KTM’s secret Duke | News | Spied









(+) / Print 04 June 2017 / Text Size (-)

We nab spy pics of what could be the most convincing and popular electric bike yet

You just might be looking at the bike that finally drags electric power into the mainstream – a realistic roadster with a familiar badge and an established dealer network that just happens to be battery operated rather than petrol powered. It’s the electric KTM Duke.

Spied on test at the firm’s own facility, it’s clearly in the prototype stage. The hand-me-down 390 Duke bodywork, wheels, brakes and suspension show that it’s still a testbed, but the electric drive unit and transmission look suspiciously like production-ready parts.

The use of 390 Duke suspension and brakes suggests that the bike’s performance – and, importantly, weight – are in the same ballpark as that machine, which has 32kW and comes in at just 154kg wet. The electric machine is probably heavier, but could still slip in under the 200kg mark.

Unusually, the electric motor has been incorporated into a unit that uses a conventional motorcycle transmission. There’s a familiar clutch lever on the left ’bar, a foot-operated shifter on the left and a rear brake pedal on the right, suggesting it will ride much like a normal bike. It looks relatively normal, too. The transmission means the electric motor – probably an Agni unit – sits where the crankshaft would be on a petrol engine. Above it, in a cast-aluminium housing, are the control electronics. The result is that the whole electronics, motor and transmission unit is shaped much like a conventional bike’s petrol engine. As well as helping with the chassis design – it can use familiar geometry and weight distribution learnt from decades of petrol-powered bike design – it is less alien-looking than most electric bikes.

One thing that does stand out is the huge battery pack. It appears that KTM has mounted the batteries in an aluminium box that doubles as the bike’s main frame. This looks large enough to accommodate four of the lithium-ion battery packs from the existing KTM Freeride-E.

If that calculation is right it would allow the bike to use a motor with twice the performance of the 16kW Freeride-E and, given that most of the time only a fraction of its power would be used, range might be upped to something approaching 200km per charge.

It’s quite likely we’ll see it emerge as a concept bike at a show towards the end of this year, where KTM will gauge interest, and a production version could follow, perhaps between 12 and 24 months later.

By Ben Purvis