ElectricMotorcycleForum.com

They share the dealership/zero customer service experience as well as the same general layout and thinking in their drivetrains and the troubleshooting around them. The specific parts are different but the overall situation when it comes to troubleshooting and dealing with issues is very much inline with newer zero bikes.

I guess we'll see if it has enough interest to ever make more than those original 15.

I think the only way for batteries to be more recyclable by design is for solutions to be mandated.

Otherwise yeah, if making your battery less easy to recycle gives you better performance or even just cheaper manufacturing costs, those are the EV's that are going to sell while those prioritizing recyclability will go out of business.

We've had this discussion recently about Zero potting their pouch cells, which makes the packs difficult to service or disassemble and presumably also difficult to recycle. But any solution that replaced the potting would likely decrease capacity, cooling performance, and water-resistance.

We're still at the point where the first question about any EV is what is what's the range, recharge time, and price. Any decision that doesn't directly impact those three factors in a positive way is not going to be the manufacturers priority.

I've said it before but at this point battery recycling and pack replacements are the biggest issue facing long term EV adoption. If after ten years our vehicles are full of 60kwh of hazardous waste we don't have the capacity or economics to recycle, our attempts to go green are not nearly as effective as we want them to be.

I'm doing a home conversion build as well and have found the same, pouch cells may be the best but sourcing high quality pouches and materials to build a good pack with them is far more difficult than with cylindrical cells. There's not an equivalent to say, IMRbatteries.com that sells  Farasis 32ah cells.

There's also the fact that cylindrical cells are just smaller, so you can arrange them to fit odd shapes and sizes. In my build, I can fit 4.3kwh of cylindrical cells where I can barely fit 2kwh of pouch cells. If we're looking at volume alone the pouches are significantly denser and pack more efficiently, but if you don't have a perfect squared off shape the benefit of that density could be completely negated.

Which is what we have here with the curtiss. The bike was made from a drawing, it's a piece of art over anything else. And using pouch cells in that cylinder shaped battery pack would be an incredibly inefficient use of space that would have far less density than going with cylindrical cells. It doesn't make sense to equate them using 21700's with not being able to afford pouch cells, when it's obviously a function of fitting as much battery as possible into the design and not a question of cost.

If they wanted the most efficient battery choice they would have put pouches in a big rectangular box, but obviously that is not the point of this bike.

The vehicle is called the LLV, which stands for long life vehicle. They were specifically designed to have an incredibly long service life of 30 years, with very few other considerations or priorities.

I definitely agree that a newly designed EV build with USPS's needs in mind is the best path forward. Similar to how Arrival is working with UPS for their electric trucks.

Quote from: caza on January 20, 2021, 04:30:40 AM

Another day, another no-name concept.

It literally has a name.  And they're hoping for dealers to sign up.

That's a step beyond Lightning recently.

-Crissa

I meant no-name as in, it's not a name or brand that has any history or recognition.

Unfortunately even though conversion kits are the greenest way to transition to electric, I don't see them growing much.

Good kits + the labor to install them typically cost more than an entire new replacement vehicle with all the modern bells and whistles, and they can't be warrantied and serviced in a straightforward accessible way.

The economics of the situation make it so it's a better choice to either drive the vehicle as an ICE car until the end of its life or just replace it with a brand new electric car.

I expect conversions to stay extremely niche for this reason.

The Grumman LLV's already have 30 year lifespans. There's not a huge reason to extend their lives further at this point, and more importantly the needs of mail carriers have changed. The LLV was designed and sized for mostly envelope mail and minimal packages, but the internet, amazon, and covid have both changed the game and now packages are a huge part of the delivery work. Those LLV's are just not up to the task or the volume, which is part of why they've already replaced so many of them with modern vans.

It doesn't help that it doesn't have air conditioning, and the fusebox is right under the wipers which causes alarmingly frequent fires.

All good points. To me the biggest issue with hydrogen is just the chicken and egg problem.  You can't switch to hydrogen until you have enough extremely expensive infrastructure to support them. You can't justify that infrastructure cost until people are buying hydrogen cars. So even if you put all of the efficiency and safety problems aside, hydrogen is hard to to implement and grow.

If we could just flip a switch and have every gas station replaced with hydrogen, it would be adopted quickly since it doesn't suffer from the very real practical challenges of charge time and range that EV's have. Most consumers care more about convenience than efficiency or even safety. But we can't flip a switch, and no one is going to invest in building hydrogen infrastructure everywhere before they sell a single car.

EV's biggest advantage is simply that a homeowner can install a charging station in their garage and not have to rely on a bigger infrastructure for the majority of their driving. Many apartment dwellers with parking spots have done the same thing. This is what's allowed EV's to grow as much as they have. They can sidestep the chicken/egg issue.