E-motocross: these are the difficulties to overcome
Worldwide, efforts are being made to develop electric motors. The first street motorcycles are already here, but for competition-oriented motorcycles the challenges are a lot tougher.
Electric driving has many opponents, but many policy makers in motorized sports see it as the inevitable future. The development of competition motorcycles is going slowly, but eventually there will be dirt bikes that can ride at full power for 30 minutes as a worthy equivalent of its gas-guzzling predecessor.
This year, a TrialE world champion was declared for the first time with the Frenchman Gael Chatagno. He won the World Championship with an electric trials motorcycle from the Electric Motion brand, also from France. Pure power and battery life are less important in this sport, making a trials motorcycle ideal for being electrically powered.
A dirt bike needs much more peak power. The motors must therefore be powerful and the battery must last sufficiently long. This fact means that the challenges of developing a proper electrically powered dirt bike are enormous. The reference is still the defunct Alta. With their Redshift they had 50 horsepower available for 25 minutes in a 120 kg machine.
However, Alta's project was too expensive and came too quickly for the average “petrolhead”. Alta Motors collapsed due to lack of money. It goes without saying that future manufacturers of electric dirt bikes will try to approach or exceed the Alta's figures without the sky-high investments that destroyed Alta.
The following problems need to be overcome:
- The weight of the complete machine is too high
- The battery life
- Insufficient peak power
- Too long loading times
- The cost
- Interchangeability of batteries
Batteries are heavy, although current lithium-ion batteries are already a lot lighter than their predecessors. A new generation of lithium-titanium oxide batteries could solve that problem. They are very light and can be charged in 10 minutes. The so-called loss of efficiency would also be negligible after many reloads. In the meantime, research was also being conducted into “ultra-capacitors”. In terms of technology, they are somewhere between the regular capacitor and a rechargeable battery. Unlike ordinary batteries that store their energy through a chemical process, ultra-capacitors store their electricity electrostatically. As batteries become lighter, the total weight of the machine naturally also decreases. The trick is to keep the center of gravity low and not to place the battery too high in the frame.
A dirt bike must be powerful and therefore the engine must be able to provide sufficient power. That creates heat and you have to get rid of it. The heat formation occurs on the motor itself, but also on parts of the electronics. That is precisely why the Dutch project EMX-PRO uses standard radiators to cool things. Liquid cooling seems to be indispensable for electric dirt bikes if they want to be competitive.
Typical for electric motors powered by a battery is their negative behavior on the battery charge. The power output of the engine also decreases along with the battery charge, meaning that peak power is lower at the end of a moto compared to the beginning. You can prevent this by electronically smoothing the peak power, but this is only possible if there is sufficient power available. Leveling off the top power insinuates that you would have to drive an entire series with a reduced power, while on paper there is more available. To achieve this you need a surplus of peak power.
The high cost of the engines will decrease as soon as the investments can be divided among higher production numbers. That's just how it goes, but don't expect electric driving to be cheaper than it is now with combustion engines. It is expected that the first pre-production models of electrically powered crossers will appear on the circuits in the course of 2022.
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