Frodus, you're right.
You tackle it from that end, I'll take the other end then.
My comments were snide, but they're real... So lets expand on them and expose that reality.
"First, the bike needs to be indestructable. Second, it needs a range of 500km. Third, it must cost less than 1000 dollars. Fourth, no-one cares what it looks like "
There are two main two wheeled delivery vehicles. Owner operated and Company owned. Seems obvious really. Either the guy riding the bike bought the bike, or someone else bought the bike... So lets break down the purchase criteria of the *buyers* of the bike.
We need to remember that the designer is designing in the same way that a fisherman ties a lure. The lure is not intended to be tasty or for the fish to enjoy, it's intended to make the fish bite. Equally the bike is not designed to be enjoyable to ride, comfortable, reliable, practical, stable, or economical. It's intended to make a potential purchaser change into an actual purchaser.
So what will attract an owner rider. Well several things, but the first thing that attracts an owner rider is ruggedness. The bikes they choose are invariably unfaired, be it by design, or by having them crashed off. So any kind of fairing will be shunned. That eliminates all “scooter†style machines, all sports bikes (unless they're bought precrashed) and most touring style bikes. Back in my day the popular bikes were things like CX500s, GPZ550s, well crashed GSX-R750s and various trail bikes. I'm sure there are popular bikes now but I'm not sure of the actual bikes in use. Still I'm sure they're similar to that. The main thing about all of them is that they're bought second hand. If you're designing a bike for an owner rider, then you're missing the point. They won't buy it until it comes on the second hand market. They also won't buy it until it has some crash damage. They know that the bike will be bashed around in use. So if they buy a damaged one they can get it at half the price (or less) knowing that it will look the same in 3 months anyway. Unless you can sell new bikes for less than the price of a crash damaged 5 year old bike then no owner rider will buy it. The owner riders are driven by money. That's it. Not a love of riding, just money. They will happily carve up the traffic to shave 10 seconds off a delivery. So a fast bike is popular (hence the crash damaged GSX-R being quite popular. No rider is going to put up with swapping batteries, waiting for a recharge or any other stuff. If the bike can be recharged overnight, that would make them happy. A normal courier day is about 12 hours long and most of it is spent on the road. Running in and out of buildings and chatting up receptionists while fun, is only a small part of the day. So plan for a range that covers riding flat out (like your hair is on fire) for at least 8 and preferably 10 hours without a charge. That's about 500 km of cut and thrust inner city traffic. Not waiting in queues, *riding*. Couriers don't wait in snarled up traffic. They move, between the cars, on the footpath, through the park, into a pedestrian plaza, they don't care (I sure didn't). Servicing gets done on the weekends so the lower servicing time of electrics is not an advantage in that it's not time off the road. As I said they go out of their way to choose crash damaged bikes because they're cheaper. They don't care what the bike looks like. The worse it looks the better because it will be cheaper. As long as the main parts are in more or less the right place, everything else is not just secondary, it's completely ignored. The bikes are never washed, never fixed beyond the bare minimum. There is zero pride of ownership.
Fleet buyers are a slightly different kettle of fish. I've never been a fleet buyer but I've been subjected to the results of their decisions... They *never* buy second hand (unless you count occasional pizza places that buy ex Australia Post bikes). The biggest seller of all two wheeled vehicles here in Australia is the Australia Post version of the Honda 110 Ag bike. So big in fact that the statistics released on motorcycle sales no longer bother to include them simply because they dwarf all other sales by so much. Built exclusively for Australia Post they're bought in huge numbers at absurdly low price. They're run by AP for 10000 km and then sold at auction for more than AP buys them for. Despite a full service every 1000 km the bikes are totally destroyed by the time they reach 10000 km (which is why AP offloads them). (the postie bike club says that they're now holding onto them until 26000 km!) There is no identifiable damping in the external spring front forks (1950's tech). As a result under heavy braking the front wheel simply patters up and down without actually slowing the bike down much at all. The frame is made of pressed steel. It's amazingly heavy, somewhat flexible (that's a bad thing in case you didn't know, at least at this level of flexibility), impossible to repair, and absurdly poorly balanced, with almost all the weight on the back wheel and none on the front. Why use it then? The answer is that though pressed steel is ***VERY*** expensive to tool up for, once you've got the huge press, thousands and thousands of frames can be stamped out for almost nothing. So unless you've got millions of dollars handy to tool up for the production of pressed steel frames, you will never be able to compete on price against them on a unit price level. Pressed steel frames were popular 60 years ago when many people rode motorcycles. No-one has created one for decades and I'd be stunned if anyone ever did again. However if you're competing against the lowest bidder, that's what you're competing against. The fleet buyers simply choose the lowest bidder. So they don't care what the bike looks like. I strongly suspect that most of them have never ridden a motorcycle anyway. So any styling you do along with the basic design is a waste. They don't care, they'll never even look at the bikes.
So I stand by my initial comments. No, I didn't dress them up in a way that makes it look like I care. Still, they're true, they're to the point and if you ignore them then any company that relies on your advice is going to blow a stack of cash on something that will never work. If on the other hand you're doing an assignment I'd just return a response, “It cannot be done in a way that will make a profitâ€.
I actually doubt it can physically be done at all, even if money wasn't a factor in the business of building real motorcycles. Even if you designed them and built them at a complete loss (you wouldn't be the first to do that, the Bugatti Veyron is reputed to cost 5 times more to make than it sells for). A bike that was big enough to carry enough batteries to do what is needed wouldn't have anything left over for cargo and wouldn't be able to filter between cars. Even a bike as remarkable as the Swigz racer wouldn't have anywhere near the range to do it and it's essentially a courier bike, GSX-R, topbox and all, but it's stuffed to gills with batteries and there's not even room for an envelope. It would certainly need a Swigz style regen unit on it. The mad and constant braking and acceleration of courier work is very like short course road racing.
Cheers Jason =:)
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Topic: courier-delivery vehicle (Read 2406 times)