EcoMotors Chief Don Runkle: ?Electric Vehicles Are Not ?Zero Emissions??

Our next panel is a little bit outside your comfort zone, but I think it's really interesting. Can you please, the next panels that you can come on board. We've got Craig Bramscher, the CEO of Brammo, which is an electric vehicle company. Here is one of his electric vehicles, a motorcycle. And, Donald Runkle who is the CEO of EcoMotors, that 's creating a more efficient combustion engine.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Craig.

Donald can see you.

And here's, when we get to the slides, you can just press that.

Oh, okay.

So Donald, you were the head of engineering at GM right, and you ran lot of programs there. The EV1 is probably the one that most people have heard about.

I would say the Corvette probably is more well known than the
we want but that's ...

I

mean in terms of green, you know, green vehicles. So you have experiences in electric and in combustion. There is this assumption that if we just had electric vehicles on the road, we would solve a lot of our emission's problems, you know, as well as a lot of the dependencies on foreign fossil fuels.

Is that a correct assumption?

Yeah, I would not say it's not. No, my experience come from having lead the EB1 program at GM starting the fuel cell projects. Did the ultralight, which is a 100 miles per gallon having been on thermal combustion engine again, using lightweight material and so forth. And then, you know, basically creating an advanced battery consortium to improve batteries out there and that has been helpful.

But typically, the issue is the cost of, you know, the moving payload a certain distance. And the EV1 was a technical marvel in terms of what it did in terms of efficiency and so forth. But it was simply, unconscionably, too expensive for anyone to buy, even if wild subsidies at GM was providing unbeknownst to everyon.

And so there's been gains in terms of the improvements in battery technology, and I think they will continue to go as your experience in the Electric Bike, but you also have to count the electricity and if you are worried about carbon footprint where the electricity is being generated and how it is being generated, and you know, right now, around the world basically electricity is mostly coal-driven and that is, you have to count in the equation, you can't forget this.

I think many people here may have watched the movie, "Who Killed the Electric Vehicle?". Was that you?

I am the guy that burned the Electric Vehicle. I was at the General Motors went down the demise.

So Craig, why don't you tell is a bit about your approach? Your primary products are electric motorcycles but you do other sports vehicles as well?

Yeah, we're focused on motorcycles right now and part of it is for the exact reason he was just talking about. It comes down to how much, how far you can go with the battery and how much payload you can push. So in our view the only vehicles that really make sense in terms of the costnow . We think cars; the batteries are still too expensive to get four passenger vehicle down the road.

So, we have really focussed on getting the cost of the batteries down. So we're in the battery business as well.

What's the cost of this motorcycle compared to So, this one's $7995, so we're working very hard to get motorcycles in electric in parity with an equivalent gas, gas right now. So one, we have just released different from this called the Impulse is very comparable to a Ducati Monster. For instance, and it is about the same cost and it goes about the same range.

And what has been the reaction? Who is buying? Is it the motorcycle enthusiast or is it the types of people who would buy a Prius? You know those are safe.

Yeah, yeah. Actually our newer products are all going to motorcyclists, it seems like. Then our initial products because they were you know early in the space. We'reoing more to the green or the electric enthusiast, I would say, but we are trying to create products that reach all the way from, you know, the aspirational customer who has never ridden a motorcycle and said 'hey, that looks like fun', all the way up to the guy that's already got the leathers and the helmet and the license.

Don, maybe you can drive the Oh, okay.

You can see right there, what's going on. But just explain to us what you are trying to do with Hico Motors.

Yeah.

And last year actually at Disrupt in September we had the Vanote Kosola on stage and he talked about Hico Motors specifically sort of an approach that he thinks is, I don't think he's invested in the electrical vehicle companies. And I asked him why and he mentioned you guys as a preface to what you are about to tell us.

Yeah. He has some investments in some disruptive battery technology, which is a good thing, but not in any of the cars. This is just some of the vehicles I've been involved with in sort of my history all over the place and from solar cars, electric hybrids, motors in the wheel, two-strokes, lean machine which was a single wide vehicle, 100 mpg ultralight, what could you do with ultralight, ultralighting and so forth, and obviously a lot of racing, but we have some pretty outrageous claims for the engine.

