Terry Hershner reminded that lane splitting is illegal in Texas

Last we saw of Terry Hershner last night had him going to a motel for sleep after SNAFU’ing his bike. This morning Terry posted the following update:

Today in Austin I’m hoping to meet with the folks at ReVolt and do a custom electrical connection repair. In the meantime here’s a recap of trip. Depending if we can get it fixed in time, we are sill hoping to be the fastest electric vehicle to cross coast to coast charging with existing infrastructure, and the first electric motorcycle to cross the country with a passenger. More updates later today…

Around the same time Chelsea (Bun Bun) posted they’d gone to the ATX Hackerspace, which is an Austin-area shop similar to the Hacker Dojo and other Hacker Spaces. Obviously that was one stop in their quest to repair the connectors necessary to reconnect the add-on battery pack to the main pack.

Last night’s SNAFU was to overheat and melt the Anderson connector and other wiring for the addon pack. The workaround he did last night was to disconnect the add-on battery pack, reducing the bike to a 9 kilowatt-hour main pack. That’s enough to get around town, but not enough for the 1,000 miles remaining to cover. Reconnecting the add-on pack means building new cables and connectors, hence visiting an EV Conversion shop like ReVolt, or stores like Graingers, or the Hackerspace, looking for parts and tools.

While running around town, Terry forgot that Texas doesn’t allow motorcycles to lane split. That led to a conversation with a police officer which Terry described in the Facebook post below.

The other thing we’re learning from these two updates is that Terry is conceding that, this trip, he won’t beat the 84.5 hours record set by Team Moto Electra last summer. He can still set another record having to do with a solo electric motorcycle trip, and also set a whole new record for this being the first electric motorcycle to cross the country with a passenger.

That’s what we like about Terry, always looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible.

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by Off The Grid

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About David Herron

David Herron is a writer and software engineer living in Silicon Valley. He primarily writes about electric vehicles, clean energy systems, climate change, peak oil and related issues. When not writing he indulges in software projects and is sometimes employed as a software engineer. David has written for sites like PlugInCars and TorqueNews, and worked for companies like Sun Microsystems and Yahoo.