Where is the Innovation?
For a new tech area, the E2W world is sadly starved of innovation
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The above is the Zapp i300 scooter. At around GBP 8.5k, it’s not cheap. It also doesn’t look very practical. However, it is quite entertaining. It’s a pocket rocket with a creative mix of a small battery and a large motor: 1.44 kWh powering 14 kW peak. The 60km range in Eco mode is not a strength, but the acceleration and nimbleness make up for that. Most scooters never leave the city limits, so it’s forgiven. This is going to be a silent hooligan if you can afford it.
The price is eye-watering, so it's for the select few. The price would be partly driven by the BoM spiking components—the high-discharge cells in that small battery, discharging at more than 9C at peak power. They should cost around 5X more than 2C discharge cells. Sprinkling carbon fiber and the recycled aluminum alloy exoskeleton further adds to the cost.
The Zapp is born expensive, and no amount of manufacturing optimization, like making it in India, will lower that price.
The Zapp sums up the challenge that the commuter end of electric mobility faces—we are dancing on jelly. Stomp hard on one side, and the other end will go out of shape pretty fast. Zapp trades price and practicality for speed and nimbleness, and that’s admirable. Most commuter scooters go the other way. There is no mid-point in this—cell tech has not reached the point where high-discharge cells would not be expensive.
Electric mobility is still a new technology area. If climate enthusiasts have their way, it will likely be the sole survivor post-2040 or earlier. Like any new technology, massive investments in research and engineering would be needed to advance it and make it the propulsion tech of choice.
Electromagnetism would have to beat Thermodynamics comprehensively.
The movement of R&D budgets
In any industry, whenever we reach a technology fork, a massive investment on one side speeds up the departure of the other branch. This happened with Blu-ray vs. DVD, CRDi vs. unitary injectors, and two-stroke vs. four-stroke.
It is happening now with EVs vs. ICE. We know our direction on the passenger and light vehicle sides. Much anecdotal evidence suggests that global R&D budgets have moved to electrification, and ICE engines are not getting the attention they were ten years back.
Batteries (and motors) are expected to follow a steep upward curve to innovation, while ICE would follow a shallow downward-sloping curve to oblivion.
The entire car industry received instructions to shift their R&D budgets to EVs.
The two-wheeler industry didn’t get the memo.
Most innovation is still ICE-centric
A look at the global news feeds that monitor tech and engineering innovation in the two-wheeler industry indicates that more engineering is still happening on the ICE side. Overall, plenty of engineering is being done—no dearth of effort exists. However, as we noticed a few weeks back, the ICE incumbents haven’t been too serious about electric vehicles, and as a result, the R&D dollars are still flowing toward ICE.
Western brands are being kept on their toes by Chinese brands like CF Moto, QJ Motor, Kove, and Benda, all of whom have decided to up their game. Meanwhile, GWM Souo has just exploded on the scene with two outrageous eight-cylinder motorcycles, covering decades of innovation in a few months. For the first time in nearly six decades, the ground is shifting from under the domination of the Japanese/European two-wheeler industry. Understandably, technology is a big focus area…for everyone.
Just not yet in EVs.
The big problem seems to be that the incumbents haven’t committed themselves to EVs in the way expected. The big brands are still scratching the surface, and the heavy lifting on the technology side has been left to start-ups. That limits the dollars that should have gone to engineering.
What measures development in EVs?
Development should be measurable. Things should indicate that they have moved in the right direction.
At a strictly thumb-rule level, we consider the motor peak rpm, pack energy density, and overall machine weight to be the three pillars of measuring advancements in electric technology. The first two have to go higher, and the third has to go lower.
That is true only for high-performance electric motorcycles like the Stark Varg or the TS Verge. These are technology innovators under pressure to innovate. Most often, they have to start with a clean sheet of paper to create new tech—the innovation is at the invention level.
Much of the innovation in mass-market electric two-wheelers is focused on making the machines cheaper and more dependable. That’s more of a sourcing job than engineering’s.
The irony is that the technology innovators have less access to funds than mass market players. Engineering gets throttled at both ends.
That brings us to the funding challenge.
Different stages of evolution
ICE is in the advanced stages of maturity, and motorcycle manufacturers have found their niche. They know the customers and the market and have identified the areas where they will grow. The engineering efforts are focussed accordingly.
This is also a very competitive industry. For every micro-niche you may target, any price point or user profile you may dream of, at least four other brands have conjured up before you. Competition is brutal.
In comparison, we are still learning the alphabet in electric mobility. As we wrote in the Issue 1 of InsightEV:
Electric two-wheeled mobility is at the basic level, and we are currently figuring out motor types, cell formats, and controlling deration. Nearly 99.99 percent of all electric two-wheelers run on low-voltage (<72V) systems, a terrible performance limiter. The real magic happens when you turn up the voltage beyond 300V. That’s when motors start getting smaller and lighter and spool faster.
Engines run hotter than Motors.