I'll show you in the next slide a little video that will clear up how it works. But basically an improvement in efficiency of about fifty percent depending on the configuration. About half, and that's due to the friction and heat rejection, which is the two big bugaboos of internal combustion engines eight to go, and improving efficiency.

It's about half the weight and half the size, so we're pushing on a horsepower per pound roughly for an internal combustion engine. That's about twice as good as what's out there today. And clean emissions, I'd like to say we have the lowest carbon footprint including electric cars when you count the fuel and all of that stuff, so that's always a good place to be, and then you have to have your other emissions like hydrocarbon and so forth, at legislative levels.

When you said count the fuel, when you count the.

Who is making the electricity, who's making the oil, and that sort of stuff.

So, if the power plant that provides the electricity is based on coal or something else, you have to account for that.

That's 50 per cent is, that's true in the United States, 92 per cent in China, in France it's 25 percent, you know, that's the drill. You can't not count that. You got to somehow, that has to play into the equation. So, when I hear electric vehicles are zero emissions, it's just not true. I mean, people can make the claim like Carlos Ghosn at Nissan, but it's not true.

Do you make that claim?

No, but it's...

Yours is pretty modest.

Even if you have the dirtiest coal, it's still 92% more efficient. So, it's a lot easier to scrub a plant than a million vehicles, in our view anyway.

The other key and the thing that typically gets in the way of advanced technology is cost, and that's the little football on the right there. So we're lower cost because of the less parts that we have. This gives you some idea. Opposed pistons, opposed cylinders, so this is the animation of how the engine works that is different from today's architectures.

Explain how this is different?

Today's engines, basically the piston pounds against the ceiling, the head, and it's four stroke engines. Everyone that drove here today probably came over in a four stroke engine. That's been on the king of the hill for a hundred years.

And so they see there is a lot of lost energy?

Yeah, the heat rejection they had. Opposed pistons means the pistons move at basically half the speed of normal engines, piston's where most of the friction is in the engine, about half of it. Ours run at half the speed of the normal engine, so We have about half the friction. So those are the two big issues there.

The engine is perfectly balanced, has electronic turbocharger to do the the scavenging and make it pass emission, so that's a key element. The other key role is shown in the next movie. If you wanted, you might drive a car that needs a 400 horsepower, so you could do it with one of our engines that has 400 horsepower or put two two hundred horsepower engines in and flux the crankshaft.

This is a perfectly balanced engine and basically the industry knows if you could do the stackable power, you could get a 30% improvement in efficiency. So you get about a 15% improvement in efficiency in the fundamental engine and another 30% on the dual module, and that's what creates the high efficiency on that.

And so, that's sort of the drill on that. If you take a look at the parts on the left part of the screen, there is a 300 horsepower conventional four stroke engine. It is a world class engine. I think that ones Navistar or Cummins and that one has to be a diesel. So then on the right is ours, 62 parts also 300 horsepower.

Again. We don't have any unusual material uses pistons and connecting [xx] just like industry uses today. So it leads to a lower cost position, which sort of brings me to this chart. This is, the height of the bars here is the total cost, the green is how much it cost to buy batteries, the electric motor and so forth; the bar on the left would be 100 mile range 4 passenger, sort of, electric vehicle.

The next one is like the bolt. The ATV would be a Prius-type vehicle. What everybody in the world today buys is basically either the gasoline engine or the diesel engine, which are the 2 lowest bars. We put in our four offerings, they are either our hybrids or our other ones. And so this is what I call economic gravity.

When you have a new technology, the savings and operating cost has to be more than what you, the cost of the technology. It is not that it is inferior and in the end of the day it doesn't lie. You could subsidize any, you could pay me a 100,000$ to buy something and I would do it but but it doesn't last that long, and we're looking at mostly what to do about all of transportation, not the niche players.

I think there's a lot of good niche applications for hybrids and so forth.

