Yatri: First electric motorcycle to be made in Nepal
yatrimotorcycles.com
yatrimotorcycles.com
Ultra high end: Harley Davidson Livewire, Zero SR/F
High end: Fuell, Cake
Mid range: Zero S/DS/FX
Low end: Sur-on Light Bee, CSC City Slicker
The biggest problem for electric bikes is recharge time. Motorcycle batteries are physically small and have low range, and take hours to recharge compared to 1-2 minutes to refuel at a gas station. That makes them unusable for anything except city commuting or tossing in the back of a truck on the way to the OHV area. Meanwhile the fastest growing segment in motorcycling is adventure riding, which is for bikes that can be ridden thousands of miles at a time both on and off road (sometimes 50-100 miles away from paved roads or services of any kind).
Are they like 650cc+ with huge fuel tanks? I shudder to think of trying to pick one of those up on a muddy slope...
Anyways, an electric bike that could do ~200 miles seems like it could do well as a replacement for smaller engines, but I haven't seen any dual-sports that realistically claim a range of over 100 miles with normal use, and you're right that that would barely get you away from the major highways in most places.
That said, it’s an interesting thought exercise to go unsupported and make your own (solar) fuel via motorcycle. Of course to maximize charging / travel you’d have to ride at night, which would sort of suck.
They're not that hard to pick up with the right technique/leverage. YouTube has tutorials showing tiny women pick up 800lb bikes, and MOTOTREK has a good video on how to pick up a big bike off of dirt or mud.
Few people take them on the road, they seem to be used mostly in cities, so there's not a big problem with range.
They are small, so you would have less of a problem setting up the charging infrastructure in your house.
Looking forward to see how well the Lightning Strike does.
Compare Model 3 at 4000lbs with a 60kwh battery. Vs a Zero SR at 485lbs and a 14.4kwh battery. The Zero weighs 1/8th as much but the battery is 1/4. The SR has 1/2 range to boot.
Not trying to piss on electric motorcycle by any means. It's just difficult to make an electric motorcycle match a gasoline one spec for spec, especially at the same price point.
As much as I'd love to own an electric bike,vlike a zero, they're still in a premium early adopter phase that I can't justify yet. A good comparison would be the model s vs 3.
Speaking of, it's a shame Tesla won't make an electric motorcycle.
In the West, a brand new Ninja 400 fuel injected sport bike is $US 5000, new. Through economies of scale, and their getting the bugs out and widening tolerances over its 30 years history, they're now the AK-47 of bikes: cheap and dependable. You can spend $20k on a bike, but you don't need to. Similar Honda and Suzuki models. Harley and BMW can't and won't touch this part of the market.
The Zero starts at $US 11k but you need to spend more like 18k to get something as useful as the current gas bikes.
Unfortunately it is a very bad time to try to make money in the motorcycle industry right now. Older riders are aging out and interested young people can't afford bikes due to student debt and other debt.
I find comments like these interesting because it shows a fundamentally different perspective on motorcycling.
It sounds like you view it as a hobby or pastime, and an expensive one at that, likely because you see it as something to purchase after already owning a car.
I see it as a highly efficient and cheap form of personal transportation, especially for urban areas. In my city (Montreal) motorcycles park for free and almost anywhere they wish, essentially lawlessly. I don't own a car and use a motorcycle to avoid public transportation yet not impact the environment nearly as much as a full size car. The economics of it are amazing too, I spend about $15-20 on gasoline a month while commuting daily, spend almost no time in traffic and nothing on parking. Maybe $600 a year on insurance and $300 on plates. The initial costs were higher due to getting gear but that still doesn't compare to car ownership.
And moto tires are expensive, much more so per mile than car tires.
Oil filter for my car: $8, lasts 15000 miles
Oil and filter change for my least expensive bike: $22, lasts 1500 miles
Oil and filter change for my lowest maintenance bike: $67, lasts 6000 miles
Valve adjustment: $200-300 for a professional to remove the head and cams and adjust the valve shims. Interval varies, usually every 10000-15000 miles on a bike. Not required at all on a car due to hydraulic lifters that are fine for a car engine but can't move fast enough for a high-revving bike engine.
Final drive: Chain and sprocket need replacement every 12000-15000 miles, costs about $150 or so. Shafts need shaft oil every 10000 miles, dunno what the price is since I've never had anything other than a chain. Most cars last 100000+ miles without any transmission service.
