Current Motor Company

We shipped our first customer bike!

2010-02-04T10:29:00.001-08:00

Here is customer bike #1, being tested on our chassis dyno prior to shipping. You can see part of the battery pack exposed in the center of the bike.

After many months of work (and delays) we have shipped the first bike to a paying customer. Yay! And here is the bike ready to go on the truck:

It's actually the fourth bike we've built, the others were prototypes that we used to test ideas and work out our production processes. Here are a few more bikes partially assembled. Our next task is to work through our backlog of orders. After we finish the champagne.

New Guy + ACE '10

2010-01-28T10:53:00.000-08:00

Hi, I'm Paul and I'm the new intern at Current Motor Company. Things have been very busy and we hope to share some big updates with you in the near future. One such update would be the team's success at this year's Annual Collaboration for Entrepreneurship (ACE), a conference that was recently held at Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

ACE is a conference aimed at entrepreneurship in the Great Lakes region, with a variety of participants such as entrepreneurs, investors, students, government agents, and other members of the business community. We exhibited our bikes and participated in the Elevator Pitch and the Great Lakes Entrepreneur's Quest (GLEQ) Emerging Business competitions.

Erik speaking with an attendee

The conference was a great success! We won 1st place in the GLEQ Emerging Business competition, and 2nd place in the Elevator pitch competition! You can read more about the GLEQ, and the Emerging Business prize here.

John, Peter, and Erik with the GLEQ Emerging Business prize!

Wow, where did all the time go?

2009-10-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

Wow, where did all the time go?

Hi to anyone who actually might be reading this blog after all has been quiet for so long...

For months my colleagues told me "we need to update the blog" (translation - John you started the darn blog so update it!), "lets get someone to update the blog for us" (translation - John you're obviously not going to update the blog how about we get someone else to do it?), "lets make it easy for us to all update the blog" (translation - for cryin' out loud John will you never get the darn blog updated???).

Hey, after months of this I finally got the message (pretty quick, eh?) and we "hired" a web developer (actually a shout out to Cameron who is doing this for us, and, err, we haven't paid him yet!) Cameron transitioned the blog to Google's blog system and embedded it on our site. Cameron was quick. Cameron rocks. The rest of us? We don't rock nearly as much...

My illustrious colleagues and I have still failed to take advantage of the wondrous opportunities of blogging our progress. (translation - oi! you all told me you wanted access so we could have more posts - so where are these posts? huh?).

OK - good-natured ribbing aside what have we been up to? A lot...

What's in a name?

As well as producing a world-class 2 wheeled EV we're also trying to get our startup business off the ground. Part of that has been naming and even branding ourselves. Hence we started as rEVolution Electric Vehicles (which was the name of my original business selling X-Treme scooters). Folks didn't like that and there were too many close but different names (I had a lawyer send me a letter demanding that I give his client her money back for the lemon I sold her. Oops, that was the other similar sounding company!!!)

Next we filed as Electric Vehicle Manufacturing, LLC - somewhat prosaic. Descriptive of who we are and what we do - but as dry as dirt from a marketing perspective.

Time for the big guns. We worked with John LeDuc at http://www.leduccreative.com who worked his marketing magic and came up with Current Motor Company and our C-Spark logo. This is us. We're Current Motor Company.

Job done?

Well, not really. We still have a ways to go with marketing and branding. Part of the process has been getting the word out there...

Hi, we're a local EV manufacturing company...

We attended about a gazillion local shows. We started with the Plymouth Green Fair - a three day event. In the summer we did two or three downtown Ann Arbor events. We did our first "ride the bike" event for the Michigan chapter of the Electric Vehicle Association show. Yesterday we just finished attending "The Business of Plugging In" event in Detroit - about 75 or more of the conference attendees took a couple of our bikes for a spin.

We also did a couple of radio interviews, some alleged TV spots (local news was at the Detroit event - but I haven't seen anything). Quite a few newspaper pieces (including getting on the front page of the first edition of the new AnnArbor.com Sunday paper (yes, AnnArbor.com is a website, yes, AnnArbor.com publishes a Thursday and Sunday print edition - we do things different around here!). We also took part in one video production available on You Tube:

We enjoy attending these shows - but boy they take up a lot of time and effort. We get a great response. "what you make these things here?", "wow that's actually a pretty reasonable price", "it looks great". Yes, we get a few duds as well - but that's cool too!

