Honda patents electric superbike
By Ben Purvis
This September Honda is expected to take the wraps off its first full-size electric production bike - a showroom version of the 'EV FUN' concept model that was unveiled at EICMA in 2024 - but the company is already working on a much more ambitious machine in the form of a battery-powered superbike as revealed in a recent patent application.
While electric bikes are still struggling to get a foothold in the West, suffering declining sales in the largest European markets and similarly failing to make a substantial dent in the US sales, there's an underlying understanding that, with the introduction of improved battery technologies allowing reduced weight, greater energy-density and faster charging, electric bikes are still likely to become a mainstream success in the medium to long term.
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Ongoing developments including solid-state batteries and new chemistries like sodium-ion are likely to transform the EV market, and companies with patents on effective ways to implement electric power stand to see substantial rewards.
Honda's latest patent, therefore, ignores details of the battery design and chemistry, preferring to focus on packaging of the electric motor and rear suspension to maximize the available space for the battery and electronics. It depicts a FireBlade-style superbike with the motor and transmission shifted as far back as possible, creating a bolt-on sub-assembly that incorporates the motor, transmission, swingarm, shock and rear suspension linkage.
It's a development of an idea that Honda has previously explored when the company backed the Mugen Shinden project that raced at the Isle of Man TT Zero from 2012 to 2019, evolving each year to push forward electric sports bike design.
The last iterations of the Shinden featured a similarly compact motor and transmission to the one seen in the patent, mounted below the front section of the swingarm rather than ahead of it, to maximise battery space in the main section of the frame.
On those last Shinden racers, the rear shock was unusually positioned, fitting under the rider's seat, but the new Honda patent shows an even more compact layout that puts the shock horizontally above the electric motor, almost entirely hidden inside the front section of the swingarm, with a compact rising-rate linkage to ensure it still works as well as more conventional designs.
The result is that the whole assembly, including the powertrain, the swingarm pivot, the entire rear suspension and even the rider's footpegs, comes as a unit that attaches to the rest of the bike using just three bolts. There's even a single, embedded electric connector to interface with the battery and control electronics.
What's the benefit? As well as maximising battery space, the rear suspension and powertrain unit's bolt-on design means it can be fitted to an array of different frames and batteries. The patent shows it bolted to a conventional aluminium beam frame, but it could as easily be attached to a monocoque-style design using the battery case as its main structure.
As the patent points out, incorporating the motor and transmission into this rear subassembly also relieves stress on the bike's frame, as all the forces from transmitting power to the rear wheel are dealt with in the rear unit, not the bike's main chassis.
