Last month a video of the DERBI GPR EV showed up on YouTube. It was posted by someone who appeared to be working with Sevcon and it was hard to tell if DERBI was behind the bike. I recently found the blog of Derbi Project Manager Carles Carrera. And guess what, he has a detailed picture of the Derbi GPR EV front and center.
Carles describes the ground up development methodology DERBI and their partners used in designing and building the bike over the course of 3 months. He cites flaws in Brammo, Zero, Quantya, Vectrix mentioning thier “poorly developed mechanical platform” and saying they fail to deliver an electric motorcycle that has all drive components communicating in an orderly fashion.
The electric Derbi was engineered to have it’s batteries, motor and controllers to work together like a tradition ICE motor’s carburetor, engine and fuel system. The GPR EV even appears to utilize some sort of transmission and has a traditional gear selector. The left hand lever could be a rear brake or a clutch lever.
UPDATE: Carles informed me the bike has 2 gears.
One thing that has me scratching my head is “Benelli” etched into the frame spar. As far as I know Derbi and Benelli have no current affiliation. I could be wrong about this. Anyone know the connection?
No mention of racing in TTXGP or e-Power but Carles might (hope, hope) be hinting at it in his last paragraph, last sentence…
And what the hell is Vema-Vogt-Perm-Sevcon-DPS? They are a group of companies working together to integrate it’s own world class product into a world class drivetrain. DPS is in charge of the batteries, Sevcon is in charge of the controller, Perm for the motor, Vogt for the engineering and Vema for the integration on coordination. And it proved to be a winning team.
Source: Plug Bike
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