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AGV Backmarker: Road to Ashland
May 14, 2009 by Mark Gardiner
Filed under Backmarker
Craig Bramscher, CEO, Brammo Motorsports. A big man with big plans… Right now, his company employs about thirty people. He expects to have 100 employees by year’s end, and 1,000 by 2015. MG photo
Last week, I explored the emerging electric motorcycle category with John Farris, who’s recently been added to Brammo Motorsports’ executive team. It occurs to me that I probably should have first explained just how Brammo came into existence.
Well, better late than never.
Brammo’s CEO Craig Bramscher set out to build a V-12 supercar. He ended up creating an electric commuter bike. Here’s what he had to tell me when I met him at Brammo’s headquarters in Ashland, Oregon, last month…
I was always a gearhead. I’ve probably owned thirty motorcycles and as many cars. Around the time I sold my last company, I had one of those very lucky days in the stock market and took a lot of money off the table. I decided to go out shopping for a Ferrari. I’m about 6’3”, but I have a long torso so I sit about as tall as a guy who’s 6’6”.
In the Ferarri dealership, I met an actor and a pro athlete and we were commiserating that for us, Italian sports cars were the equivalent of our wives’ Italian shoes; they looked good but it hurt to put them on! The light went on over my head… I decided to make an American equivalent of the McLaren F1, big enough to fit guys who were 6’6”, or 300 pounds. That’s when I started Brammo Motorsports.
L.A.’s a great place to make money [not for me–MG] but a terrible place for kids to grow up. I looked around and settled on Ashland as a good place to raise my family and raise a business.
I hired Brian Wismann to design a V-12 supercar. Along the way, I also acquired the U.S. license to produce the Ariel Atom. Right about the time we were to go into production with the V-12, Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth came out. There we were, about to sell a vehicle that got 3 miles to the gallon.
We’d done some research into electric motors for the Atom, purely because we liked their torque characteristics. The more we looked at it, the more we liked the equivalent of hundreds of mpg, with very low emissions. But we realized that given the available batteries, a motorcycle made more sense than a car.
We don’t want to be in the battery business. There are people spending billions there, and we’ll let them improve that technology. Right now, we know we can’t make a long-range tourer or a sport bike, but we can make a commuter. When Brian came to me with this TTXGP project, I asked him, “This isn’t going to impact the production schedule, is it?” But we have to go racing so that we’ll have the expertise we need when batteries have improved enough to make high performance motorcycles viable.
So I’ve come full-circle from trying to burn as much fuel as possible to building this green vehicle made of recycled plastic and aluminum. But the big surprise to me was when I rode the prototype and realized, This is a blast!
We looked at where it should be sold: in a motorcycle dealership, next to the Yamahas and Kawasakis? And who is our customer? In the U.S., we have over 200 million drivers and about 12 million licensed riders. We’re going after that larger group, people who don’t go into motorcycle shops, so we had to look for a different way to sell our bikes.
When you take the brakes and wheels off our bike, what’s left looks more like a server than a motorcycle. It’s a bunch of black boxes and wires. We thought, This is consumer electronics you ride—a new kind of mobile device. That’s why we arranged to distribute the Enertia through Best Buy.
We expect to employ 100 people and sell 1,500 motorcycles by the end of this year. We’ve got a 40-acre parcel of land across the road, and planning permission for a four-building campus. In five years, we plan to employ 1,000 people and be selling 100,000 bikes a year.
Brammo’s design head Brian Wismann came from the world of racecar design. MG photo
Those are big plans. But unlike quite a few startup CEOs I’ve met over the years, Bramscher actually seems to have a business plan. He’s aware that building a great motorcycle is only part of the challenge; building a credible brand and an efficient distribution network are equally important.
The shock of the new keeps coming… Next week, if I get around to transcribing interviews with Mission Motors’ CEO Forrest North and President Ed West, I’ll give you some insight into that company’s bold foray straight into the heart of the supersport category.
Riding the roads in and around Ashland
The Brammo Enertia I rode was a true prototype. In April, when I visited Ashland, the first mass production components were just arriving from suppliers in Germany, Italy, China and (mostly) the U.S. The assembly area was still a big, empty room with marks on the floor where production lines would soon be set up.
Ironically, it’s easier to build short prototype runs in carbon fiber than it is in aluminum, so the bike I tested had a carbon frame. Even the wheel sizes were different from stock, although the production version should have the same overall feel.
Brammo chassis designer Aaron Bland (like Zero’s Neal Saiki) is a refugee from the downhill mountain bike industry. Here he is, showing lots of confidence in one of his own designs. As relative neophytes to the world of motorcycles, they’ve done remarkably well so far. Brammo photo
Like the production Enertia, the bike I rode was fitted with a German Perm brushless DC motor, powered by an array of six lithium-ion batteries. Since each battery produces about 12 volts, the motor gets a 72-volt jolt that’s good for about 34 foot-pounds of torque and just less than 20 peak horsepower.
The finished bike weighs about 280 pounds, of which 90 is batteries. The batteries are good for 3.1 kilowatt-hours. The bike can reach a top speed of 55 mph and has a typical range of about 40 miles. The charger is built in, and it takes about three hours to “fill ’er up,” plugged in to ordinary household current.
The first time you ride an electric motorcycle, there’s a disconcerting absence of controls on the left side of the machine. There’s no clutch lever, and no gear lever, either.
The right grip twists—it’s really more of a rheostat than a throttle, but you get the idea—and there’s a familiar brake lever that, in this case, activates a small twin-pot Brembo caliper. It’s more than up to the task. Your right foot controls the rear brake, also a Brembo.
Since electric motors produce all their torque even at 1 rpm, electric motorcycles have to be outfitted with motor-control circuits to prevent them wheelying every time you pull away from a stop. The prototype I rode definitely needs some smoothing off the bottom (it felt similar to a bad fuel-injection map on gasoline-powered bike).
At first, Brammo’s bread and butter will be a cute commuter, but they have an audacious plan to build an electric road racer and compete in the TTXGP on the Isle of Man. MG photo
The combination of the Brammo chassis, non-adjustable Marzocchi fork, and a Canadian Elka rear shock yielded just the right kind of handling for the target audience of new riders. The bike feels low, small, and balanced—very user-friendly. Around town, even the prototype’s a completely practical vehicle.
Although it’s not intended to be a sport bike, I couldn’t resist riding up into the hills that surround Ashland. On winding roads, I was taken aback by the complete lack of engine braking. For someone used to riding a conventional bike, it’s like catching a false neutral, but one assumes riders will get used to it.
Overall, the Enertia was damned impressive for a prototype. Is it the next Honda Dream? Of the electric bikes I’ve ridden, it’s the strongest candidate.
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Zooming in on the first picture, one would assume that the design on the computer screen is a mock-up of the Brammo TTXGP prototype. Exciting!
Well written article, Mark. I just started following the electric motorcycle industry and this is the first one I’ve read that truly captures the feeling of anticipation in this sector right now. I’m looking forward to the TTXGP next month.
And yeah, that looks like the TTR Brammo is going to enter in the race. New videos on it are coming out soon, according to @brammocraig on twitter.
I’m intrigued. I’d like to see them add regenerative braking to stuff some amps back in the battery and act as engine braking. That could be a killer fun bike. I’m also wondering what the basic setup could do as a playbike/dual sport? With better suspension? The weight is about right, and you could really centralize the mass to maximize performance. I think they might just be onto something.
One suggestion: Include a basic rider course with each bike sold. If we’re going to be putting new riders on the street, they need training and the proper gear.