It's fun showing off our "babies". We've also found that Terry is a natural spokesperson...

Oh my, how you've grown...
Well, the team that is. We now have:
John (me) - co-founder - president (the "funny" guy)*
Erik - co-founder - chief engineer (the clever one)
Terry - director of product development (the EV experienced one)
Kishore - UofM engineering grad student (the smart, multi-talented one)
Mary - office manager (the organized one)
Alex - electrical engineer (the one who can not only solder little bitty components but knows what they all do)
Ken - electrical technician / production tech (the one who can solder 'til the cows come home and then turn right around and whip up a nifty shipping pallet or three)
Bill - clay modeler / production tech (he made us a cool model of a three wheeler - I'll leave that to its own post - he then turned around and we taught him how to weld)
Dave - welder & fabricator / production tech (OK, he's also a licensed electrician but with us he's the guy who wields the welder the most often)
Peter - COO (the businessman)
Nate - early stage investor / advisor (the one we don't say "thank-you" to enough)

* by "funny guy" I mean funny as in strange not as in humorous. Actually, as you can hopefully tell we all enjoy working together and we all have a great time.

What do I really do? Try and organize most of all the above stuff into some semblance of forward motion. I also do software (which involves me and Alex telling each other "it's a hardware problem", "no, it's a software problem"). Oh yeah, I also fund about 42.34% of this boondoggle...

What about the bikes?
I hear you cry "John, this is all fascinating stuff, but what about the bikes?" Good question. I wanted to post some of the "non-bike" related stuff that goes in to growing our company. I see this blog as a way to show you the inside of what we're doing - and it's more than just building a bike or two.

It's been a really enjoyable ride this far and I'm honored to be working with such wonderful friends and colleagues (no joke!).

My next post (or perhaps I'll persuade Erik or Terry to post) will be all about the bikes. I promise. I also promise that it won't be six months before we post it...

First Walk - Winter 2009

2009-02-20T11:32:00.000-08:00

We've been riding the "powertrain mule" whenever we can this winter. It's got a 4500w motor and a 300 amp controller set at 75% current limit. It's been stone reliable, in spite of being held together with duct tape and tie straps.

We finally got the first prototype with our own chassis put together. We put on a new 5000w motor to test, and another 300 amp controller. I threw the plastic back on it and hurried off to ride it while the weather was good. It's pretty zippy, I had a big smile on my face and I was testing top speed (53 mph on GPS) a couple miles from home when..... it died. No smoke, no pop, just a slight lurch and then coasting to a stop. Wow, I thought, that's the first time one of these electric bikes has let me down, really pretty surprising that it hasn't happened sooner.

Then I noticed the bike was really really hard to push. Uh, Oh, resetting the circuit breaker isn't going to fix this one! I parked it in a safe spot, found out that the steering lock works, and set off for a nice hike back to the "works" through the Saginaw Forest. It was almost as good a day for hiking as for riding, I didn't mind too much.

The postmortem took days, and involved lots of headscratching as well as bad noises and smoke coming out of the controller. It finally turned out that in our haste to ride, nobody programmed the controller, so it went out with the default 300 amp current limit. We had a datalogger on the bike, and we saw a few seconds over 150 amps, which shouldn't have damaged the controller. But, it means we were putting over 10kw through a motor rated for 5kw. We melted the insulation on some wires inside the motor, which caused a short and killed the hall sensors in the motor, and then killed the controller. Our mistake.

But now I have seen the inside of the motor and the controller, and I have a much better idea of what is going on in there, including thermal issues. We're putting the bike back together with a new controller (same model, but programmed correctly), huge new heatsinks, and a new motor. We've also accelerated our plans to build a dynamometer, so we can test the powertrain in a controlled environment at whatever temperature and load we want.

Engineering the bike - Winter 2009

2009-01-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

Hmm, all this stuff about WMI's and VINs. About mules and gliders. Aren't we missing something? Oh that's right - our customers want to buy an all electric maxi-scooter with the quality of a Vectrix but the price of a Chinese import. Heck at least we sure hope you do!! So without further ado the heavy lifting part of the project begins. Now is the time where the rubber hits the road - or in our case the TIG hits the metal.

