An electric scooter that can go 100 kmph (62 mph)? Meet the sleek new machine that’s designed to leave the clunky scooters you see buzzing around suburban High Streets, in the dust.
“This is a race vehicle,” says Nicola Scimeca, founder of YCOM, a motorsport technology firm. “It’s completely different.”
The S1-X, which was designed by his company, has inflatable tyres, a 1.5 kilowatt hour battery and a carbon fibre chassis. And according to Mr Scimeca, it offers an unexpectedly steady ride.
“What was really impressive was the confidence it gives to you,” he adds, recalling his own initial test-ride.
And, of course, there was no noise from the exhaust, instead, Mr Scimeca says he could hear the squeal of the electric motor as it sped up and down, and the thrum of the tyres as they gripped the track.
The S1-X is a brand new racing vehicle. It will be used by all competitors at next year’s eSkootr Championship, the world’s first e-scooter championship event.
But there are many other electric vehicle (EV) racing events popping-up across the country that are showcasing and championing important advances in EV technology.
Formula E has been around for years, but a flood of newer EV racing events have lately zoomed into view.
Others include the Extreme E race series, which launched earlier this year. In it, electric sports utility vehicles (SUVs) compete in a series of off-road events. And in 2022, SuperCharge will bring EV racing to city streets around the world.
“We feel like we are really inventing a new sport,” says Mr Scimeca, noting that his team had no real precedent on which to build when they began designing their racing e-scooter. They were even unsure as to how, exactly, riders would handle the vehicle.
For any EV racer, a flat battery means game over, so it’s something that the whole racing team needs to consider when turning cars around between heats, says Roger Griffiths, team principal at Andretti United Extreme E.
“All of us that came from conventional motorsport, we were very comfortable with operating internal combustion engine cars,” he explains.
But there are completely different safety considerations, too, given the high-voltage electronics involved in running EV racing cars.
Last month, there were a series of Extreme E races in Sardinia and one of the cars, driven by Stéphane Sarrazin, was badly damaged in a barrel roll. In such cases, engineers must make absolutely sure there are no live electronics exposed, says Mr Griffiths. “You have to treat it with caution until you know the thing is safe,” he adds.
EVs also tend to be a bit heavier than traditional racing vehicles, due to their weighty batteries, however their weight distribution doesn’t change during the race unlike their counterparts running on liquid fuel which gets used up lap-by-lap. So, EVs handle slightly differently for drivers.
ne of the goals of the Extreme E events is to showcase the capabilities and robustness of EVs. The track in Sardinia in Italy was a particularly tough test- being very dusty to begin with, and then increasingly damp as the racing weekend progressed.
For Extreme E, all drivers compete using a specially-designed electric SUV called the Odyssey 21. The cars get their power from on-site generators that use either biofuel or hydrogen, says Mr Griffiths: “We’re here to demonstrate that these cars can be green.”
Source – BBC
