The Nawa company has unveiled one electric motorcycle with a sleek hubless rear wheel and a much wider range than most other e-bikes.
However, the unique Nawa “Racer” electric motorcycle prototype is actually designed to help thecompany show what really sells: ultracapacitors.
Above the 9 kWh battery is a 0,1 kWh ultracapacitor that can harvest 80 to 90 percent of braking energy, far more than lithium-ion batteries alone can store.
With this configuration, Nawa can travel 300km compared to 180km for a motorcycle with the same battery pack but without supercapacitors.
The prototype will never be sold, but Nawa wanted to demonstrate what his products can do.
To best showcase the technology, he created a separate “tank” design: the super capacitor at the top, the regular battery at the bottom. Ultracapacitors are relatively cheap and weigh only 10kg, but increase battery capacity by around 65%.
To get that kind of autonomy a normal battery would have to drastically reduce weight and cost.
The technology is more effective in city driving, characterized by frequent braking and restarting. “It only stores a small amount of energy, but it is used very efficiently,” they say in the company.
The Nawa Racer is also quite fast, able to easily go from 0 to 62 km/h in “less than three seconds”, according to Grape.
Nawa will present the Racer at CES 2020 as a demonstration and will begin producing the supercapacitor on a large scale starting in 2020. “There is no reason why this cannot be applied to a larger motorcycle, a car or a other electric vehicle. This technology may enter production in the near future,” Grape said in a statement.
