NAWA Racer electric has hybrid battery

NAWA Technologies has revealed an electric café racer with a hubless rear-wheel motor and world-first ‘hybrid’ battery system, combining next-gen ultracapacitors with a lithium-ion battery.

They say it is the first time an electric motorbike has used ultracapacitors.

Nawa claim it is 25% lighter, 10 times more powerful, with five times more energy.

Yet they say it is only capable of 300km of range in the city which is not much more than the Harley-Davidson LiveWire with city range of up to 235km and 152km of highway range.

It’s also a long way short of Italian company Energica’s new Ego and Eva with up 400km (250 miles) of range, although they don’t specific city or highway range.

City range is always farther on electric vehicles with regenerative braking.

NAWA claims their regenerative braking re-uses 80% of the energy otherwise lost while lithium-ion batteries can only re-use 30%.

Here is how it works

NAWA’s carbon-based ultracapacitors charge and discharge in seconds and are capable of picking up energy from regenerative braking and supplying it back to an electric motor very quickly.

They can do this millions of times over without degradation, offering fast energy transfer, unlike lithium-ion.

It’s not really new.

Back in 2015, we reported on LA-based California NanoSystems Institute in the University of California who developed a hybrid battery that combined lithium-ion batteries with supercapacitors.

So why don’t all electric vehicles use supercapacitors or ultracapacitors?

Although they have five times more energy storage than existing technology, lithium-ion still has greater overall capacity.

By integrating these ultracapacitors into a lithium-ion system, NAWA’s battery has much more efficient overall performance.

This reduces the charge and discharge cycles of the lithium-ion battery performs and extends the life of the system.

It also reduces the environmental impact of lithium mining.

NAWA claim the hybrid ultracapacitor battery system can reduce the size of a lithium-ion battery by up to half, or extend the range by up to double, or a manufacturer’s preferred combination of size, weight and range.

The NAWACap ultracapacitor pack recharges in just two minutes and the entire battery can be charged to 80% in one hour from a home supply.

Lightweight racer

The NAWA Racer concept’s pack only weighs 10kg which makes it ideal for use in a motorcycle.

Together with the bike’s carbon frame, it weighs only 150kg.

It is driven by a hubless rim motor in the rear wheel with 75kW of power for a 0-100km/h rate of less than three seconds which is fairly typical of most electric motorcycles.

NAWA Racer’s NAWACap pack can be removed and swapped for different levels of performance. There are also Race and Eco modes for more speed or extra range.

Other features are LED lighting, painted aluminium and copper, anodised matte black suspension forks and nubuck leather saddle in vintage camel.

The concept will be on show at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on 7 January 2020.

We don’t believe NAWA Technologies will build the bike for the maket.

Their business is the production of ultracapacitor cells, so they will probably sell the technology to motorcycle manufacturers.