Building The Future

A young New Zealander, Sytse Tacoma, built himself an electric motorcycle to change people’s perceptions of such bikes. We had a chat with him to find out more.

MOTORCYCLE SPORT & LEISURE: Sytse, how did this project come about?

SYTSE TACOMA: In a way it started during my mechanical engineering university studies, when I was 21 years old. I had an electrical engineer friend who wanted to build an electric car, and he needed help with the gearbox.

I enjoyed the work, although it ended up taking up most of my free time over a year. We finished the car in the summer of 2012, and it did an awesome zero to 100km/h in six seconds.

Then I thought if we can do a car like this with a box of scraps, then surely we can do something a lot better in the form of a motorcycle.

The idea behind building this bike was to change the perception people have of electric vehicles, that they are actually fast, have the range and performance, convenience and cost savings that everyone hopes electric vehicles will have, and I think this bike achieved most of this.

MSL: How long did it take you to build this project from start to finish?

ST: It took about a year to design everything on CAD, before I spent a cent on it, because I wanted to make sure, before I sank a lot of my own money into it, that I had the recipe right, so everything was designed and tested in a computer simulation model. Once I knew it was going to work, I went out and bought all the parts when I was 25 years old and it took about another year to build it. This was all done part-time, while having a full-time job building electric buses.

MSL: Can you say something about your electric motor?