You know, I think it's simple because on stage, we have innovative vehicle here. It is Brammo motorcycle. We have a Tesla covered up over there. One of our start-ups is using it as part of their demo. And what you're saying though is this is all well and good, but in order to make a real impact you're better off improving the internal combustion engine, which still has a way to go.

Yeah, that would be our position, because we are looking to, you know, the huge traffic jam getting here from the airport this morning. I mean So, the internal combustion engine has been around for more than 100 years right ? And the reason it's been around for 100 years, is it's been the best.

Why didn't you do this at GM?

Don't forget, we didn't think up the engine, for one bit, and this is a heavily patented engine. But if you take a look at, don't forget that we this country with electric cars and steam engines. Then came along the 4 stroke engine which had the same characteristics, has lower cost, higher reliability, clean enough on emissions and so forth, reliable and more efficient than the counterpart.

And so in a unsubsidized fashion it became top of the hill, king of the mountain. We've taken lot of shots on trying to knock it off. The rotary engine came and went. We had two strokes, came and went. The gas turbans came and went. Fuel cells we took a real hard shot at that a few years go. At GM we tried 2 times on the electric car.

One was the Electro Chevette, if you remember that vehicle, probably didn't. And then the EV1 that we took another shot at it because of batteries improved and electronics and so forth. So, but again I claim that this curb either businessmen who need vehicles to move goods and services or people go to the market.

Every year they buy about 70 million cars and trucks around the world. And those 2 bars, the gasoline and the diesel are the ones that they all keep in mind the hybrid Prius has been out for 11 years now and it sold just under 2 million vehicles.

So Craig, what's your response, basically if I listen to this, I come to the conclusion that electric vehicles are going to remain a niche, you know, a niche part of the market, as opposed to a lot of the hype that we've been hearing that this is right around the corner, and is going to start replacing other vehicles.

Our perspective is that without players like us that are leading the path to parody with gas, so that's our goal, is that when you go in and have a choice, you can buy an electric or a gas. That you can choose electric and it ends up being dramatically less expensive over the live. But most consumers, don't do the whole-life and go well: insurance is less, maintenances is less, energy is less.

What they go is "How much do I have to write a check for today"?

Why is insurance less?

Partially because of the lower part count, and partially because of the initial ones like cars are lower speed. This one is 65 mph, so you cannot go a 130 mph on this one.

And you call that a motorcycle?

Yeah, exactly. And so, I think that's big part of it. So, our belief is that cars will get there, batteries will get there, if companies like ours could push it, you know, and our moral view is, I have got 4 young kids, and when they grow I don't want them defending oil fields. I'd rather have them working on in electric vehicle plants.

Right If anyone has any question come on up to the,the mike and I 'll calling you.

I think the right motivation,I was,was been said here is you get the parody, so that you don't need cost to get to be the issue. Right now, it's enormously expensive to buy an electric vehicle and all that so keep working on the technology, that's why I cofounded with the US Department of Energy, the USABC, to help work on driving battery cycle life up, power density, energy density, and overall cost down so that we could get the parody.

The little green barn of electric vehicles have battery.

So you haven't given up on the electric vehicle?

I advised two big battery companies today, so I'm a big fan of it and I think, we should continue to work on getting to the.

What's the key there? What's the key technological achievement that we need to get to, to make it the viable?

Dollars for kilowatt hour.

It's batteries.

I mean we made some good progress there. It was made with the undersecretary last week at the department of energy and there have a pretty aggressive forecast on what we're seeing on battery costs so that will be helpful, but they are also still very far away, keep in mind I mean a gallon of gas is an enormous, that 33 kil o per hours, Just tell that.

when are we going to see your engine in a car?

It will depend obviously on the customer's Two signed customers now, one in China, one in United States. I think both are pretty aggressive.

For One is for commercial vehicle application, another one is for genset application and then also commercial vehicles What does that mean genset?

Genset for making electricity from you know, gasoline or diesel or something like that Generator.

Generator...something. If the power.. if the grid went down today I'm sure the lights would come back on because of some diesel sitting in the back yard here.

Right.

