Harley-Davidson, Project Livewire: First electric motorbike revealed

There are plenty of small and innovative startups working on producing the perfect electric motorcycle, but now one of the biggest companies in the world has got involved in the technology.

Harley-Davidson this week unveiled Project Livewire, in which the firm's first electric-powered bike will be touring the States along the historic Route 66.

The idea behind the tour is to give bikers a chance to test out Livewire and give feedback on its development.

The prototypes that Harley-Davidson has worked on will be modified and refined based on suggestions from the public, if there's enough interest in the vehicle, then a production model may not be too far away.

While Harley-Davidson is better known for rumbling engines and bulky designs, the new creation is surprisingly light and slim.

It can reach 60mph in less than four seconds, has a top speed of 92mph and boasts 74 horsepower and 52 foot-pounds of torque.

Harley-Davidson executives are reluctant to talk specifications right now, though, and would prefer riders to give Livewire a test drive rather than compare it against existing bikes.

The tour, which involves around a dozen prototypes, starts in New York and will also hit Europe sometime during 2015.

'Any business has always got to look ahead to see where customers are interested in going, and see where society might be going,' chief marketing officer Mark-Hans Richer told reporters.

At the moment we don't know much about the internal components of the Livewire, but Harley-Davidson is claiming the bike has a range of 53 miles and a battery that charges in 3.5 hours.

That would put the power pack somewhere in the 113kg (or 250lbs) range, so the bike's designers will have had to work hard to cut down on the size and the weight of other sections.

If you check out the teaser trailer released by Harley-Davidson you'll notice there's not quite the same trademark roar from the engines, the Livewire has been built to work very quietly and efficiently, even if it's not quite as powerful as the rest of the company's current line-up.

The full promotional video provides a look at a Livewire being taken through its paces by a test driver on a closed circuit.

Volta BCN: 2011 Milan EICMA debut - YouTube

Spain's Volta Motorbikes is at the International Motorcycle Exhibition in Milan this week, to debut two varieties of its new Volta electric motorcycle. The Volta BCN is the company's first two-wheeler and the first to be designed in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, after which it is named.

It's essentially one model offered in two different styles and finishes - the Sport has been designed as an urban motorbike, while the City is headed for the downtown core. These stylish sustainable mobility solutions offer a top speed of 74.5 mph (120 km/h) and a range of 43.4 miles (70 km), and will be released in Europe in Q2 of next year.

The BCN has a 33 bhp/25Kw DC electric motor that powers a maintenance-free, direct-drive belt transmission and makes 67Nm of torque - said to be roughly equivalent to a 250-to-400-cm³ fuel-driven motorbike.

Its 74V/3.1 kWh Lithium Polymer battery pack can be recharged from any 220V outlet or public charging point via an onboard charger and supplied 2-meter (6.56-foot) charging cable with a schuko plug.

Full recharge time is given as two hours, but partial top-ups are also possible. Volta says that after around five years of daily charging, the battery should still have 80 percent of its initial capacity.


The BCN's quoted top speed and range falls not a stone's throw from the current Zero S electric motorcycles, but is not quite up to the 2012 upgrades which will boast top speeds of up to 88 mph (142 km/h) and over 100 mile (160 km) range.

Volta Motorcycles is currently in the process of building a distribution network ahead of Q2 2012 availability.

The company will initially release the BCNs in Spain, before breaking out into the international market.

Both the Sport and the City carry an estimated price of EUR 7,000 (about US$9,500).

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VW about to capture Small Car market?

Volkswagen is set to release its newest model, the diminutive up! - yes, the exclamation point is part of its name - in Europe in December.

With the up!, Volkswagen hopes to shake up the small car market. At 11.6 feet long, 5.4 feet wide, and 4.9 feet tall, the model will be one of the smallest 4-seat cars.

“If the goal is to maximise space, the ideal form for a small car would be a rectangular box,” said Klaus Bischoff, Head of Design for the Volkswagen Brand. “In the up! we were able to sculpt such a box with a clean and powerful design that does not lose sight of space utilisation.”

The car is intended for the urban driver and will sport high fuel efficiency and safety standards. It will be the first small car with optional City Emergency Braking - which employs a laser sensor at speeds under 30kph.

Depending on the situation, the car will brake automatically, reducing the risk of collisions.
The up! will be debuted at the Frankfurt auto show next month. It will feature three 1.0-liter three-cylinder gas BlueMotion engines, and an electric up! is expected to debut in 2013. The car will be available in three versions: the entry-level take up!, the comfort-oriented move up!, and the higher-end high up!

