FLASH OF LIGHTNING

摘要

In November 2009, after spending three months recovering from a broken pelvis, Chris Yates, a motorcycle racer, engineer, and defense contractor, began staging his reentry into racing. This time, he chose a new niche, where his training as an engineer would be a particular asset: electric motorcycles. He started by converting a gas-powered Suzuki GSX-R600 to run on a 194-horsepower electric motor that was built to power driverless U.S. Army tanks. Lithium-polymer batteries, 180 pounds of them, supply the charge. But to pack in even more power without adding extra battery weight, he designed a regenerative braking system that pulls otherwise wasted energy from both wheels to give the batteries a periodic boost. Yates and his team also custom-designed software that carefully manages overall energy usage. All that engineering was worth it.