Electric motorcycles are a whole new thing, and a great way to understand how they work is to see them dismantled. An even better way is to help assemble one from scratch on the company’s assembly line, and that’s precisely what Ultraviolette invited us to do at its Bengaluru manufacturing facility.
What fascinated me was that the very first item on the assembly line is the battery pack. The packs are assembled in a separate area within the same facility and arrive at the assembly line after being thoroughly tested and inspected. UV’s 10.3kWh pack is the biggest in the business in India so far, and it weighs about 60 kilos. It makes sense that the biggest and heaviest component on the motorcycle forms its very basis, and the first few stages on the assembly line are all about the mechanical aspects of the X-47.
First, a small trellis frame is attached to the top of the pack, while a cradle frame is also secured underneath. The motor is bolted onto the back, and then things like the swingarm, suspension, wheels and brakes are all added on. So far, the bike has been resting on a cradle holding the battery pack, and it gets hoisted off the line and dropped back down onto a rear wheel chock. From here on, the various EV aspects start to come into play.
Ultraviolette’s unique radar system is assembled into the rear fender, and following this, the newly developed on-board charger is installed into the rear subframe. The next few stations handle the brains of the motorcycle, and this is where the motor control unit (MCU) and vehicle control unit (VCU) are all attached and wired in. Following the installation of the standard charger connector assembly and the TFT display, we finally get to the stage where the bike is introduced to its body panels.
After this is done, the bike rolls off the production line and onto a dyno test, where things like throttle response, ABS, riding modes, and more are all working as they should. The X-47 then moves on to having its radar system calibrated. The company’s custom code is uploaded to the device, and the system is fired into an anechoic chamber. This completes the calibration, allowing the system to know exactly where it is and enabling it to offer accurate alerts for things like blind spot warning, collision assist, and more.
Finally, the bike moves to a final inspection area, and once it’s signed off, it moves to the parking bay, awaiting its journey to a UV showroom and, ultimately, into a customer’s hands. Ultraviolette’s production facility is still at a small scale, and the start-up is currently manufacturing a few hundred bikes every month.
Ultraviolette has already proven the engineering behind its products, and it is now time for the company to shift gears and step into the big leagues. The next two years are going to be crucial, with two highly anticipated products due to go on sale this year. UV now faces the next towering mountain to conquer in the form of scaling up its production capacity to meet the demand for the upcoming Tesseract scooter and Shockwave dirt bike. We wish them well in this endeavour and look forward to seeing Ultraviolette rubbing shoulders with India’s top two-wheeler manufacturers.
Ved Janve
Dinshaw Magol