Spark plugs last 100000+ miles on a car but usually are changed every 10000-20000 miles on a bike. Modern bikes often use multiple plugs per cylinder. $5 per plug.
The tires are the main killer for me. A set of tires on my car lasts about 6 years, while I have to replace tires every year on my main bike. That adds up very quickly.
Other costs:
Coolant every 4 years, brake fluid every 2 years, but that is similar on the car.
I have to admit that good coverage bike insurance is cheaper than good coverage car insurance as long as you stay away from sportbikes and hoon machines.
But I think the main reason we won’t see ICE motorcycles go away soon is simply because used bikes are such a huge market. You can buy a 1970s Honda and get it to run again very cheaply and it will just plugging along. You can’t do that with cars for the most part and the safety features have improved with cars with every decade while for motorcycles they have only improved substantially in 2010s with the EU mandating ABS as a requirement. So a 2005 bike is going to be essentially the same as a 1975 one, safety-wise. I would bet in 2070 people will absolutely be riding 100 year old bikes.
This has been my experience in the US, at least.
Furthermore, those 70k mile bikes were all meticulously maintained by older owners, and I could have bought any of them for under $4k and probably ridden coast to coast the next day without issue.
I really wish it were possible to get advanced cornering ABS on something that isn’t a bajillion cc displacement. The smallest, most reasonably sized adventure touring bike I’ve seen with cornering ABS is the new BMW F750GS, which is still >800cc. I sat on one the other day and the weight and height seemed manageable, but what I’d love is a 650cc or smaller Japanese bike where I could get advanced safety tech. I mean, these bikes are where a lot of new riders like myself start, and attract exactly the sort of rider who is likely to do something stupid and reactionary in a corner.
I have ABS on my 500cc Honda, which is honestly as big a bike as I’d have wanted to start on, and I’d have happily parted with the extra dollars for cornering ABS and traction control had they been options. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the best life-saving tech isn’t at least an option on beginner-sized bikes.
Pardon for the tangent rant :-)
Like, I want a 500cc Honda twin with cornering ABS. As it is, I have ABS, but cornering ABS looks like a solid evolution.
https://allegro.pl/oferta/motorower-skuter-elektryczny-super...
So that leaves things like this for the highway. Motorcycles are not very aerodynamic so they tend to take a lot of battery when run fast. So you are probably better off with a small electric car.
The big two reasons:
- Electric range and recharge rate is abysmal compared to gas bikes
- The excellent used motorcycle market makes the savings on gas and maintenance noncompetitive. We never had Cash for Clunkers for motorcycles, so you can buy an amazing lightly used gas motorcycle for $2500 or so.
The screen itself is distracting enough even without being a touchscreen. I really disklike the tesla-esque design with it, it feels completely wrong for a bike.
It also looks like a free tablet to anyone bold enough to rip it off while you're parked on the street.
I think classic 'moped territory' would be somewhere like South-East Asia. I don't see too many electric mopeds there.
Usually they used the same parts as more powerful motorcycles, but with cheaper breaks and crippled engines to reduce the max speed.
And that's how I got my only engine mechanics experience, by finding ways to make them run fast.
Sort of the worst of both worlds, fast motorcycles without proper breaks driven by kids without traffic experience/common sense.
Those footpegs look very low. At 0:32 it looks like the rider's toes are only an inch away from the ground.
An SV650 appears to have slightly higher pegs.
I agree they look low, but checking out other bikes they appear to be in similar places.
Also it seems super uncomfortable to ride.
The iPad instrumentation however I don't approve of and can't accept. I at least hope it all goes orange-red on black at night.
In any case, it looks targeted at the higher end.
I would think electric bikes/mopeds can be cheaper and more reliable than gasoline, and there would be a very big market, especially in poorer countries, competing with Honda Cubs etc as general workhorses.
I think it would be fantastic if electric motorcycles would become popular here in the US. Maybe then I wouldn't have to hear super loud and scary exhaust pipes! Who am I kidding though... the people who do that would find some other way to be annoyingly inconsiderate.
I’m way more worried about people doing stupid stuff in front of me than behind me. And when I’m worried about people behind me, I’m mostly worried at stops that someone will rear-end me... when my hypothetical loud pipes would be idling at a purr anyway.
