Top Gear USA Pits HPC Revolution Against Alfa Romeo 4C in Los Angeles Traffic

BY Cameron Newland

Though Top Gear USA has a much smaller audience than the original UK version, it’s still a good program to showcase electric bikes, which rarely get any media attention.

In this segment, the hosts go racing from Downtown Los Angeles to Venice Beach on a 6000W electric bike from HPC (the 2015 HPC Revolution), an Alfa Romeo 4C, and LA’s Metro buses and light rail trains.

Who do you think made it to Venice first?

  • George Sears

    As battery prices drop, something more than an ebike makes more and more sense for basic electric battery transport. The ebike has around 500 w/h of battery. The batteries are much cheaper, today, than a few years ago. So you can have 2 kWh of battery for a reasonable amount. Because of that, the HPC makes sense.

    It doesn’t make sense as an ebike. It’s too fast. If you are going to go fast, you get into the motorcycle category. But why not have the serious suspension components, tough tires, and solid brakes, if you are going 40 mph? People build 1500 watt BBSHD kits right and left. A basic Zero is around 40,000 watts, 40 kW. Gee, there must be room for something between 1.5 and 40 kW?

    So what happens if you take a basic motorcycle, put the battery where the smallish (200cc??) motor is, and mount a 6-10 kW hub motor. Sell it as a motorcycle. Encourage people to do the MSF stuff to get the road test done. I don’t know when this stuff gets decoupled from e bikes.

  • RingDings

    Cute bit.. I love this stuff!