Definitely one of the crowd favorites at last week’s Future of Electric Vehicles conference was the presentation by Eva Hakkanson and Bill Dube. The highly-entertaining couple, who design and build electric racing motorcycles out of their home garage, have set some impressive records with their KillaCycle drag bike – it currently holds the title of World’s Fastest Electric Motorcycle, and is also the world’s fastest EV of any kind. The bike was on display at the conference, so we asked Eva to give us the nickel tour.
The KillaCycle has consistently broken its own speed records since 1999. It most recently set the bar last September at Colorado’s Bandimere Speedway, where it traveled a quarter of a mile in 7.864 seconds, reaching a top speed of 169 mph (272 km/h). At that same event, Eva set the record in the 48 V street-legal category, on the ElectroCat sport bike which she built with her father in Sweden. That vehicle already held a different kind of record, being the first electric motorbike to make it up the road to Colorado’s notorious Pike’s Peak – Eva was the rider on that occasion, too.
Eva and Bill are now finishing up the KillaJoule, an 18-foot (6-meter) long fully-enclosed streamliner bike that has already made several test runs at Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats. Their immediate goal is to beat the land speed record for electric motorcycles, which sits at 176 mph (282 km/h), with an ultimate goal for breaking the record for motorcycles of any kind, which resides at a lofty 368 mph (589 km/h).