Austria-based Pierer AG appears ready to launch two new electric motorcycles for the street, through its KTM and Husqvarna subsidiaries respectively.
This revelation comes from Dennis Chung at Motorcycle.com, who found the information in a U.S. government web posting— a “new vehicle identification number decoder guide released by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.” This is how the world works these days, and it’s a rare motorcycle that can make it to the manufacturer’s intended release-to-the-public date without some administrative filing spilling the beans.
If those bikes are headed to the U.S. market, it’s almost a certainty that they will come to Canada as well.
What can we expect? According to Chung, the two machines will be called the Husqvarna Pioneer and the KTM Freeride. The Pioneer is an all-new idea for the Husky brand, and it sounds like we can expect some sort of adventure-styled machine in that case. As for the Freeride, KTM has used this name for electric dirt bikes in the past, but none of those machines were ever street-legal in North America.
Those previous Freeride models were intended for use as playbikes; they were not competition machines like the Stark Varg or Honda’s CR Electric Proto (which debuted last year).
Since these new electric bikes are street-legal, we would not expect them to be competition machines either, although options are starting to grow for such bikes. Maybe we’ll see stripped-down versions competing in the E-Xplorer World Cup in the future? Currently, that series is dominated by Stark Future, with Honda, Caofen and EBMX also fielding teams. A KTM squad might blow the series open?
All they need is legal lighting. Not the same as making a street legal gas powered bike. A moto 2 Ducati with lights and mirrors would be easily street legal for instance. Batteries are still the only thing holding electric street bikes back but with 3000 km range electric passenger aircraft coming within three years you have to wonder …..