So I would expect in the 2013 time frame. We're in the series B, we have Klosar and Bill Gates as our two financial guys running or investing in us, and we're in the middle of series B the development engine. We're on our sixth generation engine, so this is not a power point engine, we got measured data.

How much have you raised and the amount that it costs to develop this engine, how does it compare to, you know, what it would've cost to develop a novel engine at GM?

Well it would.. .the cost that we would have would be ...off by a decimal point lower than a normal automotive GM or Ford or somebody like that.

Why?
I just think the efficiencies of a small engine small company very focused on what they're trying to do .GM has things to do with other big companies. So I think, generally, like any start up you concentrate your money and your people on solving the problem, so to speak. But, there was about 50 million dollars of non-dilutive money put into it.

DARPA put about 25 million in it for a military project that they wanted to test all their goals and then there was other investments made in the technology before the company was actually found,this engine first fired in 2003. So this is not ..

It's been around.

This is not a powerpoint engine. This is not something that we just sort of dreamed up last week. This has been under development. The company Eco Motors with coastalthe series they investor was in 2008 So, what's that like to have Vinod Khosla and Bill Gates as your two biggest investors?

From my standpoint, I couldn't ask for two better investors. I think Vinod is mostly interested in company building. I've talked to this guy every week on, "Have you looked at this sort of technology? We have an investment here. Would that work on doing your inner cooling on your engine? It has nothing to do with you but it is good at cooling."

Investment and injection of company and stuff like that. So, he's unbelievably helpful in thinking about what other things we could do, markets. And, also I think very helpful in our negotiations. You know, when negotiations get too tight, he says, "The hell with it. We'll do it And, then Gates is, I think you can't get anything past him on technology and so forth.

The reason I think he invested us, he liked the low-cost idea. He thought the physics were right and liked the modular displacement and the abilities to get this.

For instance if I could wave a magic wand right now and everybody is running this engine the United States, we would be importing no oil from the mid east. That's what a 50% improvement in efficiency will do. So, with a carbon footprint lower than a electric car, the ability to significantly change the fuel consumption, and transportation is one of those unique things where you take your fuel with you.

So, it's not like you're home when the fuel comes to you, or something like that. So I know that Tesla with these guys. I am wondering when Elon Musk is going to actually switch the rockets in the Space-X to electric, and so we'll see how that is working on them.

I'm sure he's working on it.

Sure, he's working on them. The airplane I flew on today will be electric someday.

So, we'll take a question here.

Hi, my name is Edward Chin. I have a question for each of you. For Brammo, what the future of electric bikes and, you know, devices like the Segway because I'm noticing in New York, I live in New York, that there are more of these battery powered bicycles around. Do you think there is a space for that and for eco motors.

You mention that a lot of the friction comes from the piston engine. So why did you choose to go with a piston model, not something like the wankel, or the rotary engine.

Of course we believe there's a huge market for electric, 2 wheel, 3 wheel. We're really focusing on power sports in general. So it's pretty much from the NEV down because of the power to weight ratio. We're seeing sales take off. f you read any of the stats from the big analysts they're saying just in Asia the 2- wheel electric market is 10's of million of unit this year.

So we see a very bright future.

I think on your question on the rotary and why pistons, again pistons have one of the best surface to volume ratio's and they are also scalable. So that helps us in the friction model there. At GM we spend about $300 million in rotary engine we were one of the people to buy the people to buy the license from NSU at the time.

My The founder of Eco Motor which is Peter Hofbartran a VW power train for 20 years. He was at VW when they NSU who had the rotary engine. Chrysler bought the rotary engine. Ford did also. Mazda of course did. At the end of the day, it has too much friction and it simply doesn't have the right power density.

And, it's basically a failed engine architecture if you look out there.

Many people have taken a wack. Mazda did the best job of actually bringing it out and having a product. ou don't see any basically in today. The power density is wrong, and frankly the emissions level, because of the sweat volume, some of the technical stuff is just too hard to deal with.

Well, thank you both for joining us, I certainly learned a lot, and I hope everyone learned a lot. You know, we talked mostly about internet companies, but there's plenty of disruption in other industries as well and thank you for bringing that to our stage.

