LML Electric Scooter Revealed At EICMA

As posted earlier, LML Italia has promoted the arrival of an electric scooter. The German scooter shop SIP has delivered the goods with four snapshots of the literally green Star Electric. The scooter is an electric conversion of the popular LML Star (aka Genuine Stella). Electric conversions of largeframe Vespa scooters has been available as custom work from Soundspeed Scooters in Seattle. I’m betting a Stella Electric may come in at a similar price as the conversion plus an old project someone has never finished. We’ll wait and see. How much would you pay for an electric Stella?

7 thoughts on “LML Electric Scooter Revealed At EICMA”

  1. Just a note, on the LML Italia site the PDF of the specs lists 45 km/h as a top speed. 28 mph seems a bit slow. Also, the front and rear brakes are drums. Interesting approach. Maybe it’s to keep costs down or maybe it’s to reduce rotating mass.

  2. Wow; lml really pulled out the stops and got crazy with that display. Just a ton of bikes in a world of colors.

    The electric thing is hard to be interested in as I enjoy gasoline motors. Aside from that, the photos don’t get too easy to see how the power is getting transfered to the rear wheel so I am interested in seeing that, along with why they chose to put the spare tire on the left side and a spare tire cover on the right. Batteries?

    Who knows, maybe its just an empty carcass looking to scare the pants out of piaggio.

    I can say that “if” I was “green” and wanted and electric scooter, at this point in the game I think I would want the whole thing made out of plastic and carbon fiber. At least if most/all of it’s weight was in the batteries it was carrying it may actually have some speed to it along with a little more battery life.

    Until somebody can ride 100+ miles between recharges and it only takes 5-8 minutes to recharge, the world will never fully embrace the electric vehicle.

  3. A Chinese electric hub motor shoehorned into a frame made for a gas powered engine isn’t anything to get excited about. I would guess they are simply trying to show that they are keeping up. Electric scooters won’t be anything but fringe until they are properly designed around the engines that power them.

    The low top speed is typical of low wattage silicon powered electric motors. More batteries = more speed.

  4. I think the hub motor is an elegant solution for it’s compact size. The original Vespa motor was a revolution in that it was referred to as a ‘motor-wheel’ as well. I don’t think one can increase the intention of building around the motor much more than when you use an electric motorwheel. With such a seamless and compact integration of the motor into the wheel a designer is freed to build around the user. This aspect is what is all but forgotten in modern motorbike design. Designing around the motor, and to an equally regrettable degree under seat storage, has given us the stilted models we have today with the best being behemoths from compromise that dwarf the nimble rides that so many of us fell in love with from decades past. Looking at all the cool new bikes displayed at Intermot and EICMA you see these enormous motors with scaffolding around a car sized powerplant with a clumsy perch for a rider and plenty of plastic covering up all the wires, ducts and tubes that have no where to go now that a giant motor is the star of the design show. No room for suspension? Raise the seat. Still no room? Make it longer. If they keep building around larger and larger motors that old Tomahawk motorcycle concept from Dodge will start to look downright sensible.

    Though I agree about batteries. They are the limitation. Low power vehicles like scooters should have an advantage in that game. To keep it realistic they should be shooting for a reliable 70 kph target. It seems that the vintage scooter just offers as good of a place to hide this ‘dead weight’ as a modern scooter and their underseat buckets.

  5. Batteries are the space-taker on electric scooters and they have to be a consideration in design. They need to be compact, light weight and easy to access for charging (and removable). Once they figure out how to squeeze more juice from smaller lithium batteries they will be onto something. Electric scooters have the capacity to reach highway speeds now, it’s just that the battery size means you will be buying a barcalounger if you want decent performance. There just isn’t a lot of space in a PX to easily fit batteries at their current size.

  6. It will always be a compromise. But if you can reach highway speeds by hiding enough lead acid batteries in a huge sled, you should be able to reach 70 kph with a down right petite scooter with lithium polymer. The real barrier is the expense of the battery packs. What is now 1000.00 wholesale needs to get down to 300.00. Most of the other compenents are crazy expensive as well. When you can buy a 200 lb electric Buddy for the same price as a gas scooter then they’ll be a real force to be reckoned with. (Though I’d rather see a new design than a Buddy that was questionably designed around a motor and and under seat bucket. Rider? What rider?).

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