TECH

Electric Drift Trike Needs Water Cooling
Electric vehicles of all types are quickly hitting the market as people realize how inexpensive they can be compared to traditional modes of transportation. From cars and trucks, to smaller vehicles such as bicycles and even electric boats, there's a lot to be said for simplicity, ease of use, and efficiency. But sometimes we need a little bit more out of our electric vehicles than the obvious benefits they come with. Enter the electric drift trike, an electric vehicle built solely for the enjoyment of high torque electric motors.
This tricycle is built with some serious power behind it. [austiwawa] constructed his own 48V 18Ah battery with lithium ion cells and initially put a motor hub on the front wheel of the trike. When commenters complained that he could do better, I scrapped the front motor hub for a 1500W brushless water-cooled DC motor driving the rear wheels. To put that in perspective, electric bikes in Europe are typically capped at 250W and in the US at 750W. With that much power available, this trike can do some serious drifting, and has a top speed of nearly 50 kph. [austiwawa] did blow out a large number of motor controllers, but was finally able to obtain a beefier one which could handle the intense power requirements of this tricycle.

Be sure to check out the video next the trike being test driven. The build video is also worth seeing for the attention to detail and high quality of this build. If you want to build your own but do not want to build something this menacing, we have also seen electric bikes that are small enough to ride down hallways in various buildings, but still fast enough to retain an appropriate level of danger. Bryan Cockfield