Brammo Owners Forum

I wasn't sure where to start a thread like this, but I think it would be helpful if we started a feedback/advice thread on which Victory dealerships are up to speed and knowledgeable about maintaining Brammo bikes.  Feel free to move this thread to a better location if one exists.

 

I keep seeing articles talking about "the Tesla of motorcycles".  It's kind of annoying when they use it to refer to a bike that doesn't outperform nearly every other bike in a similar class the way that the top of the line Teslas do. But now that the Tesla P85D is down to 3.2 seconds 0-60, new rule - you're not allowed to claim the "Tesla of motorcycles" unless you can at least beat that figure...

Any of you modders interested in taking on a similar project designed to integrate with the Empulse?

http://electricmotorcycleforum.com/boards/index.php?topic=3085.0

Apparently the 3 of these stacked as he does take up 13.2x5x5 inches of space...

I would love to hear more about being able to upgrade to the new dashboard!

In the meantime, I thought I'd collect some thoughts and sound people out on improvements to the content of the dash board.  Here are some thoughts that I've had over the year of ownership:

• (DST) automatic Daylight Savings Time - the bike knows the date and time, why do we have to adjust the clock twice a year? 
• (BAR) bar graphs replacing unreadable numbers - think of an old graphic equalizer with a jumpy bar and some dampened tickmarks showing recent highs and lows, primarily for the power numbers
• (HIS) bar graph history for various power numbers (with or without (?) touchy-feely "I saved a unicorn with rainbows" icons for periods of high efficiency?  Or maybe a Butch Brammo Bull icon for periods of particularly prolonged power output?)
• (ALL) ability to show all numbers at once (probably without a label) to avoid having to switch through the modes just to check some other number
• (LOL) turn by turn navigation with live traffic updates and satellite imagery, voice prompting/control and running distance to nearest charger or racetrack?

(OK, one of those may be a bit ambitious...)

One additional thought on DST - while it may be a small annoyance twice a year, the fact that the machine keeps logs really suggests that it should be divorcing the concept of absolute time from displayed time and having to actually change the real time on the clock creates ambiguity in the logs.  While the time changes happen in the middle of the night and the thought may be "most riders won't actually be using the bike when the time changes so there would not really be a major ambiguity shift in the logs", that reasoning falls down for a couple of reasons:

• the bike has to be on to change the time so, by definition, a log is being generated while the time is changing even if that is the only thing that happens on that "run"
• most riders would not be changing their clocks until the next time they rode the bike, which means the time stamp ambiguity would actually happen during an actual log of an actual ride
• 2am may be "down time" for most bikes, but EV bikes are most likely being charged at that time (and running a charge log with timestamps)

If fully automatic DST is too involved, it would at least be useful to have a simple "set the time zone offset from GMT" setting so that the actual running time would remain absolute and just the displayed time in the dash would have an offset that changes twice a year for the rider's convenience (and fewer button presses to change it twice a year than to go into a full clock adjustment).

I mentioned this before and someone at Brammo mentioned that they are looking at redesigning it, but I'm a little bothered by the bracket that protects the brake lever lines from your right foot.

Until last night it was just a comfort thing, I felt like my legs were not symmetrically placed on both sides of the bike while I was covering the levers.  If I moved my feet back to a "balls of feet on the pedals" position on the highway then it was only barely noticeable, but still not exactly symmetric.

Last night I discovered another issue.  I usually wear tight fitting armor pants over my regular clothes, but occasionally I go out on shorter trips in jeans if I'm not going to be riding aggressively or in bad traffic.  When I got home I went to put my foot down and found that my pant leg had gotten hooked on that bracket.  I nearly dropped it (for the second time that night due to the S85 error), but managed to get my leg unhooked just in time.

In retrospect, I think it was part of a 1-2 sucker punch earlier when the S85 error caused me to be taken off-guard while leaning into a low-speed parking lot turn.  I remember wondering why I wasn't getting power (thinking it was my right hand not cooperating, but later realizing it was because the controller had shut down).  I also remember wondering why I wasn't getting my foot down and thinking it was because it happened so quickly that I didn't have time to react, but in retrospect, I did try and my foot didn't get down and I'm pretty sure it was the same feeling I had when I stopped at home - my leg was trapped.

I'd *really* love to see this bracket/brake lever mount redesigned.  Both for comfort, and to not have an edge that can grab a pant leg.  The comfort issue would require designing a new lever action for the brake cylinder, but pant leg issues could be solved by simply having the bracket not be open at the top (i.e. connect over to the frame so that nothing can slide behind it)...

Someone with a Tesla Model S created a neat tool for Tesla owners to estimate the amount of energy they would use on a trip.  Once it gets tuned a bit it would be interesting to see if it could be easily adapted for motorcycles (not sure what model they are using, but if it is empirical then we'd need a lot of raw data to plug in for).  Here's the link:

http://evtripper.com/planner/

While I had my bike apart today I tried to download all of the logs but the drive was not recognized in 2 computers.  I had previously read it just fine on two occasions on my desktop PC, but today the machine refused to even recognize the drive.

On my Macbook Pro it didn't even blink any lights on the drive and it never showed up on the desktop or under Disk Utility.

On my Win7 desktop it would sometimes show up as an empty drive waiting for media to be inserted or sometimes not at all.  The disk management tab would also not show it, but I could see it listed in the Device Manager's list of disk drives.

Any ideas?  Has anyone else had any issues accessing the drive?