Back in late September, the US House of Representatives passed an amendment that gives manufacturers of two-wheel electric vehicles access to Department of Energy funding, which should enable them to continue their research into better technology.

The amendment was included in HR 3246, the Advanced Vehicle Technology Act and passed the House on September 16, 2009, 312-114.

This is the first time that two-wheel vehicles have been given federal Department of Energy funding.

See the source at All About Bikes.

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Brammo Enertia Electric Motorcycle

Ashland, Oregon – November 10, 2009 – BRAMMO, maker of plug-in electric motorcycles, announced today it is dropping the price of the all-electric BRAMMO Enertia powercycle, to $7,995.  Customers are also eligible for a 10% federal income tax credit, further reducing the price to $7,195.

“While this pricing breakthrough is innovative in transportation, it is in line with consumer electronics, where engineering and production advances get passed on to customers as quickly as possible to stimulate adoption of the technology,” stated Craig Bramscher, founder and CEO of Brammo.  “The Enertia is consumer electronics that you can ride and BRAMMO’s engineers are able to deliver a better value proposition to customers sooner than a traditional transportation company.”

Today, qualified customers can walk into select Best Buy stores and with a $2,000 down payment, ride out on an Enertia for $249 a month with 24-month no interest with payments financing offered through Best Buy.  The Enertia can also be purchased direct from www.BRAMMO.com in select states where the product is not yet available at a Best Buy.

The BRAMMO Enertia powercycle is the ideal commuter vehicle as it blends an exhilarating ride experience with environmental consciousness and low operating costs. The Enertia has a top speed of over 60 mph, has a range of 42 miles and charges in about four hours by plugging into a standard wall outlet—all while using less than a dollar in electricity per 100 miles ridden.

“With this price reduction Brammo has positioned electric vehicles for the mass market and consumers can now be part of a solution to the transportation crises that America is facing,” said Bramscher.  “The wait is over, consumers can now buy an EV that is price competitive with a gas burning alternative and enjoy reduced maintenance and substantially lower ownership costs.”

Fans and media can follow Brammo on Twitter @BrammoSays and on its Facebook fan page, Brammo Powercycles

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Ebike manufacturer Hero Electric, founded by entrepreneur Naveen Munjal, leads India’s e-bikes market. Munjal is also head of the Society of Manufacturers of Electric Vehicles.

There are two e-bike categories: high-power bikes and low-power bikes. Low-power, which have a maximum speed of 25 km per hour, do not require registration or a driving licence. These bikes constitute about 75 per cent of the e-bikes in India. Although more Indians are purchasing the bikes, they command less than two per cent of India’s bike market. Munjal anticipates that this will go up to seven to 10 per cent in five years.

The e-bike niche is being harmed because there is a lack of stringent testing by the Indian goverment, so substandard bikes are imported and sold. As with any product, if one e-bike lets a customer down, it is likely to sour him or her on the whole product.

Read more at DowntoEarth.com.

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Brammo Enertia Front

The United States House of Representatives has unanimously passed an amendment giving two-wheel electric vehicles manufacturers access to Department of Energy funding for further development of electric vehicles.

The amendment was included in HR 3246, the Advanced Vehicle Technology Act and passed the House on September 16, 2009, 312-114.

For the EV industry this will allow, for the first time, two wheel vehicles to benefit from federal Department of Energy funding.

Brammo, maker of the plug-in electric Enertia powercycle, applauds the House for including two-wheel vehicles in this amendment, and encourages the Senate to follow suit.

“It’s gratifying to see the House of Representatives recognize the tremendous potential of the two-wheel electric vehicle industry and their recent move to better equalize federal government support between electric motorcycles and cars,” said Craig Bramscher, BRAMMO founder and CEO.  “Brammo appreciates the efforts of U.S. Representative Patrick J. Kennedy and the rest of the House to gain passage of this important amendment and we look forward to continuing our work with our industry coalition partners, Plug IN America (www.pluginamerica.org), who was also instrumental in getting this legislation passed.”

Brammo encourages voters to take a moment to tell their United States Senator’s to support and pass this measure when it comes up to vote. A complete list of Senators and their contact information can be found here.

