Yamaha Planning Electric Bikes For Street, Dirt

Whether electric motorcycles will ever gain widespread acceptance by riders is open to debate. Of the two main manufacturers, Brammo and Zero, only Zero has a dealer in New England – Great Bay Motorcycles in North Hampton, NH. (Zero also has Phibbs Motor Sports in Albany, NY and Carbon Negative in Brooklyn as dealers, but Brammo is absent in the Northeast.)

What it will likely take to get a true fix on the potential of electric motorcycles is for a major bike builder to try battery power, and that time has apparently come.

The British website “Visor Down” reported this week that Yamaha will begin production of not one but two electric motorcycles in 2016 – the PES1 sports bike and its off-road sibling the PED1. The designations reportedly stand for “Passion, Electric, Street” and “Passion, Electric, Dirt.”

“Visor Down”  quotes an annual report from Yamaha as saying, “These motorcycles will offer the operability expected by existing motorcycle fans, toegther with a new riding experience.” Concepts of the bikes were shown at the Tokyo Motor Show in 2013.

Details on the bikes, such as performance, price and where they will be sold, haven’t been released. The concept PES1 weighed in at under 220 pounds and had a top speed of 62 miles per hour. The PED1 weighed less than 187 pounds.