A bike Odyssey

Yesterday, I picked up my Empulse. I had the whole day planned out, but as is always the case, the plans had to change.

Billy and I set off from Maitland at about 6 am with the goal of 
getting to the dealership when they opened, at 8 am. First stop: feed the Volt some gasoline, since its battery only has about a 30 mile range. I was going to fill up the tank, but Billy insisted on only putting 4 gallons. His rational: Why carry extra fuel that you don’t need? Good point. Volt drivers (and EV users in general) don’t think like regular gas users!

The GPS was set, the Volt had all the energy it was going to need, so it was off to Tampa!

Disaster

At about 7:30, I got a call from Jamie, over at Euro Cycles. The truck that was delivering the bikes had come in very late last night, after they had already closed up shop, so they had just enough time to get the bikes of the truck. When they opened the crates early the next morning, some of the bikes had broken loose from their restraints and been had been damaged. My bike was the most damaged.

Okay, it wasn’t that bad. In any case, since we were most of the way there, we decided to at least take a look at the bike, and Jamie said that he might be able to cannibalize the damaged parts from the other bikes, which weren’t scheduled to be delivered until later. There was still hope!

We got to Euro Cycles, met up with Jamie, and I had my first look at an Empulse R with my own eyes. What a beauty! Even with the damage, it looked magnificent. Here’s what was wrong.

• Right rear turn signal
• Right passenger grip
• Right body panel
• Throttle
• Break lever
• Front turn signal

The break lever and front turn signal were pretty badly mangled. The rest looked somewhat superficial. Jamie managed to get all of the damaged parts replaced except for the tank cover, since my bike was the only red one in that shipment. The only problem was that Saturdays are crazy at Euro Cycles, and it ended up taking about another four hours before the bike was ready. What’s another four hours after waiting for almost two years, eh? (Yeah, right. I wasn’t going to wait another minute if there was any way to avoid it!)

By 12:30 I was in possession of my very own Empulse! It was time to head home. Due to the shipment issues, the bike only had a 75% charge, so Billy and I worked out the location of a free Level 2 charger that we could safely get to with the charge on the bike.

Thank you Plant City Courthouse for the free electricity and my first charge.

We weren’t planning on staying long, since there wasn’t all that much to do at the courthouse and the bike still had more than enough charge to get to our originally planned first stop: another free Level 2 charger in Lakeland. However, after being plugged in for a few minutes in the courthouse’s fairly deserted parking lot, some guy pulled up in a truck and started asking about the bike. I was surprised about how many people out there already know about electric bikes, and even more surprised that this guy just happened to find us! 10 minutes of charging and talking about bikes, and then we motored on down the road.

At Lakeland, the battery was down to 41% and getting back to 100% was going to take just over two hours, but there are some nice places to eat and hang out on Main Street, and since we were getting a free charge from the city, it would only be fair to spend some money there.

Two hours and a couple of hamburgers later, as predicted by the bike (props to Brammo for getting the recharge estimate time right), the battery was fully charged and we were ready to get our motors running and head out on the highway.

Highway Riding

The owners manual says that the motor should not be run at more that 3500 RPM. Happily, the bike will go 60 mph in 6th gear with the motor running at 3500 revs, so it is possible to safely travel on a highway during the break in period.

On the highway, I got a few stares from passengers in passing cars, and there was even one driver that slowed down and paced me for a while to take a good look at the bike. It’s quite fun to ride such an unusual machine. Hopefully, in the future, the Empulse will be so common that seeing one will be no big deal.

My last stop before getting home was at Billy’s place. If I was going to need to charge the battery to get to my place, he could tell me where to do that. As it turns out, I had 30% charge left on the bike and only 10 miles to get home, so I said thanks, goodbye, and zipped home.

Home at last

It was quite a day, with lows and highs, but it ended very well; with my Empulse happily charging in my garage.

Total trip was about 117 miles (the dealer took the bike out for a 10 mile test run before I got the bike).

A final note about the damage

It turns out that something pretty drastic happened to the truck during shipping. Brammo had previously been having issues with the back wheel sliding around, but in this case, a strap must have broken loose allowing the bike to rattle around in its crate. Poor Empulse. What a way to start it’s existence.

For more details, take a look at the Brammo Forum postings about that.