Electric touring is officially on the menu ... Sort of. Evoke has built its 6061-GT electric motorcycle around the biggest battery pack ever offered in a production bike: a staggering 30-kWh monster offering more than 600 km (370 miles) of range.
Battery-electric motorcycles sit in a weird spot with much of the biking community. In a practical daily commuting sense, they're already terrific. They're quick and zippy, often powerful enough to be fun, and while they're expensive to buy, they cost next to nothing to run.
But bikes are inherently not like cars. Well, not in Western countries, where they're often mainly viewed as toys. So even if 90% of their riding is around town, and could easily be handled by today's batteries, a lot of riders have no interest in a bike that can't pile up big miles on a weekend blast through the mountains. And in a lot of places, the mountains ain't close by, and charge stations ain't plentiful.
So Hong Kong-based company Evoke has gone and built a bike with enough battery and charging built in to get the job done. The 6061-GT will go up to and beyond 600 km around town, probably more like half that on the highway, and where level 2 CCS-2 DC charging is available, it'll charge at up to 90 kW, meaning you can get 'er from 0-80% in half an hour, too, if you've got Ironbutt ambitions.
In charge of emptying that battery as exuberantly as possible is a liquid-cooled axial flux electric motor peaking at 90 kW (121 hp) and 206 Nm (152 lb-ft) – we know not what it's rated for continuously. That drives the rear wheel directly, enabling a top speed "over 230 km/h" (140 mph) and a 4.4-second sprint from 0-98 km/h (0-60 mph), presumably slowed by the gearing.
That's certainly not on the quick end of the scale, but then, 30 kWh of lithium-ion batteries is gonna be big and heavy, that can't be avoided. So, perhaps wisely, Evoke has gone for a cruiser style here – big and heavy aren't necessarily pejoratives in the cruiser world the way they are in the rest of motorcycling. Given the sheer beef of that battery pack, perhaps we can look past the weight of this monster, which we'd estimate at more than 320 kg (705 lb).
The battery pack is housed within a "patented Twin Plate Exo-frame," laser cut from aerospace-grade aluminum sheets – and it's without a doubt the most backyard-ass, ghetto-tastic, lazy, misshapen, wasteful, look-what-my-kid-drew crime against aesthetics I can remember seeing in the motorcycle world for many a year. The outgoing 2023 models (shown above) are absolutely hideous. For once, we're glad this thing is patented so nobody else builds it.
Mercifully, the 2024 bike gets great sheets of plastic draped over it, and in the renders you can't see that godawful frame at all. Much of an onlooker's attention will be drawn to the monster 250-section spoke-o-rama of the rear tire, anyway – that's wider then the whopper on the Triumph Rocket III.
There's a small, "tank"-mounted dash, ABS and regenerative braking, "sophisticated" three-way adjustable suspension and a "deep groove seat to provide comfort on the long open road."
Evoke says it's "available to order now," with North American deliveries starting in 2024, although the bike is yet to appear on the company's website. There's no pricing as yet, but the butt-ugly 2023 bike cost around US$25,000, if that's any indication.
It's a bit of an odd package; an electric motorcycle focused on touring, yet without any luggage options, or really anywhere to even strap it down. That long tank will make it a fair stretch to the flat drag bars, and anyone who's done serious miles on a seat as scooped out as this one will know it's a recipe for monkey butt over a long day on the road. So it hardly seems built for comfort.
But it sure does have a dirty big battery, and it could end up being acceptable to look at, in a way that last year's version manifestly was not. So it'll be interesting to see how it's accepted by the biking fraternity. Would you have one?
Source: Evoke Motorcycles