A few weeks back, we mentioned that IC Engines could be more efficient, and even the best-designed ones struggle to deliver 30 percent thermal efficiency. In comparison, electromagnetic powertrains do not have any problems delivering above 80 percent efficiency.
That means that the ICE lobby always has something to do when they want to tinker with engineering—make the engine more efficient, powerful, lighter, smoother, or look better—there is always something waiting when you pick up the spanner.
It is a perennial contest—every year, engine sizes increase, so do power outputs, engines become lighter, and every other attribute improves.
A look at some recent launches illustrates this. BMW introduced the R 1300 GS recently, and while the engine appears to be the same boxer twin, it is nearly all new. The capacity is more, the power is bumped up, the torque is higher and flatter, and the cam drives have been rearranged. It’s nearly an all-new engine, maintaining the guise of the old one.
Also, last week, the new Panigale was introduced. The R version now pumps over 215PS from 998cc, edging past the other liter-class motorcycles.
Retaliation is imminent.
Arguably, we haven’t reached that level of maturity in competition in electric superbikes. Sure, there is a Lightning, a Damon, an Energica, a Zero, a TS, or the not-so-new boys from Tsinghua University. They all broke into the scene at least four years back, and the going hasn’t been great until now. We haven’t reached a stage where these guys are one-upping each other yearly. Most are struggling for funds or selling a very limited number of motorcycles. The conversation is more like who survives this year when it should be about who is better this year.
The conversation is not even at that level on the commuter end of the market. The commuter motor is a commodity market, and development is more about sourcing and dependability/warranties. In this market, manufacturers are constantly evaluating motors to lower sourcing costs. No one is tinkering with them to squeeze out ‘half-a-bhp’ more.
Torque to the wheel
Motorcycle transmissions have been the most exciting engineering focus area in the last five years. A very basic large motorcycle transmission is a challenge—the clutch would be heavy, and improper use would stall the motorcycle. Also, like stick shifts in cars, not everyone has the expertise to extract the most out of the engine. Stalling is embarrassing.
Manufacturers have increasingly made large motorcycle transmissions easier to use so that even non-experts can ride them comfortably. This ‘easing’ would also attract new customers to motorcycles. The next generation of large motorcycles from most established brands is moving to semi-automatic gearboxes that completely remove the clutch operation from the system. From Honda’s E-Clutch to Yamaha’s Y-AMT, companies are giving them different names, though everything pertains to removing the clutch.
EV transmissions never had the problem—there was no clutch to start with. But their utter simplicity also means they have far less flexibility than ICE gearboxes. As a result, EV motorcycles with limited power often fall short on either acceleration or top speed, the single fixed-ratio transmission being able to solve one end only.
The obvious solution is to mate a mechanical gearbox to the motor. However, this hasn’t worked as expected, and early examples, like the Horwin CR6 Pro, have been withdrawn.
A more elegant solution is integrating a single-stage reduction with the motor, which is where most mid and high-level EVs are headed. That is what the Gogoro Pulse—the company’s latest sports commuter scooter—comes with.
However, the Pulse is special. Not many commuter scooters bother to create a two-speed reduction system.
The biggest hurdle for motor innovation is that most E2W start-ups end up sourcing their motors from suppliers. The responsibility for innovation gets passed on to the supplier from the vehicle manufacturer.
Battery Enhancements
A fundamental problem with batteries is that they are difficult to design and expensive to manufacture. Further, they are inherently unstable, so when you have a design that works, no one wants to tinker with it. Manufacturers take time designing batteries; most countries require you to homologate the battery separately from the vehicle. Homologation—in Europe or the US—is a painful process. That brings us to the battery gospel.
If you have a battery that works, don’t tinker with it.
The only reason to tinker with batteries is when cells move a generation. That is when Gogoro changed their batteries—the cells switched from 18650 to 21700 format. This is a once-in-five-year phenomenon, and the 21700 format would likely stay the favorite for over a decade.
The other reason batteries could be updated is when you want to increase the pack voltage - from 48V to 60V or 72V. For most mass-market commuter two-wheelers, there is no strong reason to do that. Again, this is a once in five-year kind of event.
There may be other reasons, like new government regulations, but they are also not frequent.
This is unlike the IC Engine, which can be tinkered with whenever you want to. Most tinkering involves lightweighting components, boring for more cubic capacity, or merely tinkering with the ECU to improve the power/torque curves.
Tinkering with the BMS system in a battery is equivalent to tinkering with the ECU in ICE. However, most BMS tinkering can only change the battery's thermal characteristics—the cell configuration (series and parallel) decides the battery's voltage and energy capacity. Most tinkering to improve the vehicle's range happens at the Motor Control Unity (MCU) level.
Overall
We are in a difficult situation. The technology companies have little funding and negligible market impact. The mass-market companies with money see the battery as a stable asset not to be fiddled with and the motor as a commodity.
ICE is where the innovation magic continues to happen in the short term.