POLL - Would you buy an electric motorcycle?

No mention of vegetable oils that could be used on the compression ignition (Diesal) engine
which would reduce emissions by over 50% and have virtualy no carbon emissions

but that wouldnt please the oil companies

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At some point down the line I might buy into the electric or Hydrogen ideal - I don’t live in a sprawling crime ridden city where people get stabbed right left and centre, with high rise blocks and 20mph speed limits - so might be interesting. However I would leave it at present, until the Range at speed has increased to 500 miles on a single charge.

I’d love to switch to an electric car… bike, not right now as the mileage is pitiful so I could never warrant it. Unfortunately I live in a flat so neither are viable to me, which is a shame. I genuinely would have switched to an electric car by now if I had parking.

It is unfortunate that the places that would benefit most from electric vehicles are also places that tend not to have off street parking to allow them to be easily recharged.
I suspect that most cars in London are used for short journeys where the limited range isn’t such an issue either.

Councils in London are trying to roll out more chargers on the street at parking bays. It’s just expensive and logistically difficult, but I’m seeing more and more all the time. In time there’ll be chargers everywhere.

And will they be wired up to electrocute any scrotes with vandal intentions?

Once price is reasonable absolutely as long as the range is ok over winter.

Really good point you’ve made. For a routine commute where you can rely on access to charging in both ends, this could work well. For longer rides, adds a new dimension of planning. And adventure where the road takes you is a big part of why we ride.

I do think if some practical problems get solved in the future I would be all in. Parity in pricing with petrol bikes is a factor as well of course. This isn’t like buying a new iPhone!

Good topic this one!

How big and heavy are the batteries? As surely a design for exchangeable batteries would make more sense that only being able to charge in-bike.

You pay a subscription fee, so you just turn up at a charging station (likely a petrol station) where they take you used battery to charge and reuse, and give you a pre-charged one.

This way the recharging time when you are low would be similar to stopping for petrol. Plus it provides a new revenue stream for vehicle manufacturers who can offer their own charging services.

For example, Honda could charge £50 per month to cover fifteen battery exchanges at any Esso and Shell station. Which is also good for petrol stations as it keeps them relevant compared to on-street charging points, getting people into their shops where they make their money.

What am I missing?

The problem is that manufacturers will design, patent and copyright their own battery and claim it is superior to others. So what you will end up with is dozens of different “standards” so you have to hope that the battery exchange place has the one that you need.

Ideally you’ll need a global standard for battery size, capacity, dimensions, electrical specifications. This is never going to happen.

Most mainstream technologies start that way, though. With everyone offering their own thing before market share forces standardization. Why would hat consolidation not also happen with vehicle batteries?

If Yamaha batteries were so widespread that it meant people stopped considering Honda bikes, then Honda would have to change to a compatible format. Just as Phillips and Sony started selling VHS recorders after JVC dominated the market.

But given the push from governments to go green, surely they would impose a particular standard on all new vehicles anyway. Similar to how they currently require them to meet specific emission standards.

Aha, with video recorder formats, the Sony Betamax video cassette was better quality recording/playback than the VHS format. However VHS format dominated the market.

Hopefully, the same does not happen with electric motorcycle batteries or systems.

That’s because VHS allowed porn, Sony wouldn’t allow porn on their format making it instantly less popular

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One thing being a better quality does not mean another is bad quality, though. If it were then it too would be rejected by consumers.

But despite the smaller number of users, Betamax’s quality made it popular enough to continue alongside VHS, as does iOS does with Android, whilst V2000 quietly died much like Windows Phone.

So you could still have two systems. A widespread affordable one that is good enough for most people, and a more expensive one for those who want to pay for the best. It is not as though bikes (two- and four-stroke) and cars (petrol and diesel) have a single standard for how they are fueled.

Nah you could record on VHS but not using Betamax that’s why VHS won to dominate the market.

They were invented as recording systems, so you have always been able to record on Betamax. Pre-recorded videos came when people had the machines.

The problem for Betamax started at the beginning in the U.S. where originally you could only record one hour on a cassette compared to two hours on VHS ones. Which is the difference between a film or just a bit of one. That is what made the later more popular there.

The smaller size of the Betamax cassettes meant the physical tape length was more restricted than for VHS. Although Sony added a long playing mode to double that length, it meant the quality was worse than VHS, losing the advantage. Meanwhile VHS added the same feature making for four-hour recording times. That made a huge difference to Americans wanting to record football or baseball games which last over three hours.

By the time VCRs came to Europe you could get Betamax tapes that recorded for slightly longer than VHS ones. But they were now far more expensive due to having such a small share in the U.S. This meant VHS units had become cheaper to produce due to their much greater demand, and came from multiple manufacturers creating competition to keep prices down.

Although Super VHS was a higher quality than Betamax, and even Super Betamax, neither of those ‘super’ formats never took off because people did not find them worth the significant added cost. Betamax may have been better quality (though the difference between them was exaggerated by Sony using it as a marketing point) but VHS was good enough for most people.

It is pretty widely accepted that the failure of Betamax was that initially limited recording length of the cassettes. And whilst V2000 offered much better quality than Betamax, it arrived far too late that both other formats were already well established, with VHS winning, that it died pretty quickly.

Incidentally, by the mid 1980s there were more VCRs in homes in the U.K. than any other country in the world. Literally the number of machines, not just per population. At the peak over 80% of homes had one.

But, yeah, electric bikes.

Weird… Everybody I knew with a Betamax couldn’t record with them.

To get this back on topic, another forum I on has been talking about using roof installed solar panels to provide the power to recharge electric cars via a storage battery.
A couple of the links someone posted.

And battery storage

Not to dig up an old thread to say I told you so but…

https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/new-tech/yamaha-honda-kawasaki-suzuki-battery-project/

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