Mobility: ELECTRIC MOTORCYCLES

Words by Ren Alcantara

Ah, 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?

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.

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.

These didn’t really take off either, and things got quiet in electric motorcycle development for another few decades until 1964, when Indians came up with the Papoose, a prototype electric motorcycle. As you may have noticed, all of these were small runs or one-offs done over a very limited period of time. This trend continued, and in 1974, a designer named Mark Corbin created Quick Silver, an electric motorcycle that set the speed record for the class at a blistering 266 KPH through the use of an electric starter motor off a fighter plane. This offered a glimpse at the terrifying potential electric two-wheelers, even though consumer-level bikes were yet a few decades off.

If we’re talking about the mainstream adoption of the electric motorcycle, 1996 is a good place to start, when Peugeot (yes, that Peugeot) created the Scoot’Elec, which has the distinction of being the world’s first mass-produced electric motorcycle. It was essentially a Peugeot Zenith, which was a gas-powered scooter, powered by a 2.8 kW (that’s 3.8 HP) DC motor fed by an 18V, 100Ah Ni-Cad battery that had a range of 40 kilometers at 45 kilometers per hour, though eco mode could be switched on to sacrifice top speed for range.

It admittedly wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Fast-forward to today, and we have brands like Energica, Zero, and even KTM, not to mention a whole slew of Chinese brands that have motorcycles in practically every flavor you might want whether you’re a street rider, prefer the dirt or want to take a spin on the track.

So what’s so special about electric motorcycles? Quite a few things. First, it’s quiet. You don’t have explosions happening thousands of times a minute, so there’s no exhaust note. There’s also no clutch. With one exception we’re aware of, electric motorcycles don’t use gears, as there’s no RPM range they perform best at, because again, there’s no internal combustion engine that has a powerband you need to be in for maximum performance. This also means you don’t have to spool up to get to where your bike can deliver max torque.

That property also gives it face-tearing acceleration. It’s “GO” as soon as you give it the beans. If you think a literbike can rip, you should see how electric bikes can jump off the line, though that will also depend on how the electronics are set up.

There’s also very little maintenance. Chains, tires, brakes, and recharging are pretty much all you have to think about. There are no valves to shim, no injector to clean, no carbs to balance. It’s insane how simple they are to keep running.

If they’re so great, why aren’t they more popular? It’s not because they lack tech--top-tier electric bikes offer the same tech as their dino juice-consuming counterparts: ABS, traction control, connectivity functions, rider modes. It’s mostly because of the limiting factors of the technology behind them. Buyer psychology aside, there are a few reasons.

Firstly, batteries. Gasoline is more energy-dense than batteries. This means that you have more power for a kilogram of gas than a kilogram of the best-performing battery we have available. This means you can get more power for less weight and with less space with gas, and since you don’t have a lot to spare for either on a bike, gas is still on top. There might be a day where this will change, but we’re not quite there yet.

The other face of the energy density coin is range. Because you’re powering the bike with a less energy-dense source, you typically have less range on electric compared to gas. It just comes with the territory. If you wanted your electric bike to match the range of gas, you’d need a larger battery bank.

The third factor here is recharge times. To top off a bike, you’d need maybe two minutes to fill your tank and pay, and something to which anyone with an empty mobile phone battery can attest, recharging an electric cell is painfully slow. Again there are changes on the horizon here, so this is bound to improve.

We’ve pretty much reached the zenith of internal combustion engine performance. It’s been improved on so much that additional gains just aren’t as large, and diminishing returns have set in. On the other hand, there’s so much more room for electric motorcycles to grow.

Yammienoob, a great motorcycle resource online, raised a good point when he brings up the fact that improvements in MotoGP year on year are left in the dust by improvements in MotoE. There’s no doubt in my mind that electric motorcycles are the future. Whether we’re there yet, though, is another matter altogether.