A Living Motorcycle

Recent advances in battery technology have focused on bio-technology, specifically looking at how to draw electricity out of the energy rich nature of natural sugars.  How much energy is stored in glucose?  A recent experiment drew about 10 times the electricity of a lithium ion battery out of a glucose energy cell on a per kilogram basis.  Battery weight has long been an issue, as has duration.  Focusing on bio-technology might resolve both of those issues while also producing a green electricity storage solution.

Electric bikes will start to take on the aspects of gas bikes
if they suddenly have much lighter batteries.

Perhaps most promising, research labs around the world are seeing success with enzyme based bio-tech batteries.  With many researchers pushing forward on this, we may see marketable solutions appearing in two to three years.

What does this mean for motorbikes?  Imagine a Zero motorcycle with a battery that weighs half as much (making it lighter than a gas equivalent motor), that produces four times the range (better than a gas motor).  If the glucose solution that provides the charge can be packaged separately, you may very well pull into a refuelling station in 2020, pull the spent fuel canister out from where your gas tank used to be and buy a new one.  You'd be ready to go in five minutes, pretty much just like a modern gas stop.

That spent canister would get recycled, the spent glucose solution either reused or composted.  Since new solution is created primarily from natural sugars, it would be a matter of growing more fuel.  Enhancements to the enzymes that break down the sugars would open up a strange new bio-tech world of performance enhancements.  People would customize how their bikes consume sugar in order to focus on performance or efficiency.  Advances in enzyme efficiency would allow for greater range and power.

These living bikes would consume sugars just like their riders do, they'd even breath as they did it.

The Brammo Empulse, a shockingly fast electric bike still hobbled by battery weight and range, but for how long?

Future Bike

WIRED recently did some articles based on the Tokyo International Motor Show.  I spent a couple of years in Japan paying off all the debts I accumulated living in North America.  I've got a soft spot for Japan and the tech they produce.

Kawasaki's neon green ode to anime bikes scratches that anime itch, though it is fairly ridiculous.

Of more interest from an engineering point of view is Yamaha's ultralight bike.  Since watching McGregor and Boorman trying to right seven hundred pound BMWs in the Long Way Round, I've wondered why bikes aren't lighter than they are.  Why aren't we getting more horsepower out of smaller engines and saving weight that way?  Why aren't we using our modern engineering prowess to build bikes with smarter materials?

Case in point, as a high school student I thought the Honda Interceptor was awesome. It weighed 443lbs ready to go.  The current 500CBR is a modern equivalent, wet weight? 428lbs.  In thirty odd years of materials research and development a company as forward thinking as Honda has managed to shave 15 pounds off a bike's gross weight?

How about Triumph's last year of the original Bonneville?  A 750cc bike, 441lbs.  The new one?  496lbs.  It's a bigger engine, but it would need it to lug that fat ass around.  Even Triumph's brilliant and athletic naked Street Triple still tips the scales at over four hundred pounds.

Motorcycles are, by their nature, minimalist forms of transportation, but instead of finding ways to make them even lighter and more efficient we're SUVing them just like we did with four wheelers.  Bikes like KTM's new 390 Duke give me some hope though.  At 300lbs I bet 390cc has never felt so powerful.

I can't help but feel that alternate building methods and advanced materials haven't been explored by conservative

motorcycle manufacturers.  Yamaha asks a good question when it asks, where are the two hundred pound motorbikes?

McLaren could put together the three seater 200mph+ V8 F1 super car twenty years ago with a curb weight of only 1062kgs (about 2340lbs).  We've got massive cruisers tipping the scales at 900lbs, meanwhile Mercedes-Benz is putting together Smartcars that weigh only 1600lbs.  Even a back to basic bike like the KLR650 with only a single cylinder and basic bodywork still weighs in at 432lbs.

A bike frame in one hand? It's possible,
but bike manufacturers aren't
considering it?

I'm still not a fan of electrical bikes as long as we're stuck with medieval chemical batteries.  With lousy storage and even worse disposal characteristics, rushing into electric bikes right now isn't the way to go, though one day I hope to see an unlimited charge bio-tech battery that recharges off the buried kinetic/flywheel battery under my house.

Our issue with electricity isn't the making of it, it is the storage and transmission of it.  One day I hope to be able to unplug my bike from my locally generated and stored electrical system and get a thousand kilometres out of it before I have to plug it in again.

There are levels of efficiency we still need to move through in order to get to that place and the conservatism and marketing focus I'm seeing in bike manufacturer aren't moving us in that direction.  A little less focus on building to marketing niches and a bit more focus on advancing engineering would help us toward a necessary evolution in motorcycling.

While Formula One develops energy recovery systems that also act as full on torque turbo-chargers, perhaps it isn't too much to ask bike manufacturers to go after other areas of efficiency such as weight improvements in chassis and drive-trains.  I'd very much like a 400cc bike that weighs only 200lbs.  From an efficiency point of view it would be unbeatable as a means of transport and something that would get many more people interested in riding on two wheels.