loved vintage conversions to electric power. Dan is located in Kansas, and one day he showed his wife some pictures of motorcycles to see what kind she likes, and they settled on a vintage Honda from this era. It didn’t take long for him to find one in decent shape with a seized engine for only $500. I’ve also heard of builders buying an example that was running, and then selling the engine and transmission to someone who is restoring one, for near the cost of the entire purchase.

This particular model is a 160cc “Baby Dream” (made between 1966-69), and Dan has decided to call it the Dream-E.

In the pic above, Dan has stripped the frame down quite a bit (you can see the front wheel on the floor in the background). I love the style of the classic “toaster” gas tank, which Dan made sure to keep. You can also see how Honda made the frame out of two halves of pressed sheet-metal, rather than the common welded cylindrical tubes. Doing it this way can be lighter and more affordable to produce. If you ever want to search for something similar, make absolutely certain that the frame is not damaged by deep rust. However, mild dents and paint are not a problem, as you will soon see below.

Another benefit of this style of frame is that the engine is a stressed member, so there is no downtube curving under the engine. Any battery box that might be mounted in this space will also have to “hang” from the top and rear, but there are no frame-members that will interfere with the size and shape of the battery box.

Now that Dan had the frame in-hand, he can take measurements on the swingarm spacing, and order the motor that he has selected.

There has been a lot of controversy about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and subsequent selling of $40 Billion dollars of Tesla (TSLA) stock to finance the deal and keep Twitter solvent. There has been a lot of takes on this situation, but the one thing that no one seems to be talking about, especially the liberals is how this represents one of the largest wealth tranfers from the richest person in the world mostly into the hands of retail stock investors. Institutional investors tend to shy away from TSLA (only 43.5% of the stock is held by institutions). For long Tesla retail investors this is a once in a lifetime buying opportunity.

Elon sold another 3$ Billion dollars worth of stock between 12/12 and 12/14

Over the past 5 years I have spent $85,000 on solar panels, installed 7 heat pumps, put in another 12Kw of off grid solar panels on my wife’s house and purchased an electric Bolt for 1/2 price new. At this point I can say that I have personally kicked the fossil fuel addiction although the total cost to do so was a lot. I was looking for other ways to invest my money into moving humanity towards a sustainable future this year and decided investing in Tesla was a good choice. Since I have made that investment my stocks have dropped over 46% to date. When that happened I doubled down and at the same time as struggling to pay off my margin calls (don’t ever trade on margin) I moved all my retirement funds in both my Traditional IRA and Roth IRA from mutual funds to TSLA stock. One of the things that has really bothered me about investing in mutual funds is most of the index and mid cap funds invest in a lot of businesses that are contributing massively to global warming and trying to block progress with sustainable energy. I learned a valuable lesson that I should never trade on margin with TSLA stock dropping 46%, but instead of being upset about the dropping stock price I just doubled my investment in TSLA. I plan on investing over a 10-20 year period so it doesn’t matter that much if I bought the stock at $300 or $156. This is not investing advice, it’s just what I’ve personally done.

Some of my liberal friends are extremely toxic when it comes to Musk. I ask them to point to a single person who is alive who has done more to move humanity to sustainable energy than he has, I have never heard a good response to that. For all of his faults, what he has accomplished is astounding and I’m sure that no matter how much of his stock he sells off, he will be able to make it back in the future. The thing that amazes me is that no one is really talking about what an act of philanthropy it is for him to be selling off his stock in large chunks when the price is so low, thus driving the price even lower for retail investors. Warren Buffet said once that you can think of buying opportunities like this as a punch card you get for your life where there is only a small number of punches you get and you have to recognize when one of these opportunities present itself.

For politicians that constantly deride the capitalist system for the way massive amounts of wealth accumulate with a few individuals they should be rejoicing that the wealth from Elon Musk is very rapidly transferring from over to retail TSLA investors. Hallelujah.