Electric Superbike is on the way

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June 20, 2005 Our recent story on the inevitability of the electric motorcycle brought a number of reader emails pointing out projects we’d missed. One stood out head and shoulders above the rest. The rMOTO electric superbike concept was developed by ROBRADY design to showcase the technologies and expertise of several of its clients but when the first design sketches were released on the company web site in April, so great was the interest that the project has been given the green light and a prototype is to be constructed for unveiling in January 2006. In terms of design pedigree, no studio could be more appropriate than ROBRADY which has worked on an array of relevant notable projects such as the Vectrix electric and fuel cell scooters, a number of Segway scooters, Parker Hannifin’s Fuel Cells, regenerative braking systems and on a number of motorcycle designs for various companies. See inside for an exclusive interview with ROBRADY principal, Rob Brady.

Florida-based ROBRADY design is one of the elite design studios used by the likes of Yamaha, Polaris, Segway, Vectrix, Suzuki, Volvo, Dell, AT&T, Evinrude et al. Here, ROBRADY principal, Rob Brady discusses the coming rMOTO electric superbike the company will produce.

Tell us about the origins of rMOTO?

“We I’ve had that RMOTO sketch in one form or another for a couple of years and I was really captivated by the thought of an electric superbike when we were researching two wheeled markets in Europe for the Vectrix project.

“I thought about with all the technology we have available to us with our technology partners at the studio and thought wouldn’t it be a great vehicle to showcase everybody’s work on a single product.

“The concept behind it isn’t – the performance and expectations – we have a lot of people wanting to buy it and all those things are actually secondary to wrapping it all together - the technological feat of putting it into a single cohesive package, the battery the battery management system, all the electronics, illumination, all the different components and systems of the bike are existing items today from the different people we do business with so what we’re trying to do at rMOTO is put it into a single product – LED headlights, the recharging systems, fuel cell from Parker Hannifin.

“Vectrix has really been the cornerstone of Robrady for the last few years and we’ve been developing products for Vectrix and it’s all about electric transportation and a new way fo doing things without excessive noise or pollution and renewable energy and … just a better way, a much better way.

“Vectrix have all the electronics and the battery management and regenerative braking system and it has a lot of the IP to optimise everything for a motorcycle such as this, so we feel we’re starting with an enormous head start. “It would be very easy to take an existing motorcycle and slip a motor and a lot of batteries and I think a few people have done that already and it’s kinda disappointing and it becomes a gas bike that morphs into an electric bike and we’d like to do it as an electric bike from the start … from day one.

“It would be easy to ride something like this – you twist the throttle, and hang on. When you want to slow down, just roll the throttle past zero, depending on how fast you’re going of course (laughs), and the regenerative braking starts turning the momentum back into energy and storing it into the battery.

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