Kawasaki Working on Electric Sportbike
Rennie Scaysbrook | November 13, 2019
Kawasaki is busy working on the company’s first electric sportbike. Using the EICMA Show in Milan to show off the chassis, motor and battery package but being extremely coy on any technical details, Kawasaki is trying to get the jump on its fellow mainstream competitors by becoming the first Japanese manufacturer to offer an electric sportbike for sale.
In the above video, Kawasaki’s Senior Manager, Innovation Department Research and Development Division, Yoshimoto Matsuda, who has previously headed development on the ZX-10RR Superbike and ZX-RR MotoGP machines, says with the electric platform Kawasaki has “been thoroughly studying—and patenting—features ranging from packaging and chassis geometry, to transmissions and thumb brake-activated energy recovery systems.”
As such, the Kawasaki electric motorcycle will likely come with a gearbox, making it an anomaly in the electric motorcycle sphere (let’s hope Kawasaki’s execution of a gearbox on an electric machine is better than the dismal Victory Empulse of 2016…).
Crap photo, we know, but that’s as close as we could get to the bike at EICMA.
While the motorcycle in the video looks suspiciously like a Ninja 400/Ninja 650, it’s likely the new Kawasaki electric bike will come in all-new styling, so don’t read too much into what it looks like right now.
The electric motorcycle space has needed a major manufacturer like Kawasaki to publically state its intentions to build such a machine, so don’t be surprised if at least the other Japanese manufacturers don’t follow suit soon.
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