For the latest news from Brammo, follow us on Twitter at @BrammoSays.

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Gocycle Full Review

London, England — Formula One designer Richard Thorpe has designed the Go-Cycle, an “electric-assist” bicycle, or e-bike for short. (It’s an inconvenient name, in this editor’s opinion. An e-cycle is a motorcycle, an e-bike is a bike, and never the twain should meet! Ed.)

Three reviews of the Go-Cycle have appeared to date:

TreeHugger
Times Online
The Guardian).

If you live in a town full of hills, or have a medical condition which has weakened either your legs or your respiratory system, an electric-assisted bike could be just the thing to get you back outdoors.

Although e-bikes are manufactured from light-weight materials, the battery and motor make it heavy.

The £1198 sticker price for the Go-Cycle is a bit daunting. Indeed, to date most electric vehicles are more expensive than their petrol counterparts.

E-bikes are more difficult to fix, should they break down.

However, as technology improves, all those problem factors will dissipate.

Source:
TreeHugger

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Santa Barbara, CA — Trikke Tech, Inc., the world leader in 3-point carving vehicles for all seasons, announced the “Tribred Pon-e”, an addition to its line of light electric carving vehicles. “We anticipate that Tribred will be embraced as a breakthrough product line because it can be used for commuter transportation, exercise, and just having a blast,” said John Simpson, CEO of Trikke Tech. “Thanks to the Pon-e, it feels like I’m downhill skiing to and from work these days. And, more importantly, it’s one less car on the road.”

Built on top of the popular and proven T8Air chassis, the Tribred Pon-e differs from the earlier Free Rein Model primarily in that it has a lighter, more powerful Lithium Ion Battery, compared to the Free Rein’s Lead-Acid battery. Both models will remain in production to provide consumers with choices in price points and battery capacity options.

The Tribred Pon-e is capable of reaching 18 MPH on flat ground and traveling up to 20 miles on a single charge. The average cost of a full battery charge during the test period was $0.07, which works out to literally fractions of a cent per mile. The entire unit only weights 40 lbs and quickly folds down for ease of transport and storage. In addition to the LI battery, the Pon-e also has dual rear disc brakes. Plus, a rider can optionally go faster and further by “carving”, that fluid motion that generates energy to propel the vehicle forward, and feels much like downhill skiing.

New Trikke Tribred Electric: Save money, save gas and have fun – while you help save the planet J .

About Trikke Tech, Inc.

Trikke Tech, Inc. is the world leader in 3-point carving vehicles for recreation, exercise and personal transportation. In business since 2000, Trikke Tech has sold hundreds of thousands of vehicles to enthusiasts worldwide with its patented technology. The product line includes the new Tribred electric vehicles, human powered vehicles and the Skki – a downhill snow vehicle. Trikke Tech is based in Santa Barbara County, California.

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NEW BEDFORD, Massachusetts (CNN)

The Vectrix VX-1 maxi scooter, which weighs 515 pounds,  requires a motorcycle license to drive.  Part of that weight is the  180-pound battery – for the Vectrix is electric.
In 2008, the  Vectrix VX-1 cost $8,000.

“The cost of new technology is always higher than old technology,” explains Mike Boyle, Vectrix’s CEO. “You may win [people's] minds and hearts through the understanding of what an electric vehicle can bring to them. You then have to win their pocketbooks as well.”

There’s stimuli in Obama’s stimulus plan for the electric vehicle – there are proposed tax credits for those who buy plug-in electric vehicles. Depending on the size of the battery, the credit can reach up to $7,500.

Peter Hughes, Vectrix’s chief technology officer, said the scooter was designed to suit the needs of a commuting executive.

“Think about the lawyer; think about the businessman, the banker, the engineer who doesn’t want to take his car into the city. He has about a 20- to 40-mile round-trip commute.”

The scooter can go about 50 to 60 miles when fully charged and can reach speeds up to about 60 mph. It’s also the only electric scooter on the market that’s highway legal.

