As usual, not meant for the United States. WAKE UP PEOPLE. This engine is clean and gets nearly 80 mpg?

great, Now put it in a motorcycle chassis! the long way round, down, across or up would be great on a diesel. And with this sector of the motorcycle market growing the time is right. DO IT!

The U.S. always has its priorities in line. Thank you EPA and other regulatory bodies from keeping fine motors out of our market.

Sean Brendan Phelim Moore. A diesel on a motorbike? There a good reasons why people don't put diesels in motorbikes. They are heavy - which affects manuverability. No one is going to ride a motorbike that wants to resist change in direction because of an overly heavy engine. That is dangerous. Emissions controls are more complex and involved on diesel engines. Are you going to use a catalytic converted to reduce particulate emmisions? Urea injection for NOx emissions? Any solution will add more weight, cost and complexity to your motorbike. The increase in weight means you need to upgrade the brakes and suspension systems. This adds further weight and cost. They are low revving compared to petrol car engines and incredibly low revving when compared to your average motorcycle engine. You would need an extremely complex gearbox to make use of the torque. Torque that is overkill for a bike weighing anything near or under 300Kg. This is only adding further weight, complexity and cost. The turbo lag would be so appreciable on a motorcycle compared to a petrol engine that it would be potentially dangerous and frustrating to ride. The manufacturing costs relative to a comparable petrol motorbike would be unjustifiable. What would the selling point be? The only advantage would be fuel consumption. If fuel efficiency was your main concern then there are already motorcycles built to be fuel efficient on petrol - not surprisingly, honda sells them. If I've missed some advantage you are thinking of - please let me know.
I will be very disappointed if Honda only provides this engine to Europe. Australia could certainly benefit from it and it would do the Honda brand here a great deal of good. There is a proven precedent. Hyundai sells their I30 with a 1.6 Turbo diesel and it has gained a lot of popularity and wide acclaim. Not surprisingly it is a fuel miser. If honda sold the Civic with this engine and a dual clutch gearbox or a finely tuned CVT, they would be on a winner.

Interesting article, but I have a suggestion for the author. In an article about the lightest engine in it's class, it might be a good idea to give it's actual weight, not just a comparison to another engine's weight.

The headline speaks of lightest ever, so too, the first sentence but not till the second paragraph does weight actually get mentioned. And I still don't know how heavy this engine is!

This looks like an excellent advance. I bet it won't be long before this is used in aircraft too.
One should note MPG is in metric so more like 65mpg with US gals as ours are smaller.
I'd bet it weighs about what a MC engine of similar power does. They are not light. I built an E MC using 240lbs of lead batteries from a Kaw 750 and it weighs less than stock!!

re; Australian
Heavy bikes have advantages to they are more stable in windy conditions and if you have the right ratio of weight to tire/road contact area they are plenty nimble.
Also having different gear ratios does not make the transmission more complex.
I will take the heaviest bike I can lift back onto it wheels by myself.

We ALL need to petition Obama and the government agencies to abandon their stance against diesels which obviously bring many more miles per gallon than what we have to offer. I believe they are measuring them by the minute instead of overall per mileage and so get it wrong and apply foolish sanctions against these engines. We need them NOW congress-EPA whoever the genius's are who are holding them back-why? There must be some lobby that stops them in favor of buying more fuel is all I can think!

I guess there's no market in the USA for a car that gets 78.5 mpg. :-)