As the 2020s head towards the 2030s, we see the motorcycle industry is slowly-but-surely following up on its promises to make like Bob Dylan and go electric. Your latest evidence: Yamaha is showing off a new maxi-scooter design with a hybrid powertrain, combining a gas engine with an electric motor, looking like a solution to the challenges posed by current environmental regulatory regimes.
The design Yamaha uses is called a series-parallel hybrid electric vehicle, or SPHEV for short. We’ve seen nothing particularly special about the engine itself; it’s mounted underneath the seat, where you’d expect to find it on a scooter. But instead of simply driving the rear wheel by a belt, you can also see a generator attached to the engine’s crankshaft. This gives the engine a second role, recharging the bike’s battery that in turn powers an electric motor mounted directly in the hub.
All this electro-mechanical wizardry onboard means Yamaha is able to give this scooter three different drive modes. It can run entirely off battery power, or use the internal combustion engine to fully power the rear wheel, or use a combination of the internal combustion engine’s belt drive as well as the hub motor. Using both power sources at once lets Yamaha offer a considerable boost to the performance of either the motor or engine.
We’ve seen something similar to this with Kawasaki’s 7-series hybrid bikes, but those machines had very limited range in their batteries. It looks like Yamaha is emphasizing longer battery range at the expense of performance (Kawasaki bills their 7-series bikes as having superbike-like acceleration). Yamaha’s system is also currently under development, of course, while Kawi’s is actually available on the market. Stay tuned on this one, as it does seem that this is where the industry is headed since battery tech and the charging grid still fails to catch up to the demands of the EV hawks.