At this point EVMFG grew to include Terry. Terry is great. Terry is lord and master of all things welded or otherwise fabricated. In fact we wanted to put that on his business card - but we chickened out. Instead he's Director of Product Development. Fancy titles aside we're very happy Terry joined our team. He has aorund 20 years of experience in the EV world. In the late eighties he was working for a company that converted VW Rabbits from gas to electric. They were the only manufacturer to crash test their conversion. This was the time of the Carter Administration and big utility companies were buying these conversions - whether that was for PR or for operational value is somewhat questionable. Terry is the first to describe how "his" cars used to turn up at various shows and other PR events. At the end of the day the battery technology for a viable commercial conversion just weren't available - flooded lead acid was too heavy and too finicky. Fast forward to the end of Terry's career and one of his last jobs for Chrysler before retiring was to travel to Spain to help Tata engineers convert small utility trucks to all electric for the 2008 World Fair in Barcelona. While at Chrysler Terry also worked on the GEM and various other electric products - none of which ever seemed to reach their full potential. As I said in a previous post - the car companies have the talent and the resources to build the best possible EVs. Don't ask me why they don't - I don't believe most of the reasons they give anyway.

Anyway, back to the bike! There are two major (and numerous minor) mechanical engineering jobs to be done for our conversion. The first is the battery box. We're targetting a 4.6kWh pack (the biggest pack available in any commercial 2 wheeler today) which is twenty-four sixty amp hour cells. While LiFe is smaller and lighter than either NiMH or Lead I don't think you'd call a 4.6kWh pack either small nor light! However, we've come up with a mounting arrangement that keeps the weight low and evenly distributed. It also has room for an extra couple of cells for the 26 cell "big block" version...

Probably the most important, and challenging, aspect of the bikes design is the new swing arm. In original ICE form the engine and transmission actually form the swing arm. (The swing arm is the rear part of the frame that pivots and carries the rear wheel). On the ICE bike the pivot point is way up high - this is "unusual" to say the least. With such a high mount point under acceleration the rear wheel has the tendency to want to push up on that point causing the bike to rise. Probably not a very big problem with a 150cc gas engine. But with a high torque electric motor we needed to come up with a better mounting point

Our swing arm mount is low down and it's substantial design is over-engineered to carry the stresses involved. However, this is one of the key areas on the bike - you wouldn't want us to skimp there. Believe us you wouldn't want that - and believe us we didn't. Into those mount points goes the swing arm itself. Again this item is designed for strength - not beauty (but, hey, I think it's beautiful too!)

The photos you see here are early working models. For example there are three mounting points for the rear suspension to allow for different geometries to be tested. The production version will have a single mounting point with a bushing.

On the electrical side we've mounted the controller and current DC-DC converter in the tail of the bike - one each side. In production we are likely going to transition to a higher quality (and higher cost) Vicor DC/DC converter. As well as increasing the reliability of the bike this will allow us to consider a permanently mounted charger rather than a portable design. Heat is the main villain when it comes to failing electronics - care is taken to make sure we have sufficient airflow to keep these components in spec. Whichever DC-DC converter we use it will have best in class power output. We will use a 13.8V output meaning bright lights (a lot of bikes use a strict 12V which is less than the voltage usually seen on an ICE model). We will also have around 200W constant (and 275W peak) power capability - that's about enough to run a heated vest in the winter!

If we transition to the Vicor DC/DC we will likely be able to permanently mount the charger which is a good convenience feature especially because we won't sacrfice cargo space to do so.

Our first model year bikes will come with a 300A Kelly Controller and a seperate BMS (battery management system) based on an open-source design. We are also implementing an additional "meta-controller" (a controller for the controller). We call this the BCU (Bike Control Unit) it receives its inputs from the BMS, from the battery pack and from the motor. With this information we have implemented a "proper" fuel gauge - we monitor the Amp Hours used by the bike rather than having the rider trying to "guess" the state of charge from a simple volt meter. Furthermore we use the BCU to control the regen braking function. By tying into the brake light switch we know as soon as either brake is applied, at that point (which occurs before the brakes begin to engage) we engage the regen braking mode of the controller. We start off with a low amount of regen and then begin to ramp up with more regeneration braking force. As well as controlling braking and fuel guage the BCU is used to record speed and usage statistics.