On my very sensible Honda CB500X, I have a quiet exhaust and have a daytime headlight modulator, which I’m positive has caught the attention of distracted motorists. I’d take a very cool and very legal headlight modulator over loud pipes 100 times out of 100.
Also it's worth noting that Ancient Greek and Modern Greek have different pronunciations. Some of the English pronunciations are actually more 'correct' than the Modern Greek names, e.g. the English pronunciation of Gamma.
"Not care so long as you're understood" reminds me of US TV approach, where every report pronounces that funny foreign name different, often painfully wrong; or periodic fashions in education -- during the sixties and early seventies UK fashion for "no one cares about grammar so long as the little dear is understood". It's coloured, limited and ruined my communication for the following 50 years, despite much effort to self teach as an adult. I'll probably never put all commas, semicolons and what not in the right place naturally, nor clear sentences structure -- they come with a second editing pass. A pass HN mostly doesn't get, sorry. :)
We got, in total: "verbs -- doing words, adjectives -- describing words, nouns -- naming words, tenses, and the use of the full stop". I honestly remember nothing else of grammar being taught whatsoever.
TL;DR I would start wars against "not care as long as you're understood". It's a horrible, disrespectful and limiting approach. Happy New Year. :)
Take Iran for example. It's rendered often in English as [ɑɪ.ɹæn] (eye-ran). What it "should" be is [i.ɾɑn] (ee-rahn). Fortunately, all the sounds in [i.ɾɑn] are ones that occur in most varieties of English (with the exception of the [ɾ], but that's minor), so most speakers are able to accommodate without issue.
Now compare that to Shanghai: its English rendition is [ʃeɪŋ.hɑɪ], and its Mandarin pronunciation is [ʂâŋ.xài]. Most Englishes lack the voiceless retroflex fricative [ʂ], and the same for the voiceless velar fricative [x], and to make matters worse, Mandarin is tonal, which puts the correct pronunciation of this word squarely out of reach for almost all English speakers.
It still makes sense to insist that people try as hard as they reasonably can. Perhaps to say that speakers should get as close as possible—in the case of Shanghai, for example, maybe this would mean [ʃɑŋ.hɑɪ] instead of [ʃeɪŋ.hɑɪ].
But I do give a lot of marks for them trying and exposing us to how the person pronounces their own name or town, and prefer it to Anglicising everything. Even if sometimes it only results in an imperfect close attempt with a layer of English speaker's difficulty, or that we don't realise it's not quite correct Finnish or Cantonese etc.
In fact, in a case of politically questionable names it could even be seen as a sign of antirevisionist acceptance to introduce a badly butchered (if necessary) transcription and pronouncement of the local name into a language that used to have a name that isn't acceptable anymore.
It's just accent drift, happens all the time. The other pronunciation is also in use, I would say "Root 66" but I call the network packet devise a "Rowter".
Er, while it's not a construct that appears much in English to start with, I'm fairly sure the natural phonetic interpretation of “Paal” to many and perhaps most American readers would be identical to “Paul”, so that's a non-helpful correction.
Also, I'm pretty sure the “Nay” part is not part of the (English) pronunciation; this source[0] gives what I would write out informally as “nih-PULL” as the UK pronunciation and “nuh-PALL” as the US pronunciation.
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/pronunciation/english/nepal
Despite having a cumulative 8 years of foreign language courses against three different languages, I have no clue how you’re expecting me to pronounce “paal”.
Is it “pal” - like friend / buddy? “Pail” - like something you’d carry water in? Something else?
I'd start with people with first world problems to develop the tech.
Anyway, video, what they have done seems pretty insane given the timeline, not sure how much is off the shelf
The arrogance we have developed such that none of us in the first world uses or have used electric bikes predominately in our families, now, or a 100 years ago by our ancestors when they first appeared and were about technologically the same as today.
This, it's good enough for them idea is astounding. This road has been well travelled.
Why is it any different to the developing world experience of mobile phones? They expanded directly to mobiles without any landline phase first, and because of that have been surprisingly successful. Do you claim Western arrogance here?
If we simply shrug and let all the developing countries go via the worst of Victorian era coal, then 20th century oil, RCP 8.5 starts to look like an optimistic pipe dream. Everyone will suffer.