HOW DID WE GET HERE?
June 12, 2009 was an important day in the history of the electric motorcycle, when Rob Barber won the TTX GP race at the Isle of Man TT races, completing a lap of the infamous Mountain course at an average of 87.434mph on his Agni X01. It might not have seemed like much at the time. Thirteen bikes entered the race, nine finished – one taking almost an hour to complete the 37.73-mile course. But despite the sniggers of the hardcore petrolheads, electric propulsion had started to enter motorcycling’s mainstream. Fast forward a decade and an electric bike class even takes place in support of MotoGP. Electric motorcycles are not the future, they are the present.
The actual genesis of the electric motorcycle is hard to pinpoint. The earliest patents for electrically powered bikes go back to the 1800s but, despite one-off projects over the years, electric motorcycles are definitely a child of the 21st century.
While those Isle of Man TT races have hardly captured the imagination
