: Electric at the Isle of Man

By: g | No Comments » |

Forget those silly electric solar races plodding their way through the outback of Australia each year, this is electric at the sexy and amazing end…. This is a little bit of history being made and I hope in the near future, we will look back and think that this was the the turning point when electric vehicles became exciting for everyone.*

“The 2010 MotoCzysz E1pc, ridden by American Mark Miller, has won the Isle of Man’s TT Zero, lapping the 37.7-mile course at an average speed of 96.82 MPH. To put that in context, the first ever 100 MPH lap at the TT was in 1957, last year’s TTXGP winner, Rob Barber, lapped at 87.434 MPH and the outright record is held by John McGuinness and his CBR1000RR at 131.5 MPH.” Source HFL

And to think that the big automakers struggle with making electric a real alternative when a (well funded) privateer can pull this off…

*Let me clarify….

Up until now, electric vehicles and been, how shall we say…. poky at best? Yes, there is the Tessla coupe (and soon the be sedan) out of the US, but for the most part exciting ‘real’ (as opposed to glossy concepts at the auto shows) are few and far between. The real world application of electric technology has to date either been watered down and funked of ‘eco’, (Toyota Prius anyone?), or reeked of home made.

The MotoCzysz on the other hand is 100% electric, 100% real and 100% professional. From where I sit, looking through all the images available of the bike, I can not find a single element that has not been given a professional Engineering and Industrial Design working over – you look at the bike and think, hell ya, where do I plop the money down? This also does not account for the myriad of design and engineering innovations you find on the E1pc.

Topping it all off, it’s a project not designed to save the world but purely to go damn fast. And that’s the difference at play here. While to date everything electric has been aimed with the end goal of ‘eco’,  and we all know the general public does not consider eco sexy, the E1pc is designed to go fast – it looks fast, is designed to race and it’s these simple attributes that make it sexy. No saving the world here, just the simple, single minded pursuit of… fast. Mmm yea.

That’s why I think that this bike more than anything else to date, might and probably will, change our perception of electric. And there’s the clincher for me. In capturing the attention and desires of ‘everyone’, the MotoCzysz E1pc might just save the world. It would indeed be ironic to think that the individual who changed the world’s perceptions about electric vehicles is a motorcycle racing petrol head at heart.

Maybe it’s time we reconsider just how we look at addressing electric technologies. Instead of being green and tree hugging, we should be reckless and selfish, pursuing things with it that give us the proverbial ‘hard-on’, rather than that warm and fuzzy feeling we get when are doing something good for the world. Put another way, mankind has an issue getting motivated when it comes to saving itself, but when it comes to blowing himself up, going fast or doing something it should really not be doing, then there’s more motivation available than one would think humanly possible! Maybe then we’ll see more things like the E1pc that will make people want to trade their petrol burners for something more future friendly…. just don’t tell them it is.

 

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