Cycling electrified

From the seed of an idea for a spoke-less wheel, a pair of Portland brothers grew a new high-performance bicycle brand.
Their knowledge from that project has blossomed into a new business venture they hope will help put them at the forefront of green transportation technology.
Dave and Tim Poole, the co-founders and owners of AeroCat High Performance Bicycles, have teamed with former classmate Alan Lewis to create ECat, an electronic bicycle company targeted at law enforcement organizations.
“It actually started out as a conversation last year at the Indy track,” said Dave Poole of ECat, which is using this year’s Indianapolis 500 to help launch the new company (see related story on page 12). “(Lewis) had an idea for this project and wanted to get input from us because we were bicycle people. … We’ve been working on this part time for more than a year now.”
Involvement for the Pooles, who are both electrical engineers, has stepped well beyond input over the last year.
They have been working to take the electronic bike from an idea to a prototype, which looks almost like an everyday bicycle. In fact, the frame of the ECat prototype is an AeroCat mountain bike.
The difference is that there is a battery pack, manufactured by the Toronto-based company Bionx, in a case attached to the down tube, which runs at an angle from the handle-bar area to the gear area.
“It’s substantially lighter weight,” said Dave of what differentiates the ECat product from a similar gas-powered vehicle such as a moped. “This is a much more portable version. It’s around a 40-pound solution.”
The electronic bicycle can be operated like a regular bicycle, using only pedaling to propel it forward. But the electric motor makes it a much more versatile machine.
The bike can be set to multiply the rider’s effort by anywhere from 25 to 300 percent, allowing travel up to three times faster than would be possible manually. It can also be set to a fully-automatic mode, in which it would work with no pedaling at all.
And there is the option to add minor resistance so that the rider’s pedaling recharges the battery while riding.
While the Pooles did not want to give away the product’s top speed, Dave said it is capable of going fast enough to keep up with automobiles in a downtown situation. That’s an important detail for the target demographic.
“What this enables the policemen to do is ride with traffic,” said Dave. “On a normal bicycle, they don’t have that opportunity. And then because the bike is still small and nimble enough, they can be in a pedestrian situation. So it really gives them the best of both worlds.”
ECat started when Lewis, a 1984 Jay County High School graduate who sold the Portland company Createc in 2010, was approached by a friend who had the idea for the electronic bike. Lewis said he had promised his wife to take some time away from work after selling Createc, but the idea stayed in his head.
He contacted Tim and Dave, who are 1977 and 1982 graduates of JCHS respectively, and they’ve been working on it ever since.
Lewis said there are other electronic bicycles on the market, but they are either too expensive to be marketable or poor in quality.
“No one appears yet to have found that middle where you can have a good quality bicycle … to make it an e-bike for cops,” said Lewis. “Our plan is to tie in with the whole push for green technology. I think it’s a perfect application.”
ECat, which is headquartered in Portland, has been working with the Chicago Police Department as it develops its electronic bicycles. They’ve made adjustments along the way, and they said their main goal now is to make the bike lighter.
In its current state, about half of its 40-pound mass is tied up in the electric motor.
Dave said the goal is to get the total weight to less than 30 pounds in order to make it even more portable and versatile.
Lewis noted ECat’s business model is to start by targeting large municipalities such as Chicago to gain some exposure. After that he said he hopes market to smaller areas, and noted that college police departments could be a logical home for electronic bicycles.
“If you look at the costs for different methods of patrolling, the bicycle makes a lot of sense,” added Tim. “And when you put a motor on it, its almost exponential the benefits that you get from that.”
With the electronic bicycle now in the prototype stage, the next step is to design a production model.
Dave will be working on the design in his shop on Tyson Road in Portland, and he said the frames will likely be fabricated overseas. He said they are about three months away from getting frames and a year away from having a production model, which will also be assembled in Portland.
“Hopefully we nail it,” Dave said. “We believe that these products are going to evolve and pretty much take over the whole combustion engine market over the next 20 or 30 years. Our goal is to have a good position in there.”
For more information about ECat, visit www.e-catbike.com.[[In-content Ad]]