According to a report from Reuters, Indian is working on an electric motorcycle.
Supposedly, a single charge could take the new bike as far as 225 km while being ridden aggressively, which is a far cry (no pun intended) from the Empulse TT electric bike that Indian’s parent company Polaris just axed.
The new electric Indian would theoretically debut in the next four or five years, Reuters said.
There’s no word on what the new battery bike would be called, or what it would look like. While most of Victory’s lineup espoused traditional cruiser styling, the Empulse TT kept the sportbike lines originally developed when Brammo owned the design. Will the new Indian electric bike have similar sporting intentions, or will it tend towards the muscle cruiser genre, as Harley-Davidson’s Livewire concept does?
Indian’s competition with Harley-Davidson in the electric segment will be interesting to watch. Emerging battery technology could give either manufacturer a chance to reinvent themselves for a new generation of riders, but will they take it? Will they have any choice? Harley-Davidson is supposed to release their first electric motorcycle by 2020; expect the next few years to be have lots of competition in the North American motorcycle manufacturing industry.
With it looking like solid state batteries will be masss produced in a couple of years everyone had better be working on electric bikes. With three times the capacity, zero safety issues, faster charging and lower cost than even the newest lithium batteries it spells the end for gas powered vehicles
Believe it when you see it.
Better start firing up all those coal power plants that have been shut down then to power the 300 million vehicles on the road in North America that will be plugged in.
I’d be surprised if they weren’t all working on that!
I figure my current car is my last with a combustion engine. However I think the range problem will linger more for bikes, for obvious reasons. Still, only a matter of time.
So they buy Brammo, change the name to Victory, then pull the plug on Victory(pun intended) and now announcing that Indian is announcing an electric bike. Sounds like it’s all a shocking joke.