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I immediately thought about the drag racing electric motorcycle I had read about years back, the KillaCycle. Well, apparently those guys designed the battery packs for the Drayson in TFA, which is pretty neat. It's also the bike that the inventor crashed while trying to do a burnout for some reporters... but whatever, still cool.

I immediately thought about the drag racing electric motorcycle I had read about years back, the KillaCycle. Well, apparently those guys designed the battery packs for the Drayson in TFA, which is pretty neat. It's also the bike that the inventor crashed while trying to do a burnout for some reporters... but whatever, still cool.

There are many many different formulations of battery referred to as Li-ion. The newer variants such as nano-phosphate Li-ion from companies like A123 are no longer susceptible to thermal runaway, are capable of delivering enormous amounts of current, and maintain excellent energy density. These are the batteries driving record holding electric dragsters such as the Killacycle.

All Electric Motor cycles are in the high 7's. not the same as a car but i could believe that you strap that same drivetrain onto a a 4 wheeled tube frame and it would still be sub 10 seconds.
http://www.killacycle.com/

This is progress, but not a breakthrough. The problem with electric cars used to be that batteries didn't have enough energy density. With lithium-ion batteries, the energy density is almost good enough, but the battery pack costs too much. So they're trying to deal with that by leasing the batteries. Interest rates are unusually low right now by historical standards, so this might actually work. But it's more of a financing gimmick than a technical advance.

Dragsters are going electric. The energy storage required to go a quarter mile isn't that much; the problem is getting it out of the battery fast enough. There's now an electric motorcycle that can go 0-60mph in under one second. They hope to break the top-fuel record for the quarter mile within a year, once they get a new battery pack.

I remember reading this story in Wired some years ago about electric vehicle drag racing. The article talks about the National Electric Drag Racing Association (NEDRA), among other things.

Some of these cars are what you think of when you think of drag racing; some of them aren't, like this street legal 1972 Datsun 1200 "White Zombie" mentioned in the Wired story. Some people build electric motorcycles too; check out the KillaCycle .

No, but how about this?