Great. Thank you.

OK . Thank you very much. OK. I'll take that.

Thank you very much. All right. Next we have a fireside chat with Michael and Keith Reboy.

The chief executive officers of two very different clean tech startups, Brammo and EcoMotors, discussed the relative merits and limitations of clean vehicle technology at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on Wednesday.

Oregon-based Brammo designs and manufactures all-electric motorcycles and the battery technology and software that powers them, while Michigan-based EcoMotors designs and makes more efficient combustion engines.

EcoMotors? CEO Don Runkle roundly criticized clean tech advocates who say all-electric vehicles (EVs) are ?zero emissions.? Causing a bit of a stir in the conference hall, Runkle, the former VP of engineering at GM, went on to claim that EcoMotors? engine technology enables car companies to produce diesel-powered vehicles that have a lower, overall carbon footprint than any electric automobile available today.

Given that electric vehicles don?t produce diesel exhaust, and don?t use fossil fuels, how can this be? Runkle explained: more than 50 percent of the world?s power is generated by the burning of coal, today, and that had to factor into the ?carbon footprint? assessment of all-electric vehicles.

Brammo CEO Craig Bramscher said that he refrains from calling his company?s plug-in, electric motorcycles ? including the Enertia, Empulse, Engage and Encite (some models have yet to hit the road) ? ?zero emissions vehicles.?

During a live broadcast backstage following the session, Bramscher noted that power generation is changing, and coal will become a smaller piece of the overall energy equation over time. He also said, ?The argument you have to burn coal to generate electricity is true but [electric vehicles] still 92 percent more efficient [than combustion]??

On the main stage, Bramscher said that personally, he didn?t want his children fighting to defend an oil field as petroleum resources become strained. He would be much happier when they grow up if they could find work designing or making batteries, instead.

Watch the video from the session on Disrupting Transportation (above) and the backstage interview with Craig Bramscher (below) to learn more about emerging clean vehicle technology from Ecomotors and Brammo.

[Ed's note: TechCrunch founder and editor Michael Arrington makes a cameo appearance with Craig Bramscher.]

- this is probably like a 250 Honda or something like that, so real easy to ride, not too terribly fast, but fast enough to merge with traffic and everything.

- Okay, all your bikes, are they all plug in or do you need charger stations?

- Yeah. We've designed every bike so that it's any plug in a laptop, you can plug in the bike.

- Okay, fantastic. And, tell me a little about how you guys maintain that green environment minded credibility end to end. What do you put into the material analysis to make sure your batteries are green?

- Yeah, essentially we evaluate every vendor for their sustainability, so for instance our fenders are made out of ground up battery case recycled and the seats have carpet nylon. And then the colored part of the bike is actually recycled polypropylene bottles, so, water bottles.

- Okay, recycled bottles. I mean, we had a bike in the hall, I don't know where it is. Maybe, in my dream Mike just drove it out there

- Mike Harrington has itStill

in the Brammo Bike apparently, and if you could bring it back, that would be wonderful. So, can you tell us about what's new for the company? You guys have some plans to expand from thirty five employees here in Oregon. Where are you setting up shop in the world?

Well, we're opening an office in Italy because a lot of the components for motorcycles come from Italy, we also have Singapore and Hong Kong set up. We are working on all of Europe as well essentially as well,so, we are mostly a sales organizations there, but we're actually building for Europe and Hungary so that it's very short trip to the customers instead of shipping from US.

OK and that should reduce the carbon footprint of shipping.

Yeah, you want to build the bikes as close to the point of consumption as possible for the sustainability factor.

OK, and on Main Stage before, you were in discussion with Don Runkle, who's a long time automotive VP of engineering from GM now CEO of Ecomotors, you guys were discussing the fact that a lot of environmentalists have perhaps little too much faith in electric vehicles. He made a point that a lot of the world's electricity is recycled.

When do you you think we'll start to see a tipping point where electric vehicles are, you know, coming through on that promise of?

