The KillaCycle New Zealand Tour was a huge success! We not only demonstrated that electrics can be fast and sexy, the tour also brought together EV people from all over NZ. An “EV movement” seems to already have started in NZ in the surge of the tour.

Picture: Meremere dragway in Auckland. Most of the day rained away. Even when the rain stopped, the track was too wet to run safely at full power.

Every show and dinner on the tour turned in to a mini-convention where people met that otherwise wouldn’t have met. With ten events during three weeks, that means a lot of people. We really helped to draw together a “critical mass” of NZ EVers.

One of the purposes of the tour was to promote and help the development of the Tumanako open-source motor-controller project. The Tumanako group, based in New Zealand, has built and is just on the edge of production distribution of an open-source 200 kW inverter and drive package. It is awesome and it is about time someone did this. This has potential to be the “Linux” for electric vehicles.

Motor-controllers are a big issue for _all_ racers and for small manufacturers. The motor-controllers you can buy are a “black box” and you have no access to change or modify the software for your needs, because the manufacturer will never give you the source code. Imagine buying a race engine where you can’t change the pistons or even set the ignition timing..? That is the case for electrics today. Information about the Tumanako group here. I will write more about them soon. We hope to use one of their motor-controllers in the motorcycle streamliner that Eva is building right now (more about that too soon). Eva and I are strongly supporting the open-source project and hope that more people will join the group to reach the critical mass where things start to really happen.

You can read many more details about the trip, (and about Eva’s electric motorcycle streamliner) on Eva’s blog at http://www.EvaHakansson.com