Battery tech has to improve - they do not last as long as the marketing says. do not give the range that marketing says. the batteries are too expensive to replace.
In October 2010 i put an electric kit on my road bike (pedal). It was expensive (1800$) but used LifePO4 battery that (marketing) said would last atleast 2000 charges. So that was over 5 yrs at charging it every day.
loved the kit. was fun zipping around town. stock speed was 32kph but i had it derestricted so speed was 45kph. I never found out what the range was because my trips would be done b4 it ran out of power (trips were 20 to 60 km)
so sometime around April/May 2011 i took the bike back to the dealer because the motor started cutting out as i was riding along. The kit was under warranty for 12months. but they could not tell me why it was doing this. It was fine with a fresh charge but got worse as i went along. I thot maybe it was heat because of going too fast on hills (over heating the controller)
so come November 2011 (warranty over) with the problem getting worse and worse. Could barely go 2 km without it cutting out. The dealer says it is a bad cell in the battery and they would be happy to sell me a new battery pack for $800
so after a year and approx 300 charge cycles (so much for the minimum 2000 ) the battery was toast. Did not buy a new battery and removed the kit shortly after.
Not saying in your case this is the issue, but how you treat the battery has a lot to do with how long it last. In general, even with lipos, you want to run it down until the volt limiter turns it off, always balance and charge if you have more than 1 cell, only half charge the battery for storage (if the product is not going to be used for a long time), and no trickle charge, which shouldn't be an issue if you use the right charger. People constantly charge their cell phone and laptop batteries all the time even when they don't need too. I usually run mine down all the way then charge and then unplug the charger when the battery is full. If you keep topping off the battery all the time and not letting it run down than it wont last long, even on a lipo and even though they dont have a memory.
How is it green transport ? It's not. No it doesn't use gas but how is the electricity produced that charges it? Or the nickel mining to produce battery's. in no way shape or form are any of these electric cars,bikes etc green.
The Following User Says Thank You to Joeboo For This Useful Post:
Gas engine are 30% efficient at best. We rarely used them in the best range which is 90% load just below the first torque peak. Cars are lucky to turn 15% of the gasoline energy into forward motion. Electric motors can be 85% efficient most of the time. Even with line and battery losses, electric vehicles can easily be 75% efficient. Electricity can come more and more from green sources such as hydro, wind, solar, and nuclear. It is very inefficient to renew carbon fuels. There are also efficiencies of scale by producing electricity in a big power plant versus putting fuel in a gas engine vehicle. The newest natural gas powerplants are boasting 60% efficiencies. Put that fuel in a car and you will still only get 20% out of it.
.
Electric vehicles are very green for short to medium commutes. The limitation is energy storage for cross country trips. And also for battery cycle life. As big as the battery is in the Nissan Leaf, it only stores as much energy as what is in 1 gallon of gas and you will be lucky to get 2000 charges out of it if you run it low all the time. But it will return 95 mpge. The best streamlined electric motorcycles could get 400 mpge at 100kph.
Very green.
Until charge times equal fill time of gas/diesel vehicles I'm not interested. I'd hate to be stranded at home/work because I forgot to plug my car in. And what about long trips?
You also have to factor in that batteries don't last forever and will need to be replaced. Cold weather also kills batteries which may be a problem up here in the north.
ICE is a proven, reliable technology that isn't going away any time soon.
ICE is a proven, reliable technology that isn't going away any time soon.
You have about 100 years left for personal ownership of internal combustion engines. Better to start learning and phasing in an alternative as soon as possible than wait until things really get tight and be caught with nothing to fall back on but muscle and firewood.
You have about 100 years left for personal ownership of internal combustion engines. Better to start learning and phasing in an alternative as soon as possible than wait until things really get tight and be caught with nothing to fall back on but muscle and firewood.
That's fine if you want to be an early adopter. I'll wait until they work the bugs out.
You have to look at the big picture, electric cars & bikes still need electricity to charge them. A nuclear power plant isn't green, u need plutonium then fresh water to keep the reactor cool, look at Chernobyl when that went wrong!! You have to mine for copper, nickel etc for the battery's so that's not green, all the way from start to finish these are not green toys. Yes it is a more efficient motor but the cost to the environment out ways the benefit.
Chernobyl was a highly flawed design with a positive void coefficient and graphite tips on the control rods. We would obviously never want any more of those around. Fukushima shows that we simply needed water towers to gravity feed cooling water in the event of a massive flood taking out the back up diesel generators.
.
Gen I and currently operating Gen II reactors were designed 50 years ago by reletive scientific cave men doing calculations on slide rules and chalk boards. The emerging Gen IV designs such as the Pebble Bed reactor will be much, much better in all regards.
.
Nuclear fuel is the second primordial gift and will maintain us 100's of years after every last drop of fossil fuel has been sucked dry. To think that 10 billion hungry people in 2112 will leave either one of these resources untouched is completely naive.
Chernobyl was a highly flawed design with a positive void coefficient and graphite tips on the control rods. We would obviously never want any more of those around. Fukushima shows that we simply needed water towers to gravity feed cooling water in the event of a massive flood taking out the back up diesel generators.
.
Gen I and currently operating Gen II reactors were designed 50 years ago by reletive scientific cave men doing calculations on slide rules and chalk boards. The emerging Gen IV designs such as the Pebble Bed reactor will be much, much better in all regards.
.
Nuclear fuel is the second primordial gift and will maintain us 100's of years after every last drop of fossil fuel has been sucked dry. To think that 10 billion hungry people in 2112 will leave either one of these resources untouched is completely naive.
The thorium fail-safe reactors are always 10 years away, but if they ever nail it down, that's a winner for sure. In the meantime, CANDU seems to be the safest and most proven design.
I'm more for a nationwide "war-effort" level buildout of solar infrastructure. Take those shuttered factories in the Middle West wasteland, retool them for solar production, hire a a half million people to build and install them and then sell them to American homeowners at a 90% subsidized price. It would not only reduce fossil fuel usage for years to come and have ever-increasing effects of lowering utility bills, but would also distribute electricity generation and make the grid more robust. Natural disasters and big storms would no longer necessarily knock you offline for a week or more.
The Following User Says Thank You to NSU For This Useful Post:
I agree. It should be code for all new housing builds to have the major roof section angled for optimum solar panel placement. Then cheap, low efficiency flexible solar voltaic films could be rolled out as the roofing material on that side.
CBR250r
) the battery was toast. Did not buy a new battery and removed the kit shortly after.
2007 Honda Cbr125r
Stoner
