Extreme DIY: Electric motorcycle built by 22-year-old

When I say DIY, I mean he DIY’ed, not necessarily that you can DIY. This 22-year-old college student took a Kawasaki ninja frame, stripped it down, and with help from his electrical engineer father, built a pretty damn amazing electric motorcycle.

I suspect we’re going to be hearing from this kid again. His first project is a motorcycle that’s capable of over 70 mph and a range of 60 miles on a single charge, and that’s just the first version. He put this all together in one semester. The total cost of his little project was $12,000 and half of that was just for the battery and the motor. Again, this is the first version of his project, he’s currently out of school and refining the design to squeeze as much performance as possible out of the setup.

This isn’t the first electric bike project we’ve seen but it is one of the more promising ones. The others are not quite ready for prime time, or really expensive. I do expect that the electric motorcycle is going to come into mass production on a large scale before the purely electric car does.

[via Autopia]