Zero Motorcycles - XU Arrival

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Written by Mark

The partnership between REVO and Zero Motorcycles has been a long time in the making. We visited their headquarters in Santa Cruz in January and were impressed by their stable of beautiful bikes and were blown away by their hospitality amidst their 2013 production ramp up. Since then, they have agreed to sponsor us by heavily discounting our purchase of our first professional electric vehicle for study and disassembly, a 2012 Zero XU. Before leaving for break, we unveiled it to the team in a surprise "emergency" meeting.

The clearly excited team has been wating anxiously for this moment since Fall semester. The plan for the bike and our partnership is simple: they provide the bike, we take it apart, learn as much as we can from how it operates, retrofit it onto the existing racing kart chassis, and hopefully clench a win at the EV Grand Prix as a result. This process will start on Friday afternoon and we will not stop working until the powertrain has been extracted. Stay tuned for evidence of the deconstruction.

We would like to thank ZERO for their generous donation as well as Aerospace Robotics for the remaining funds necessary for the purhcase of this bike. It's a beautiful piece of technology that we'll be sad to disassemble, but we are more excited to see what ZERO's powertrain can do for the performance of our racing kart. With a speed limit of 55 mph during the EV grand prix, we should gear to have even better acceleration than the already stellar ZERO bike.