Here’s an interesting video, and an interesting lesson in physics. Filling a tank with water, and then pressurizing it with air, François Gissy has made a drag racing trike that gets up to 160 mph with only power from the jet stream of water it produces.
This exercise in Newton’s third law of motion contains a considerable amount of force, accelerating Gissy and his rig to over 5gs, as it only takes half a second to go 0-60 on the track. It’s pretty impressive to watch.
The idea of an electric personal watercraft is a little troubling at first, I mean…we are talking hundreds of volts and hundreds of amps surrounded by water, in an inherently unstable vehicle…what could go wrong, right?
But, for those who aren’t adverse to a little wake-up jolt, the all-electric Free Form Factory Gratis X1 personal watercraft might be an interesting way to spend a sunny afternoon.
And for savvy motorcyclists, the electric bits on the Gratis X1 should be familiar, as Free Form Factory is using Zero Motorcycles’s Z-Force powertrain to propel its watercraft.
For some, the KTM 125 Duke is just not quite enough machine to get their two-wheeled juices flowing, and thus the KTM 200 Duke & soon-to-be-expected KTM 350 Duke were born. With the Austrian motorcycle maker KTM partnering with India’s second-largest motorcycle brand Bajaj to make the baby Duke, it should come as no surprise then that many of these models are ending up outside of Europe, and in Asian markets…namely India itself.
While us Westerners might think of the KTM 200 Duke as a fairly practical machine, buyers in India are a bit more skeptical, since their day-to-day travel can be a bit more varied than ours. You see, India right now is preparing for its summer monsoon season, and flooding in certain regions is more of a certainty than a special phenomenon. So while an underslung exhaust might look stylish to us Americans, to an Indian motorcyclist it could look to be more of a liability.
Hoping to purge that thought from Indian riders’ minds, KTM has put together this video outlining its wet-weather survivability testing. If you ever wanted to know whether you can park the KTM 200 Duke in wheel-high water for 30 minutes or more sans snorkel, check out the video after the jump.
Harley-Davidson has registered a recall with the NHTSA for 6,964 Softail models that have the factory security system option installed. Affecting only 2011 model year Softails that were built between June 7, 2010 and October 8, 2010, the recall is the result of an improper seal on a component in the security system, which could leak and let water in, thus causing an electrical short that could stall the bike.