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Hello there,
Neil youīre right about both drivetrain efficiency and the weight. Thatīs why I chose the Honda Innova as the basis and, so far, did not bother about 5kg more or less. The latter is especially true for constant speed.
For acceleration, less weight is of course better, since the vehicle will be more agile when itīs light. And for deceleration itīs of course good to have less weight too, since youīre loosing less energy when braking. So weight is very important especially in urban traffic - for acceleration and fuel consumption.
There is another important influence of weight to fuel consumption which I think may not be underestimated. I got to this insight and conclusion yesterday during a 600km ride to my parents and back home. The autobahn was partially very hilly, partially absolutely flat and I got into several traffic jams. In the flat sections I thought about increasing gear ratio even higher but in the hills I was happy to have enough uphill-stamina.
So hereīs my chain of thoughts:
1. For best fuel consumption, you want to run the engine with best possible efficiency.
2. This usually means you need to increase the engine load (torque) and reduce the revs.
3. You do that by increasing the gear ratio.
4. However, if you do that, acceleration of the bike will get worse.
5. Of course you can, for better acceleration shift down but itīs annoying and with only few gears (4 in the Innova powertrain) you will end up at high revs in the lower gear.
6. So if you want to have a certain acceleration level in the highest gear, you may not exceed a certain gear ratio.
7. This is where the weight comes into play: since acceleration is force at the wheel divided by weight, you will have more acceleration if you decrease the weight.
8. So if you decrease the weight, you will be able to further increase the gear ratio and still reach the desired level of acceleration.
9. The higher gear ratio will then run the engine with more efficiency and fuel consumption will be lower.
I hope I was able to explain.
By the way, you can find my fuel logs at the spritmonitor website ( www . spritmonitor . de ). Unfortunately Iīm not yet allowed to post links, but you can find the evomoto 125cc quite easily by searching for the Honda Innova.
The values are in liters / 100km but itīll give you an idea about my everyday fuel consumption. Overall fuel consumption so far is 1,12 l/100km which is equal to 205mpg. I have added comments (in German) about ambient temperature, wind speed / direction as well as the route - the most important "external" factors for fuel consumption. Lowest fuel consumption so far was 0,96 l/100km which is equal to about 244mpg. Please note that the spritmonitor site will not accept fuel consumption values below 1 l/100km, this is why I sometimes artificially increased the fuel data to meet the 1,00 l/100km limit.
Greetings from Germany
Wolfgang
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