According to an emailed statement, a flexible financing plan called AutoCredit2 will “make the goal of driving a safe and economical new car more attainable than ever. Like the Beetle back in the 1950s, one could say that the up! is once again ‘democratising’ car driving.”


No word yet on when we can expect to see the up! in the U.S., but it will be interesting to see what effect the up! has on the European small car market.

Photos: Volkswagen

This ECO vehicle gets 2,564.8 miles per gallon

Students from the Université Laval in Quebec, Canada won the internal combustion crown in Shell’s Eco-marathon with a prototype vehicle that got 2,564.8 miles per gallon (above).

Shell’s fifth annual Eco-marathon Americas is a challenge for students to design, build and test fuel-efficient vehicles.

Waste chip fat fuels hydrogen economy

Don’t pour that dirty fat from the frier down the sink — it could be used to make the fuel of the future.

Hydrogen has been tipped as a cleaner, greener alternative to fossil fuels. But scientists have struggled to find a way to make it that doesn’t consume vast amounts of energy, use up scarce natural resources, or spew out high levels of greenhouse gas.

Researchers at the University of Leeds have now found an energy-efficient way to make hydrogen out of used vegetable oils discarded by restaurants, takeaways and pubs. Not only does the process generate some of the energy needed to make the hydrogen gas itself, it is also essentially carbon-neutral.

“We are working towards a vision of the hydrogen economy,” said Dr Valerie Dupont, who is leading the Leeds-based project. “Hydrogen — based fuel could potentially be used to run our cars or even drive larger scale power plants, generating the electricity we need to light our buildings, run our kettles and fridges, and power our computers. But hydrogen does not occur naturally, it has to be made. With this process, we can do that in a sustainable way by recycling waste materials, such as used cooking oil.”

Hydrogen can already be made quite easily from simple fossil fuels, such as natural gas. The fuel is mixed with steam in the presence of a metal catalyst then heated to above 800 degrees centigrade to form hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

However when much more complex fuels are used, such as waste vegetable oil, it is difficult to make very much hydrogen using this method without raising the temperature even further. The reactions could be run at lower temperatures but the catalysts would quickly become poisoned by residues left over from the dirty oil. In short, the process is not only expensive but also environmentally unsound.

Dr Dupont and colleagues have perfected a two-stage process that is essentially self-heating. To begin, the nickel catalyst is blasted with air to form nickel oxide — an ‘exothermic’ process that can raise the starting temperature of 650 degrees by another 200 degrees. The fuel and steam mixture then reacts with the hot nickel oxide to make hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

The researchers also added a special ’sorbent’ material to trap all the carbon dioxide produced, leaving them with pure hydrogen gas. This trick eliminated the greenhouse gas emissions and also forced the reaction to keep running, increasing the amount of hydrogen made.

“The hydrogen starts to be made almost straight away, you don’t have to wait for all of the catalyst to be turned into pure nickel,” Dr Dupont said. “So as well as the generation of heat, this is another way that makes the process very efficient.”

The researchers have shown that the two-stage process works well in a small, test reactor. They now want to scale-up the trials and make larger volumes of hydrogen gas over longer periods of time.

UK Space industry could add £40 billion to the economy

Britain's space industry could be worth up to £40 billion a year, according to a report published by the Space Innovation and Growth Team (IGT), a committee tasked by the UK government with laying out the future of the UK's commercial space ambitions.

Chief among the recommendations is more spending. The UK currently spends around £270 million on space projects such as satellite programs.

Andy Green, who chaired the IGT, told the BBC, "we already have six per cent global market share, despite the fact we spend a relatively low proportion of our GDP on space."

Getting organised

UK Space is an organisation which represents an assortment of British high-tech companies. Its chairman, Richard Peckham is also business development manager of Astrium, a UK-based satellite company.

He said that the future of the British space industry doesn't simply rely on asking for money. “You've got to have somebody that's actually looking across all of the potential uses of space,” he said.

That somebody will be the as-yet unnamed British space agency, a dedicated organisation announced in December 2009. Responsibility currently lies with an assortment of different government departments – a situation which leads to wrangling over funding.

Former aides want Chavez to resign over charges of corruption and incomptence

Former aides want Chavez to resign

In a daring move, former aides of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have signed a petition asking the populist leader to resign because of gross incompetence.

The former loyalists' statement appeared in the local media, itself a brave move by the remainder of the Venezuelan press that has survived last year's purges and government measures against independently run newspapers, magazines and broadcasters.

It was also the first time that news had reached the outside world of the existence of a dissident group calling itself the Constitutional Axis.

The call for resignation follows weeks of growing public discontent over the shortages of water, power and basic necessities. The government said drought conditions caused by the El Nino phenomenon have drawn down water reservoir levels, but critics accused the government of mishandling that worsened the crisis.

