Cover story
Words by Ren Alcantara
h, electric bikes. They have a lot going for them: they are quiet, have ungodly amounts of torque, and have very little maintenance to worry about. What makes them great, and why aren’t we all buzzing around on them Tron-style yet?
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You may be surprised to know that the electric motorcycle has been a thing for more than a century. A patent for an electric motorcycle was filed in the United States in 1895 by Ogden Bolten Jr., which kind of puts things in perspective when you realize that the patent for a “vehicle powered by a gas-powered engine” was filed by Carl Benz in 1886.
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We’re not spoiling anything by saying that the Ogden electric bike didn’t really take off, and while it would take almost a century for it to start to gain traction, electric motorcycles show up now and again in history, with a British electric motorcycle that had a sidecar that housed the batteries, and some models that appeared on both sides during Second World War due to fuel rationing.
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