Ebike Industry Updates

Now that all the electric car charging companies are lining up for handouts from the federal government to expand the US electric charging infrastructure, this is the perfect opportunity for us to force them to implement a handful of things that will greatly improve the integrity and usability of US chargers.

NYC is now spending a whopping $25 million to install ebike chargers for people to use on the streets of NY. I’m not sure how this is going to work and although I understand why they are doing it. They want to cut down on building fires caused by ebike charging in apt buildings that now happen on average once a day. A lot of people have died in these fires so I want to address why they happen and why having ‘ebike chargers’ on the street in NYC are just not going to work.

Installing Electric car chargers to have a small $10 weather resistant 20 amp GFCI outlet on every charger is a no-brainer

The main reason that ebikes burst into flames is because so many cheap Chinese ebikes are built with counterfeit 18650 cells. Unfortudently it is nearly impossible to tell the difference between authentic cells and counterfeit cells made in China just by looking at them. When you build lithium batteries the process for making the cells is very intolerant of moisture as well as any tiny errors in the mixture of elements that make up the ‘jelly roll’ of the 18650. A counterfeit cell can appear like a legit cell from Samsung, LG or Panasonic and can even perform similarly as far as the amount of watts it can deliver on a single charge, but they can be a time bomb waiting to burst into flames at any time.

Can you tell the difference between the fake cell or the real one? No, You really can’t

I have to confess that I am no expert when it comes to controllers, and when I find someone who has a lot of experience and is honest about the benefits and drawbacks of any given model of controller, I want to hear what that tech has to say.

There are some very good products out there, but if every manufacturer says that their controller is the best, and never tells you why (or they fail to mention any particular weaknesses that it may have) then we can’t make an educated choice.

The reason these tech details are important is because some of the issues are something that we can fix ourselves, and other issues are completely integrated into the design. Plus, most builders don’t have an unlimited budget, so an affordable component that is “fixable” might sometimes be the best option.

I recently stumbled across a youtube channel where they do teardowns of popular EV components, and they spell out the raw data on the guts, both the good and the bad. It’s by Richard, and called “EV Components review (De-bodgery)“

I found his channel looking for info on controllers, and he has quite a few of those. The one in particular that caught my eye is the good review on the Votol EM-150. I pay no attention to someone who says “this is good”, unless they can show me how its different, compared to the one they say is bad….or…I am annoyed of they only tell us the good parts, and leave out glaring weaknesses.

This is big news, but there’s not much to add after reading the title. Tesla did two very important things early on. The first is that they developed a charging system where the design really makes sense for technical reasons. The second thing they did was to build thousands of Tesla “Super Chargers” just about everywhere.

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The Tesla NACS Supercharger Plug

In March of 2021, we wrote about the various proprietary charge plug designs (to see that article, click here)

The CCS “Combined Charging System” on the left, and the Tesla NACS “North American Charging Standard” plug on the right. Right now, NACS already outnumbers CCS charging stations two to one.

One of the most often asked questions about any electric conversion is “what controller should I use?”. Controllers are the last remaining voodoo in electric systems, and they are not easy to understand. I have picked up a few bits and pieces over the years, but to be honest, I have to trust in the opinions of other people who are more experienced than me when it comes to controllers.

Our custom builds article (click here to see that) shows several examples of ebikes using RC controllers, which for some reason are called “Electronic Speed Controllers” or ESC. They are tiny compared to the amount of peak amps they can flow. However, they typically could not provide high amps for long, since they were never designed to power an ebike.

These expensive tiny controllers used proprietary software, so…in 2014, a Swedish electronics engineer Named Benjamin Vedder designed an “open source” ESC-style of controller. This meant that anybody could build one from scratch and could also program it with free shared software. You could even alter the software to improve it or add new features. This type of controller is a Vedder-ESC, or VESC.

The first ones were very small for operating a powered skateboard, and similar devices. However, it is easily scalable to any size, and “3shul Motors” is a company in India that has slowly increased the sizes of their VESC models to the point where you can now get one that uses 126V and provides a peak of 1400 phase amps.

I have been hearing about VESC-based controllers for a few years, and I kept an eye out for conversions that used them, and now I am featuring two of those builds here below.

I’m not going to say that making a motor from scratch is “easy”, but…if you decide you simply have to build one, then the Lebowski Axial is probably the “easiest” one to make, and I have been studying these things for a while. Most motors are “radial flux” which is like a cup spinning inside another cup that’s slightly larger. However, there are some axial-flux motors that are available to buy, and the axials are configured like one plate spinning next to another plate (as seen in the pics here).

If this interests you, I recommend that you first take a quick skim through the pictures in our article “Motor tech, Learn the Terms”. Many common questions you might have about motors will be answered in that article, so I’m writing this as if you have already read that.

I believe inrunner radials are more popular for non-hubmotor applications because they are easier to cool passively with the stator having the outer aluminum fins attached to it. Outrunner hubmotors can add ferro-fluid to dramatically increase passive cooling. If you can increase the heat-shedding in a motor design, this means you can temporarily use massive amps for acceleration. For a short while, Zero motorcycles used an early Motenergy axial-flux design that had a single rotor in the center, and two stators with one on each side. Adding air-fans or liquid-cooling can help, but having the hot coils near the airflow around the vehicle helped the passive heat-shedding.

The downside of an axial-flux is that in order to make the motor more powerful, you can keep adding stators and rotors of the same diameter (which makes the motor wider), but…the stators nested in the center of the motor have a difficult time passively shedding heat. Once an engineer adds liquid-cooling to the equation to get heat out of the core, the added complexity, weight, and cost can make other designs more desirable.

My interest in non-hubmotor DIY motors is because of my concern that in the future, there might be a trade embargo affecting products from China. To be fair, you would still need to buy Neodymium magnets and also the enameled magnet-wire to build this, and both of those are likely going to be found as manufactured in China.