Recently, a man named Ben Nelson put the finishing touches on his DIY electric motorcycle. His first electric vehicle project, Ben started by finding a motorcycle he liked with a blown engine and stripping it of all it’s old, gas-burning components. From there he did some research on electric vehicles, and was able to put together a great bike for a low price.

The bike certainly isn’t made for the race track, but can hit speeds of 45 mph and has a range of just over 20 miles. I just talked to Ben, as we are staying together this weekend while we attend HybridFest, and he’s definitely getting a lot of use out of the bike, as well as planning future modifications. I’m sure we’ll hear more about it in the future.

Though Ben still tinkers with the motorcycle, his current project is an electric Geo Metro. Much like its predecessor the ForkenSwift, Ben hopes that this car will be both useful and cheap, and has based the project around an old electric forklift.

If you’re in Madison, you can come check out the bike at HybridFest in the EcoModder booth all weekend.

Yamaha Tesseract: Green Bike or Decepticon?

The future of transportation is in no way restricted to cars, considering that most of the world’s population gets by on some sort of bike. If you want to see what the future of individual transport might look like, take a look at the Yamaha Tesseract (above), and a slideshow of 11 other green motorcycles put together by Wired.

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The vehicle, tagged the Acabion GTBO has the power-to-weight ratio of a Formula One car, and can reach 300mph in 30 seconds. The Swiss maker says it could be in production and on the road in three years.

I wonder whose roads he’s talking about.

There’ll also be an electric version of this bomb, expected to reach a top speed of 300mph, the epitome of high-speed, low-emission transport, according to the designer.

It won’t be cheap, right around £1.5 million.

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