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[Electric_Adventures]

I’ve been following Verge Motorcycles fairly closely this past year and at this point, I just have to ask - do we think there can be a dedicated space created for them on the forum to share news and opinions?  They’ve delivered to customers in Europe and with their solid state deliveries looking very promising to deliver by this year in the US that means I’ll be replacing my Experia with one of them.  Hoping to be able to share experiences with new and existing owners here.

Linked charging test of their new pack this morning:

https://youtu.be/xp2T7gGHK6s?si=7jxMHylxG_-Jb45Y

[Starpower]

This forum gets so little traffic and posts that a seperate subforum is really not needed. It will not be hard to find!

[MVetter]

Also it's a scam.

[Grauteufel]

The solid state batteries may yet turn out to be a scam, but there are real actual bikes with customers out there, more than some other manufacturers. Most of the feedback I’ve seen peg the bike as a straight line hero, with that rear tyre limiting the fun in the twisters.

[MVetter]

I realize the bikes are real but they're a gimmick for the sake of gimmick. There are so many things wrong with the design. The Donut battery stuff is where it gets super shady and at this point I'm fairly confident it will become exposed and fizzle apart. May kill Verge with it. Who knows.

[Fran K]

Go to the other electric motorcycle spot under various brands and we can discuss it there.  Makes and models.

There is a review by a road racer guy linked on here somewhere that let ride it around.  The 120mm long cylinder batteries are more to my liking than getting involved with donut.  Changing the tire isn't too bad there is a rim that comes off but the sealing of the wheel bearings and the rotating mass of the wheel that makes it not worth worrying about it.  How many have they sold?  I hear there is a storefront somewhere in southern California.  Last I looked there are 128 Can am bikes on Cycletrader and no dedicated sub forum.

[MVetter]

What's a, "120mm long cylinder batteries"?

[TheRan]

Perhaps they were using 38120's, wikipedia lists electric motorcycles among their common uses.

As for how many have actually been sold wikipedia also says less than 100 up to February this year, however the source article requires a subscription to read.

[Fran K]

What's a, "120mm long cylinder batteries"?

"Stark has just signed a deal with China-based Wanxiang A123 that will see, in theory, a consistent supply of 26120 cylindrical battery cells in the future."

put this in search.   Any idea if China-based Wanxiang A123 is reputable.  Royal Enfield (likely a division of something else I would have to look up) owns a piece of Stark.

You seem to like pouch cells.  I watched a video about the livewire one/Harley live wire and that one used a prismatic cell.  I don't know what is in my Kawasaki hybrid.

[MVetter]

This is not a Stark thread. I do not understand speculative derails.

[Fran K]

Why then did you quote me on the 120mm and ask?

Did you at least skip around the video in post 1?  It seemed kind of dumbed down and repeating at the beginning.  Seems to leave untouched if there is a fan and air passages in their pack, I did not watch all of it.

[MVetter]

If I didn't have industry friends much smarter than me doing the kind of digging I can't, I would probably also have a little shred of hope for this. However I do know such people. One such person has a battery consulting business where he designs, builds, tests, and detonates a lot of batteries and packs. He's not new to the industry and has over a dozen years of manufacturing experience, including large scale. Some of his earlier work was actually at Zero which is when I met him. I waited to call him a few months after the Donut announcement to chat because I figured he'd be swamped with his clients demanding to know why THEY can't get a pack that does all the claims Donut says.

He laughed and said he'd had a chance to talk to the lead battery engineer at Donut for the better part of an hour and left the conversation, "fairly convinced this guy has never manufactured a cell before."

My buddy knew he couldn't ask about chemistry, manufacturing process, or anything that might be proprietary. Now, in his experience he's watched battery plants like Farasis go from MegaWatt Hour production all the way up to GigaWatt Hour production and knows the sheer amount of raw materials to do so. And I'm not talking battery chemicals. I'm talking specifically pouches and battery tabs.

In order to generate GigaWatt Hour levels of cells you need to have many, many truckloads of pouch materials and tabs delivered every day. So my buddy asked straight up how they were going to handle all that with the size of their plant.

I was told the battery engineer stammered a bit and then said they were going to be making all of that in-house. Riiiiiight. Completely different set of machinery, raw materials, and training. And it would require more than doubling the size of the plant. Even the Big Boys (Samsung, LG, etc.) buy pouch material and tabs from established manufacturers who have honed their craft. The idea that Donut is not only going to come up with a revolutionary battery (that behaves so far exactly like NCM) and also make all the supporting components in-house is, as the kids say, sus.

I would have never thought to ask a logistics question like that, but it makes so much sense.

[Specter]

another reason the big guys also outsource stuff like tabs and pouches etc is, it's just so much easier when all things are considered.  why re invent the wheel when someone else already honed it and can make them very fast.  Another issue is liability.  Something goes wrong, wrong material, contamination etc, it's the tab company's problem, not theirs when the lawsuits and cost of recall start coming in.

Tesla decided they were going to do pretty much all of their own stuff in house but he has multiple companies that all merge in and all can in essence use the same tech for their stuff, so can write off the costs of stuff on each other, so it makes sense in a dollars and cents way for them to do it, but for a one trick pony like verge. umm no.

manufacturing also creates a lot of waste, which you have to dispose of as well,  more cost to you.  let them worry about throwing away all the curvy top tab nibblets, and oh, it might have 0.0001 percent cobalt in it, that's hazmat, throw in an extra 1.85/lb for disposal diatribe.

now lets look at capacity issues, how much more electric water and sewer is that going to create?  can the utility handle that currently.  what about shipping out that many products, do you have a railway spur to take the stuff out by the trainload, or are you going to havr 500 semis coming in and out every day.  What's that going to do to traffic?  we already know it's going to tear up the road, who's going to pay to fix that or upgrade it to handle that kind of traffic now?  what about the pissed off people in town who are going to protest it at every step, because they don't want to be stuck behind trucks all damned day?

are you going to be making any unusual noises or smells along the way?  oops, now zoning is going to want to have a word with you and the epa, what limit are you permitted for.    oh you have your own water well?  how many mpg are you allowed to draw?  do you have any cooling towers, those can suck up insane amounts of water, what about legionaire's mitigation and other pathogen aerosol programs? ...though i think that still falls under epa still.

you don't just build a second shed next to the first one to handle the growth, it's going to get very interesting for them.

Aaron

[ultrarnr]

Scroll down on this page to see videos of the Verg charging: https://advrider.com/f/threads/verge-fixed-the-two-biggest-electric-motorcycle-problems-at-once.1829951/page-3

[MVetter]

Amazing how you managed to link the video that's in the very first post of this thread.