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[jotjotde]

Flynn, I think the best time to pick up an Experia is now. I see them now offered with a 30 % discount.

I had hopes for an E-Ducati but not anymore. Audi, the owner of Ducati, is part of the Volkswagen Group which is currently restructuring. Looking at the current mood about e-mobility, they will not invest into anything related to this. So, buying Energica or getting an e-Ducati on the market, this is not going to happen anytime soon.

[flynnstig82r]

I agree it’s a good time to pick up a new Experia, but 70% of $22k is still way too rich for my blood right now. I’m house poor for the next couple years so I can maybe afford to splurge on a stick of gum. I’d rather Energica be rescued and continue development and I’ll pay full price for an upgraded model in 3-5 years. If they go under and owners figure out how to keep the bikes going with chewing gum and newspaper holding them together, maybe I’ll get one sooner at the “Fisker Ocean” discount rate, but that’s not what I’m hoping for.

My predictions for an electric Ducati are somewhere around 2030-32 for a “PanigalE” and/or “StrEetfighter” and 2033-35 for an electric Multistrada. I’d love to be proven wrong, but full Multistrada redesigns only happen every 6 years or so, and I don’t see them putting any kind of electric assist in the next one c2027-28. Can you imagine how silly Ducati would look with their usual +10 HP against a 2030 Experia RS with a solid-state pack and 2nd gen EMCE motor peaking at 200+ HP? Fingers crossed that the bankruptcy court allows that match-up to happen!

[Pard]

Buying an Energica now is a gamble on the entire purchase price of the bike.  If something goes wrong with the battery or associated electronics, you are out of options to get it fixed.

Considering how few Energica bikes are out there, there are way too many stories of bikes with issues to take the risk now, IMHO, unless you can afford to lose it all.

My first Rebelle went 90 miles before it died.  Simply stopped dead on the road.  Stefano replaced the entire bike within 2 weeks.  If that happened now I would be out of luck.

I knew the risks of early tech adoption, and went for it.  Now?  No way.  Risk to reward ratio is through the roof.

Get a Zero or a LiveWire.  They are not horrible, and they at least have service and support options.  The LiveWire one is a genuine comp to the Energica, maybe even better unless you are planning to ride track with it.

Or just get a great ICE bike.  No shortage of those. 

The state of electric hypersport bikes is on hold for now.

[coolhand]

Agreed,

I now own a very rare SS9 (I think the colors I chose have not been delivered to any other bike in Europe), at a zero to no resale value  :-)

As for the battery, there  is a tech shop here in Norway that claims they can repair or swap single cells in the battery. For the electronics, if things go bust, the bike is a brick....

[Pard]

Agreed,

I now own a very rare SS9 (I think the colors I chose have not been delivered to any other bike in Europe), at a zero to no resale value  :-)

As for the battery, there  is a tech shop here in Norway that claims they can repair or swap single cells in the battery. For the electronics, if things go bust, the bike is a brick....

Hopefully, there will be some ambitious individuals in every region who start to stockpile bikes that are being sold cheap, or sold for junk due to inoperable status and will have used, but working components to keep the machines running for some time.

[Stonewolf]

EEMC have said before they're happy to break open Energica batteries and root around in their guts and I expect that depending on what the problem is they probably still are.

[TNCreator]

are these batteries not sealed in resin like I think, zero ?

[Stonewolf]

I have no idea what's inside the box but resin sealing isn't common in EVs as far as I know.

[flynnstig82r]

I think Zero is the only one that pots their batteries. Energicas can be repacked in theory, if you can get the new pack to talk to the controller and the rest of the electronics.

[Specter]

Opening one of them up is a bit risky.
A. It's heavy as shit, hope you have a solid stand and a way to turn the thing up / down / sideways and around as you work on it.  A cherry picker setup worked for me.

The pack is 300 volts, once you got hot inside, there is NOTHING protecting ANYTHING from you making a mistake and touching something wrong.

I'll tell you right now, if you DO arc flash that thing, it WILL be catastrophic.  You'll damage at least one cell, to the point of auto self destruction, with no way to isolate it from the pack, save maybe getting a bolt cutters and cutting thru a bus that has how many hundreds of DC amps running thru it now.

At short circuit currents it will only take a few seconds tops for things to overheat, swell, vent and now it's a chain reaction as you have a sympathetic melt down.

Secondly, what exactly do you envision as being inside one of these packs?  I have taken one apart.  It isn't just a can full of battery cells.  You have bus'.  wiring out the ass, BMS boards,tie in boards, a bajillion nickle weld tabs. on and on and on.  Then there are the communications boards, CAN bus, so on and so forth.  It's a pretty complex device.

Do you really want to go gorilla footing around in it if you don't know exactly what you are doing.

I HAVE to warn you.

Opening that pack up is DEADLY.  You come across that bus hand to hand you will die.  300 volts will lock you up and the rest is an old tale of carelessness and DC voltage.

Please be careful if you want to poke there.

At the end of the day it's a 20kw pack, either rebuild it for house storage at 48 vdc nom OR just get an inverter that runs at 300 volts, they are out there and not very expensive at all.

aaron

[PWM]

I would have no hesitation to opening up one of these to document findings...insulated gloves and insulated tools is all that is really needed.

The 21.5kW variant shares the same form factor of (4) modules as the smaller 13.5kW variant...each pouch cell nests in a polyimide carrier...modules can be separated...within the modules cell tabs are bonded to bus bars likely by ultra-sonic welding but this is pure speculation based on other module designs I've seen...



Be cool to create / share video on this forum of step-by-step dissassembly / non-destructive reverse-engineering effort...raising hand for a donor pack if one can be made available.

[TNCreator]

is there some kind of archive website with all technical schematics like this one ? could be useful, even more now.

[PWM]

Energica patent is titled "Supply Unit"...CRP Group previous parent company before Idiotnomics is into additive manufacturing and a big contributor to this pack's design, e.g. pouch carriers I'm pretty sure are 3D printed using CRP proprietary technology.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9941556B2/en

[Stonewolf]

I have thought that one thing that would be interesting down the road would be a solid state cell swap. If you can get the right form factor cells you should be able to do a straight drop-in replacement and as long as the software works off voltage it the existing management systems should cope without modification.

[Specter]

Stonewolf, the solid state.  It's interesting right now.
One manu I have been watching, are pulling a tesla on their product's ratings and stated capabilities.
Remember how the powerwall was promised with all this grandoise and then quietly the specs dropped, reduced and went down.
Seeing same thing now with the SS supercaps.  Amp ratings are dropping, and cycle life went from an original claim of almost a million cycles, to now maybe 10k or so.  Now that these things been on the market for a while and are seeing real genuine use, and real world data is coming in on them, initial claims are quietly being re adjusted to match reality.

With that being said, I don't see any weight reduction really, in fact is heavier.  Price might come down over time, but for now is pretty high.  The only real benefit right now is no chemicals, or corrosives.  The supercaps are essentially cellophane  / saran wrap and carbon rolled into a tight tootsie roll with electrodes on it.  Besides for safety, there is no real 'gain' in capacity .vs. weight on them for the time being.  I havent heard of much in the way of capacity milestones hitting anywhere, just a bit of safety.  I don't expect to see anything breath taking coming out in the next 4 or 5 years really.  At least not at our level, and THAT is the one thing that is going to have to happen really to make Electric vehicles really hit mainstream.  If not capacity, some fast charge that can be done in like 5 or 10 minutes, but THAT is going to take multi megawatts per station if you don't want a line of cars a half mile long.... and THAT is gong to take a major infrastructure overhaul.   Were a ways out on all of this no matter how it plays out.

Aaron