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HIllsoro, Oregon — The city of Hillsboro is installing 16 charging stations for electric vehicles. They are scheduled to be completed by spring, 2010.

The system is called ChargePoint.

The stations, to be installed by Coulomb Technologies of Campbell, Calif., will include several features, including the ability to e-mail the owner when a vehicle is fully charged, and the ability for drivers to find unoccupied charging stations with web-enabled cell phones, and systems designed to prevent energy theft.

It won’t cost anything to plug in to the Coulomb stations…for now. Future plans do include a cost, however – drivers will have to purchase their power via credit cards in the future.
The state of Oregon currently has about three-dozen electric vehicle charging stations, including these PGE demonstration stations each with four 120-volt outlets:

Lake Oswego Charging Station, 2nd and A streets, Lake Oswego;

OMSI Charging Station, 1245 SE Water Ave., Portland;

World Trade Center, parking garage at 26 SW Salmon St., Portland;

PGE Salem Office Charging Station, 4245 Kale St NE, Salem;

Oregon City Charging Station, 1220 Main Street, Oregon City;

Source: Oregon Dept. of Transportation
“We’re committed to providing the infrastructure so our citizens will feel comfortable buying and using electric vehicles,” David Robinson, Hillsboro’s director of facilities and fleets, said Monday. “It’s exciting to see Hillsboro on the leading edge of this technology.”

The first of the 16 stations, to cost a total of $50,000, is to be installed by the weekend of Aug. 7- 8 in front of the Civic Center on Main Street in time for the city’s Celebrate Hillsboro.

Hillsboro plans to ultimately buy a total of 47 car-charging stations from Coulomb.

Electric vehicles are highly efficient, with fuel costs of 2 cents or less per mile. A big obstacle to wide adoption is the absence of a statewide charging network, James said.

“People have to get over ‘range anxiety,’ worries that they won’t have enough power to get home,” James said. “We could begin seeing mass deployment of charging stations in first quarter of 2010.”

There are only about 400 all-electric vehicles registered in Oregon now, but the state DOT estimates that within a decade plug-in cars could account for as much as 20 percent of new vehicles sold in Oregon.

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USA – In May, 2009, Best Buy will begin selling electric motorcycles along with the other electric bikes, Segway transporters and scooters.

Speculation began that Best Buy would start selling the electric motorcycles back in March. That’s when Brammo CEO Craig Bramscher told attendees at the Pacific Crest Clean Technology Conference that they had approached Best Buy about offering the bikes through its retail outlets.

The Brammo Enertia, which plugs into a wall outlet and when fully charged can travel 45 miles at speeds of up to 53 miles an hour, gets the equivalent of 373 miles per gallon and costs less than 1 cent per mile to run.

Best Buy hasn’t officially stated when the Enertias will be on sale at retail locations, however. Brammo’s MSRP is $11,995.

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BOULDER, Colo. — The world’s fastest electric motorcycle is the KillaCycle.

Its creators, Bill Dubé and Eva Hakansson, are debuting their cycle in educational institutions aruond the country.

In May, 2009 professor Jean Koster  (aerospace engineering) welcomed the Killa Cycle and its creators to his  Alternative Energy Electric Vehicles class,  the first of its kind at CU.

Koster wishes to start a major project to build electric vehicles at CU in the next few years.

“The way Dubé and Hakansson designed the vehicles and how they approached the whole development is similar technology to what we would like to follow,” Koster said.

The KillaCycle dragbike goes from zero to 60 mph in less than a second. Dubé said the vehicle is silent, aside from some chain and tire noise.

The bike is powered by an  A123 Systems lithium ion battey, which he said are the world’s most powerful and the next generation of batteries. The bike weighs 653 pounds, including 200 pounds of battery weight.

Dubé is a scientist at CU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and works on his bike in his spare time.

“I do this as a hobby,” he said. “I use my disposable income to build this. When it comes to the electric vehicle, it’s all about the battery.

The KillaCycle made electric drag-racing history in October 2008 with a new world record at Bandimere Speedway in Morrison, covering a quarter mile in 7.89 seconds at 168 mph.

Source: ColoradoDaily.com

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