NEED FOR SPEED

Horwin’s fast-charging bike is coming for 2024

Electric bike firm Horwin has just signed a deal with niobium supplier CBMM to bring ultra-fast charging batteries to its range of bikes.

Never heard of niobium before? Well, it’s a metal mainly sourced in Brazil which is most commonly used as an additive to create high-grade steel alloys, in addition to being used to create superconductors for MRI scanners. But it also has some big benefits for batteries.

Promising improvements to widelyused lithium-ion batteries, including increased capacity, better stability and much, much faster recharging rates, niobium could help to silence naysayers who believe that electric bikes are impractical as a result of limited range.

Horwin’s not the only manfacturer working with niobium. Recently, electric bike firm Lightning announced its own deal with CBMM to use niobium to reduce the weight of some components. However, Horwin’s doing things slightly differently, using batteries developed by CBMM and Toshiba that use niobium titanium oxide (NTO) for their anodes.

That’s right. Toshiba is in on the action, too. The Japanese technology giant is developing the next generation of its ‘SCiB’ fast-charging lithium-ion batteries, but instead of using lithium titanium oxide, it’s using niobium titanium oxide.

According to Toshiba, NTO offers around three times the capacity of popular LTO (in theory at least), and it expects that it’ll be able to increase its SCiB battery’s energy density by oneand-a-half times.

But what does all this mean? Well, the suggestion is that electric riders could soon be able to plug their bike into a high-speed charger and ‘refuel’ their bike in a mere 10 minutes. That’s impressive.

Although official facts and figures are a little scarce at the minute, we do know that the NTO batteries will first appear on a prototype based on Horwin’s existing CR6, which currently as standard has a 6.2kW motor and offers up to 150km from a single charge.