I've been dabbling with the idea of an Ebike setup. I was thinking of going more of a tadpole trike, but same concept. What I'm wondering is can you run an alternator as a charging source through a converter to step it up from 12v to 36v or 48v? Or could/would it be better to run an inverter setup to either charge a 48v bank of batteries or a 12v battery with some kind of inverter/converter direct to the motor? Thereby being able to run the alternator direct to the battery and convert the voltage between the battery and motor?

Sorry, I know the thought is sort of scatterbrained, I'm trying to think low cost at the same time as efficient and I'm fairly sure the two are mutually exclusive.