Support for Chavez has dwindled since his much publicized foreign tours in 2009 that preceded major shortages and urban unrest. Critics accused Chavez of neglecting the domestic needs of Venezuela and of wasting resources on lavish foreign tours.

Falklands nationalistic row aimed at rattling oil investors

Falklands row aimed at rattling investors

A developing Argentine-British row over the Falklands prospecting for oil and gas offshore may be part of a diplomatic strategy by Buenos Aires to rattle investors who are pouring millions into the project, analysts said.

Political temperatures have been rising after Argentina revived its campaign for sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, a British overseas territory.

Britain and Argentina fought a war over the islands after Argentina invaded the territories in 1982. Britain retained control but Argentina says it has sovereignty over the islands.

In a further diplomatic escalation, Argentina summoned the British envoy in Buenos Aires to deliver a stiff rejoinder to London over the scheduled start of drilling for hydrocarbons in the waters off Falkland Islands.

The Argentine Foreign Affairs Ministry said the area earmarked for drilling was part of the Argentine continental shelf and therefore Argentina's sovereign territory is currently under "illegitimate British occupation."

The picture shown here incorporates the Coat of Arms for the Falkland Islands with the motto 'Desire the Right'

Economy Funerals for the Cost Conscious Corpse

Clare Brookes and business partner Michelle Orton, both 35, have created a hearse with a difference: their unique funeral Volkswagen Camper Van.

Not so much a funeral more of a short, one-way road trip!

Consumerism: Humans are 'eating the future'

We're often a gloomy lot, with many of us insisting that there's nothing we can do personally about global warming, or that the human race is over-running the planet like a plague.

Unfortunately, according to leading ecologists speaking this week in Albuquerque at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, few of us realise that the main cause of the current environmental crisis is 'human nature' and our own activities.

More specifically, all we're doing is what all other creatures have ever done to survive, selfishly expanding into whatever territory is available and using up whatever resources are available.

Like a bacterial culture growing in a Petri dish till all food sources and nutrients are used up. What happens then, of course, is that the bugs then die in a sea of their own waste.

Earth dead by 2025
One speaker in Albuquerque, epidemiologist Warren Hern of the University of Colorado at Boulder, even likened the expansion of human cities to the growth and spread of cancer, predicting "death" of the Earth in about 2025.

He points out that like the accelerated growth of a cancer, the human population has quadrupled in the past 100 years, and at this rate will reach a size in 2025 that leads to global collapse and catastrophe.

Juggernaut mentality
What's worse, is that not only are we simply doing what all creatures do: we're doing it better on an industrial scale. In recent times we're doing it even faster because of changes in society that encourage and celebrate conspicuous and excessive consumption, with a Juggernaut mentality.

Fill and consume Habitat
"Biologists have shown that it's a natural tendency of living creatures to fill up all available habitat and use up all available resources," says William Rees of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

"That's what underlies Darwinian evolution, and species that do it best are the ones that survive, but we do it better than any other species," he told me prior to the conference.
Spreading humans

Domination and Expansion
Although we like to think of ourselves as civilised thinkers, we're subconsciously still driven by an impulse for survival, domination and expansion. This is an impulse which now finds expression in the idea that inexorable economic growth is the answer to everything, and, given time, will redress all the world's existing inequalities.

Finite Resources
The problem with that, according to Rees and Hern, is that it fails to recognise that the physical resources to fuel this growth are finite. "We're still driven by growing and expanding, so we will use up all the oil, we will use up all the coal, and we will keep going till we fill the Petri dish and pollute ourselves out of existence," he says.

GM Segway: Eco City Transport for 2

Air France; First A380 rolled out

Air France has rolled out its first Airbus A380 in the French flag-carrier's new colour scheme.

The twin-deck aircraft, which has been undergoing final preparation at Airbus' Hamburg plant, is to be deployed on the daily Paris Charles de Gaulle-New York JFK route in November this year.

Air France has configured the jet for 538 passengers, which will make it the highest-density layout of any A380 so far put into service.

The airline has a mix of 80 business-class and 106 economy-class seats on the upper deck. The lower deck will feature nine first-class and 343 economy-class seats.

Air France chief Pierre-Henri Gourgeon says: "The A380, particularly well-suited to the current economic context, will enable Air France to offer its customers an even better quality of service while at the same time limiting costs."

Air France has 12 of the A380 type on order and plans to introduce four into service over winter 2009 and spring 2010, barring delays.

Air France's first A380 is MSN33. The airline is fitting all 12 with Engine Alliance GP7200 powerplants.