Yeah, the arguments about that you have to burn coal to generate electricity is absolutely true, but it's still 92% more efficient, and at the end of the day, it's so much cleaner to go electric. Doesn 't matter how you produce electricity. The efficiency of a gas motor is 35%. He's trying to get it to 50%.

They haven't been able to do it in a hundred years. I hope he does it, 'cause it would be great, but electric is going kick its butt in terms of efficiency.

So, the biggest problem though is you...one thing you pointed out, a gallon of gas has 33 kilowatts. Thirty-three kilowatts of batteries is bigger than a gallon of gas.

Okay.

Until those are equivalent, it's going to be a little bit of a challenge. But for us, that 's why we chose motorcycles instead of cars. It makes sense today, where cars, we think it's three to five years off, because a Nissan Leaf is still twice the price of a Sentra. Our Impulse is the same price as the Ducati Monster.

So, we're at parity now, where we think cars are a few years off.

So, what are the models you've announced so far at the Inner Show? The Impulse Yup, and also the Engage which is the first world reveal of our patent around a gearbox integrated into the electric motor to increase the efficiency but even more importantly to make it twice as fun to ride, so essentially gas bikes.

OK, how so?

Well,having a clutch and being able to slip the clutch and let the gas go is part of the excitement around that.

So it feels like a combustion.

Yeah, I mean you can pop a wheelie, you can burn rubber. At the end of the day the 28 million people that ride motorcycles in the US, they do that partially because of the fun.

Ok, so, I heard that you guys had a lap record recently for electric?

Yes, so, we went to Infineon and they had the TTX-GP.

What is that? What is that event?

It's really a race that showcases where technology is for electric vehicles. So, we beat last year's lap times by several seconds, and so every year it's getting a little bit better in terms of performance. But also, the bike that we have is one that you can actually buy next year. You could win an Infineonand then buy it in retail, so we're pretty excited about that.

Can you tell us a little bit about this, like the inertia here, that's in the demo hall?

Yeah, so as an example, this bike . The orange panels are actually all pop bottles. All this black plastic is recycled.

Security, and I'm not kidding, almost just kicked me out of my own event. "Sir you cannot, get off of that." And I said "I'm going really slow", and then I said 'hey this is my event". That got me no other safety. And then I just left, right? And the security guard is chasing me down start of alley, and I think I need to go hide in there.

You can go back with the helmet on and hide.

No, they were actually like absolutely freaking out. This is so much fun.

It is, it is.

You know, I am going to get off of this now. When security comes, you guys got to "human-shield" me, okay? Where do you want me to go?

Do a loop backstage. First time I've been on a motorcycle.

Typical customers for you or...? Who are buying these things?

They are. I think anybody that believes in the future tends to be, you know, quick to jump on board for this, so...The inertia is kind of like our beta bike. You know, it proved the technology. What we found was that we had to improve the batteries to get over a hundred mile range, so we tried really hard to find batteries that people made.

Nobody had it, so now we're in the battery business. And we're calling it Brammo power.

Okay. Could you guys ever, speaking of the battery business, I mean, it seams like the motorcycle market is slightly more limited than something like, just more general software IT business. How big could a company like Brammo become?

Well, to put it in perspective, you sell 50,000...

Got it, Greg?

Yep. Fifty thousand of these a year and you're a billion dollar company. And Harley sells, you know, 500,000 bikes a year, 400, you know, depending on the year. So, you can see where this is a, you know, five to ten billion dollar company in five to ten years, you know.

The Harley of clean tech?

Well, that...you know, your words, but, you know We like that, so I think the opportunity really gets much, much bigger too, because our batteries are very unique. So we're seeing a lot of interest from other companies. So the B2B side of our business....

What kind of companies are buying up your battery tech?

Well we've signed a bunch of NDA's, so just most of the major motorcycle and ATV manufacturers have shown interest in Brammo, more around the drive train, because we already have the motorcycles.

It 's a beautiful machine. Thank you so much for spending the time with us.

Thanks.

Image in excerpt: Michael Arrington test-drives a Brammo Enertia inside of the #tcdisrupt conference hall at Pier 94 in New York City.

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