The Zap Electricruizer

Zap is a very odd company. In the early days it was like any other well intentioned California tech startup, made by an inventor with a dream he believed could change the way people lived and moved. The founder Jim McGreen had created a simple system made from readily available consumer parts that could easily be added to any bike to convert it to electric assist. The company grew quickly and expanded it's product range, but tensions rose with the co-founder Gary Starr, brought in because of his experience in EVs from his time at U.S. Electricar, when he persistently argued for outsourcing production to China and lowering quality, which McGreen was vehemently against. This all peaked in 1999 when Starr added three new members to the board of directors and executed a hostile takeover of the company.

This is where Zap Died.

Yes, it would still last as a company in some form or another until 2017 (at least according to Wikipedia), but never again would it actually create a product. The Electricruizer and the Zappy (a small electric scooter) were the only two products that Zap ever actually made, everything beyond this point was someone else's, just rebranded by Zap. It was from here that Zap became known as the face of the electric dream perpetually 5 years away. Simply selling people stock and preorders on pure speculation.

Take a look through the history of Zap through it's website on the Wayback machine some time, it's interesting to watch a company slowly crumble to pieces through the lens of its primary outlet to the world.

My Electricruizer

If it wasn't already apparent I've been fascinated by Zap for some time now, so it was natural that at some point I'd end up with one of its products. This is my 1998 Zap Electricruizer, lightly modified of course.

I bought it in the winter of 2023 from some redneck, who apparently used it to go hunting. He had unfortunately ripped out it's controller and replaced it with his own mess of wires, but it's my understanding that it was originally nothing more than a relay anyway. It worked anyway so there was no reason to go messing about with it. I got it with a 22AH lead acid pack which gave it some assist, but wasn't enough for it to actually propel itself without human input. This was how it was experienced new, it was only assist, and you had to be the one to actually make the bike move.

The Electricruizer when I first bought it.

Since I bought it in the dead of winter it saw little use in this state, but the next summer I started to mess around with it more. I had plans to bring it to my families yearly vacation to the beach, but right before that disaster struck! The day before I had left the battery on a dumb charger (the "smart" charger wouldn't recognize the battery due to it's low capacity) and accidentally forgot to unplug it, and of course it swelled. Luckily I had a drop in replacement for the aging battery in the form of a 30AH LiFePo4 (my second favorite battery chemistry!) battery from batteryhookup on the way, but it would be showing up the day we left. Thankfully, it showed up in the morning and I was able to quickly test it and bring it with us. I'd also brought along a small solar panel used for maintaining car batteries so I could charge the Zap at the beach. There was no guarantee that it would make it would have enough juice for a round trip to the beach, so with it I'd be able to charge at there and hopefully regain enough energy to make it back.

So far the plain specs are some generic brushed DC motor (24v I believe), a 12v 30ah LiFePo4 battery with BMS, a 14v 2a solar panel, and a 10a charger. More to come in the future.

Recent Additions

The way I had been using the Electricruizer previously necessitated me to bring a multimeter along if I wanted to take voltage readings of the battery. Along with this the solar panel was connected by an extremely long cable wrapped around the frame with some alligator clamps at the end. Far from an optimal solution to say the least. Recently I've taken an afternoon to clean up the bike a bit and add a voltmeter. I'd also intended to add a relay since currently all of the power is being routed through the switch on the handlebars. However, after wiring it all together I found that there was simply no way the mess of wires would fit. It was suggested to me though, that perfboard would be a good solution, and next time I'm at the cable shop I intended on getting some perfboard and trying my hand at building a circuit on it.

Since both the voltmeter and solar panel would be wired in parallel with the battery I could simply use the same wire to connect them. Compared to the mess that arrived with trying to shoehorn the relay in the inside of the "controller box" is simply two wires (the series loop with the switch and motor) with an additional two wires (the voltmeter and solar panel) jutting out of them in a T. Very pleasing to look at in its simplicity, if functionally sub optimal. Just like a Mac!

My dad also recently got an RC airplane, which we've been flying at the park nextdoor. I found that I was often riding back and forth between the park and my house to swap out batteries between the charger and the plane, and I figured as long as I have a large battery in my bike I should be able to charge the smaller LiPo batteries while at the park. This is where the beauty of the Electricruizers simplicity comes in, as since it's a 12v system I can use any old automotive electronics. A perfect example is the voltmeter and solar panel, both originally intended for use in a car. I was able to simply find a cigarette lighter outlet in a box of car junk and install it on the bike, connected to that parallel circuit with the panel and voltmeter, no voltage regulation or any other circuitry required. In fact, since I'm using a cigarette lighter I avoid the small resistors and diodes in USB ports that slowly drain away power. The Zap was easily able to charge the small LiPo batteries, and it didn't even have to use any power from the battery, since the solar panel was easily able to supply the 350ma of draw at 5v from the LiPo charger. I can disconnect the battery entirely and it will continue charging. It's really a special feeling seeing something operate using only energy drawn directly from the sun.

I'm currently editing together a video about the Electricuizer. It'll be posted here once it's up for all the dutch webcrawlers that come by this site.

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