For the technically adventurous owner we will provide details of how to interface the BCU to a digital dashboard. Our first models use a traditional speedometer and fuel gauge. This gives a nice clean and familiar "user interface" to the bike - but if you want to go with a more modern LCD dashboard approach - be our guests!

In time we expect to replace the Kelly controller and seperate BMS and BCU with an integrated design that incorporates all three functions. With tighter integration between these three we will be able to offer more features. But early adopters won't be left out in the cold - any time we improve our bike the changes will be backward compatible and easily retro-fitted to pre-existing bikes.

So that's a brief view inside our process and how we went about building our bike.

WMI's, 565's and 566's

2008-12-01T11:24:00.000-08:00

OK, in our last exciting installment we left with the train gathering speed, right? There's nothing like a nice dollop of government legislation to throw a few (well intentioned) curves in the way. If we were going to do this properly (and believe me we are!) then we needed to start grappling with CFR's, FMVSS, DOT, NHTSA and plenty more alphabet soup.

2008-12-02 1E9 / 458. What's that? That is our WMI number and it's date of issue. That's the date we became "recognized" - go ahead and look us up at: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/rules/manufacture. WMI is our world manufacturer identifier. Now when we issue our VIN (vehicle identification number) anyone can look up who manufactured that fine piece of two-wheeled EV machinery. More than that we can interpret the VIN and tell you where and when we made it and what model it started out as. All that info is packed into the VIN and the 565 (or maybe it's the 566) - filing is the key to crack the code.

FMVSS stands for Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards - this is where the folks at the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) codify the rules and regulations required to make a safe vehicle. For a motorcycle (which is any two or three wheeled vehicle with more than 5HP - the Department of Transport (DOT) don't care about no high falutin' terms like "maxi-scooter") there are CFRs (Code of Federal Regulations) applying to various aspects of the bike. Tires, lights, brakes, controls are the big ones for a motorcycle.

Now, here's a word of warning, FMVSS compliance is self-certified. If you think about it it has to be this way. The government doesn't have the time or resources to test every new vehicle. They rely on the manufacturers to follow the rules and to certify their products. The vast majority do. There are concerns that some may cut some corners. For example go look at the headlight lense on any vehicle. It should have a DOT marking to show that it's valid for use in the US market. At a large motorcycle dealership show we saw many import bikes on display that didn't appear to have all the apropriate DOT markings. Of course if one asked the vendor/manufacturer about the omission of such marks one would receive the answer "oh this is just a show bike" - we're not so sure we believe them...

However, our bike is fully FMVSS compliant. Every light lense, every brake component, the tires, the controls. The whole shooting match is composed of appropriately certified parts. It's our name on the line (or in this case our name is on the Products Liability insurance) so you can bet we made REAL sure of all this.

So now that we've detoured through administrivia (and defined some of the various acronyms) lets get back on to the main line and head towards the building of the bike.

First Steps - Fall / Winter 2008

2008-11-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

We spent a good part of September looking for the basic frame that would become the genesis of our bike. We ended up selecting a maxi-scooter frame from a major Chinese manufacturer. These guys produce hundreds of thousands of bikes per year. They're not a fly by night operation - far from it. We struck up a relationship with one of their company reps and we were able to get an agreement to provide us with "gliders". "Glider" is the term EV'ers use for a bike (or car) with no engine, transmission or fuel system. Apparently in the racing or automotive world that's a rolling chassis. But, hey, I like "glider" - it sounds cooler.

The frame we chose is a standard tube frame. It's far more substantial than the frame on some competitors bikes. But it's not a uni-body like the Vectrix. Uni-bodies are stiffer (compare a Vespa scooter to a Honda scooter and you'll find the Vespa feels sturdier) - but are more specialized and they're heavier. The Vectrix weighs over 550lbs our bike weighs in at 400lbs. That's 150lbs less to shift around the world. Just because we're making an EV doesn't mean we should forsake weight management!

