AGV Backmarker: Electrifying Season on The Salt

Last night, when I should have been working on a column that was already late, I was instead sitting in the third row watching the Missouri Rep’s amazing performance of Into the Woods. This Sondheim musical begins as a fairytale for children, and ends as a cautionary tale for adults. Of course, the role of fairytales themselves is cautionary; it’s appropriate that so many of these stories were first compiled by a pair of brothers named Grimm. I suppose motorcycle racers are the people who typically ignore advice like, “Be careful…” and I imagine I should be more careful how I start a column. I wonder how many readers stopped partway through that second sentence?

In last week’s Backmarker, I mentioned James “The Rocket” Rispoli’s land-speed record, set recently at the BUB speed trials on the Bonneville Salt Flat. (The official name is “Flats” with an “s” but heck, there’s only one of them; I say it’s a “Flat.”)

After that column came out, I got an email from Mission Motors, the fledgling electric sport bike manufacturer up in the Bay Area, in which they told of their own electric land speed record, also set at the BUB event.

Mission’s Jeremy Cleland (an AFM racer and ex-Ducati North America product manager) rode the company’s electric sport bike prototype—the same machine we described in the current print edition of Road Racer X. He had a one-way run of 161 mph, which is at least as fast as I’d expect a stock 600 to go at Bonneville. In the end, Mission took their electric sport bike prototype up and down the BUB course for a two-way average of 150.059 mph.

Depending on your point of view, Mission’s last big racing endeavor, at the TTXGP on the Isle of Man, could have been rated underwhelming. In the print magazine, I pointed out that Mission, Brammo, and indeed all of the high-tech companies that built electric bikes from the ground up were beat by an under-funded effort that fielded a used GSX-R600 that had been stuffed with batteries and an electric motor.

In hindsight, that wasn’t too charitable—toward either Mission et al, or the Agni bike that won the race. A reader wrote in to point out that unlike almost all the other entrants, Agni had designed its own motor and deserved credit for it.

Anyway, Mission sought redemption on the salt. It’s a great place for electric power to show off. Bonneville’s low air density bedevils the tuners of conventional motors. The runs are short, so battery life is never an issue. And with several miles to get up to speed, bikes can be geared to the moon; that reduces the effect of the power fall-off AC motors experience at high engine speeds.

Mission’s 150+ mph average earned them an AMA-sanctioned Land Speed Record (and, I believe, an FIM World Record too, although they didn’t mention it in their press release). Now, there are faster electric motorcycles out there. The current SCTA (Southern California Timing Association) record in the Omega class is over 176 mph. You can see a photo of that bike here.

The most successful electric race bike (so far) is the Killacycle drag racer, which has gone through the traps at 174 mph, while running sub 8-second quarter-miles.

Still, a land-speed record is a land-speed record, and Mission’s press release accurately points out that theirs was set with a (nearly) street-legal motorcycle. The company plans to sell its first 300 production machines in 2010.

I’m tracking a couple more really interesting electric motorcycle stories, and while there are lots of people who are skeptical of this technology—or at least who believe that the batteries available now are nowhere near ready for prime time—I am still convinced that within a decade, motorcyclists will be opting for electric power on a straight price-performance basis.

This has nothing to do with the alarmist notion that we’re “running out” of oil. Although I do believe we’ll see an inexorable trend upward in the price of oil, we’ll never run out of it. Back around the time of the first OPEC-induced oil shortage, I was taking the International Petroleum Economics course at the University of Calgary. (My prof was Brent Friedenberg, who went on to develop quite a name for himself in that field.) In Alberta, we were desperate for OPEC to succeed in artificially raising the world oil price, because all of our oil cost more to get out of the ground than it had, theretofore, been worth.

That was when I realized that while we think of “non-renewable” resources like oil as the ones we can run out of, we’ll actually never run out of them. In fact, all we’ll run out of is oil we can get out of the ground at a certain price. Double the price, and suddenly a whole bunch of reservoirs that weren’t worth tapping become economically viable.

“Let the price of oil hit $200 a barrel,” Friedenberg pointed out, “and we’ll be squeezing it out of some pretty ordinary rocks down there.”

“Ironically, we can run out of ‘renewable’ resources,” he went on to point out. “After you kill the last whale, they’re gone forever.”

That was an “aha” moment for me—one of the approximately three minutes, spread over my entire university education, that weren’t a waste of time.

Anyway, speaking of cautionary tales, I hope that we learn from the environmental devastation wrought by the oil industry and take a more pro-active and conservative approach to the extraction of minerals, like lithium, that will be necessary if, over the next decade, the EV industry makes a significant stride. By the way, if you hate the way OPEC has attempted to influence world oil prices, we’re not out of the woods yet: It turns out a handful of nations effectively control the world’s lithium supply, too…