Last month a video of the DERBI GPR EV showed up on YouTube. It was posted by someone who appeared to be working with Sevcon and it was hard to tell if DERBI was behind the bike. I recently found the blog of Derbi Project Manager Carles Carrera. And guess what, he has a detailed picture of the Derbi GPR EV front and center.

Carles describes the ground up development methodology DERBI and their partners used in designing and building the bike over the course of 3 months. He cites flaws in Brammo, Zero, Quantya, Vectrix mentioning thier “poorly developed mechanical platform” and saying they fail to deliver an electric motorcycle that has all drive components communicating in an orderly fashion.

The electric Derbi was engineered to have it’s batteries, motor and controllers to work together like a tradition ICE motor’s carburetor, engine and fuel system. The GPR EV even appears to utilize some sort of transmission and has a traditional gear selector. The left hand lever could be a rear brake or a clutch lever.

UPDATE: Carles informed me the bike has 2 gears.

One thing that has me scratching my head is “Benelli” etched into the frame spar. As far as I know Derbi and Benelli have no current affiliation. I could be wrong about this. Anyone know the connection?

No mention of racing in TTXGP or e-Power but Carles might (hope, hope) be hinting at it in his last paragraph, last sentence…

And what the hell is Vema-Vogt-Perm-Sevcon-DPS? They are a group of companies working together to integrate it’s own world class product into a world class drivetrain. DPS is in charge of the batteries, Sevcon is in charge of the controller, Perm for the motor, Vogt for the engineering and Vema for the integration on coordination. And it proved to be a winning team.

Source: Plug Bike

Christian Amendt, an engineering student out of Germany is the first confirmed entrant of the FIM ePower Electric Motorcycle Race series. Using what might be called a quantified version of Lotus’s “performance through low weight” philosophy, Christian converted a Honda RS125R to electric using a “half the weight, half the power” design.

The 115kg (253.5lbs) electric race bike weighs 187 lbs less than the triple motor MotoCzysz e1pc. The theory is that the light weight will allow the 96 Volt, single motor, 3 kWh Epo-bike to out perform a 2 or 3 motor bike that weighs over 400 lbs with the batteries needed to power them. The Epo-Bike uses a Lemco D135 DC motor, LiFePO4 batteries from an undisclosed manufacturer and an Alltrax AX7425 controller to achieve 74Nm of torque and reach a top speed of about 111 mph. See more pictures and a video of the epo-bike on the track after the break.

Like most of the “exclusive” TTXGP entries, it does not seem Amendt has anything against the competing series. The FIM ePower series is merely more convenient given his location and time constraints. This is a step in the right direction for ePower who has seen TTXGP gain a hand full of entrants over the last few weeks. The FIM will run ePower races on WSBK and MotoGP race weekends which should have a strong draw for race teams looking for visibility in the up and coming electric race scene.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRh8cw3XBOw

 

Source: Plug Bike