To get the ball rolling we simply went out and bought the gas version of the bike. It just feels great ripping out all the ICE (internal combustion engine) components. EVs are fundamentally far simpler than ICEs. Makes you wonder why the big guys don't want to build them. Quick rant: Of course the big companies could build an EV if they wanted to. They don't want to. Why not? My guess (and it's just a guess) is that (a) it would alienate the dealers (less servicing revenue for the dealers) and (b) it would cost the companies a lot of lost revenue (no more selling service items). But, hey, that's just a guess. At the end of the day they don't want to (or perhaps they really can't?) do it. Bad for them. Bad for you. Good for me. Sorry - but it sure ain't my fault!. End of rant.

OK, so we now have a bike stripped of it's ICE components and we drew up a more detailed description for our Chinese suppliers. The joke around here is that when we get the bikes we'll have no front wheel and a gas engine. Instead of no rear wheel and no gas engine. Sort of "Lost in Translation" but in the engineering world (I wonder if Bill Murray would be interested in the film?). Seriously though we soon realized we needed some serious Chinese language skills - so we've addressed this and we have "our man in China" ready to help dot the i's and cross the t's. A quick shout out to Greg in China! (OK, I know they don't have i's and t's - but that just makes you realize how much we need a Chinese interpreter...)

Along with getting the glider we turned one of my existing electric bikes into our "mule". A "mule" is an automotive term for a vehicle test bed. When Ford wants to build a brand new car they take one of their pre-existing models and "hack it about" and add the new bits and pieces to it. OK, it's just a tad more complicated than that - but that's basically what a mule is. We upgraded our mule with a bigger motor, a better controller and more batteries. This helped us determine the parameters we were shooting for.

So far so good. We've got the frame question answered. We've got the basic parameters of the drivetrain. The train has left the station and is gathering speed...

Intro - The Birth of EVMFG - Fall 2008

2008-09-24T11:19:00.000-07:00

Back in the summer of 2008 with gas prices over $4 a gallon I decided to "get serious" about selling electric motorscooters. I was fortunate enough to hook up with two other local businessmen Coley and Erik. We spent the next few months exploring our options. At the time we were focused on opening a dealer and beginning our own brand. This would be the first step and then we'd move in to other EV ventures. The idea was to import a pre-existing Chinese electric motor scooter and make various upgrades and fix certain quality control concerns.

But if we did this we were going to do it properly. So we engaged an automotive consulting firm to help us answer the questions and discover the issues. However, it didn't work out. The closer we looked at the chosen bike and the chosen manufacturer the less attractive the plan appeared. One day in September we pulled the plug - it just wasn't feasible.

However, on that day Electric Vehicle Manufacturing (EVMFG) was born. Coley stepped back at that point (his skills are in retail and general business management) - but Erik (owner of an electronics manufacturing business) and me (John - owner of rEVolution Electric Vehicles, LLC) were still committed to bringing an EV to market. So, we switched our attention to how to build our own bike.

Right from the beginning we had decided we didn't want to "do a Vectrix" - i.e. we didn't think it was feasible or even preferable to design a new bike from the ground up. Many a wannabe EV manufacturer has managed to raise a few million dollars of other people's money (OPM) with the promise of the "perfect solution". They disappear into the design studio and appear a couple of years later (or almost a decade in the case of the Vectrix). At that point they sure do have a great looking vehicle - on paper. They've also spent the OPM and, because this is a fast moving environment, they may find themselves already behind the technology curve (can you say Nickle Metal Hydride batteries?). A lot of folks apparently give up at this point. Others, like Vectrix keep on trucking. However, by this time they've saddled themselves with a "big business" cost base - as such, when the bike finally makes it to the showroom floor it costs $12,995 and risks being classified as an expensive toy.

Why re-invent the wheel? There are hundreds if not thousands of bikes out there. Are any of them the "perfect" bike to use as a starting point? That depends on how you define perfect, it also depends on whether you're even looking for perfect. Engineering is the art of compromise - that's not a bad thing. It's a realistic thing.

So, EVMFG's goal was set - build a world class EV bike using the best technology that exists today and bring it to market quickly. At EVMFG we know the best place to learn is in the field not in the lab.