Curtiss One
A bike that will last forever, is infinitely updatable and tips the scales at £57k. Sounds like Cloud Cuckoo Land to us. Yet…
This is the Curtiss One, the first of a new line of luxury electric bikes to emerge from the defunct Confederate – the company responsible for the Hellcat, Wraith and Combat. The new bike has an axial flow motor capable of 217bhp (though limited to 120bhp), a liquid-cooled battery that gives a range of around 80 miles and a price of £57,401 ($81,000). ‘This bike is for people who want no compromise,’ Curtiss CEO Matt Chambers tells Bike from the company HQ in Alabama. ‘It’s just way better than an ICE [internal combustion engine] bike. We have some clients who say, “dude I will never get on an electric bike,” but that’s exactly what I said when we first started talking about it nine years ago.’
What convinced Matt was, as he and his team tried to satisfy customer demands for more power, their V-twins got hotter and more temperamental. ‘Eventually I realised that we were down a rabbit hole with ICE,’ he says. ‘If you start adding power and exotic features you also add weight and heat and as soon as you start pushing the limits, you make it more fragile too – that’s more ownership hassle. In terms of what our customers want with two wheeled motoring, you just can’t get there with ICE.’
Starting afresh with a new name (the word Confederate became a bit too Trumpy) and a new power source wasn’t easy. ‘One of the things that stopped us getting the One out earlier was that we had to invent our own electric powertrain. It wasn’t in the original business model, but we’ve done it and it’s f**king awesome so I’m glad we did.
‘When we started we were going to buy an electric powertrain and we were working with Zero. But when we looked at it, it’s all inexpensive Chinese stuff,’ says Matt. So he went with a far pricier axial flux motor made by British company Yasa,
based near Oxford. ‘We didn’t make the inverter either (the device that changes the battery’s DC output into AC for the motor), but we tuned how the motor and inverter communicate. Our charging system is brand new and miniaturised – the bike is only 26in wide, so has the proportions of a Knucklehead from the 1930s. I see it as a return to elegant proportions.’
The battery – slung low and covered in fins – is ground-breaking too and, as an object, it’s not too shabby looking either. ‘It’s the first immersion battery on a motorcycle, with each cell immersed in fluid so the temperature stays uniform. We wanted to eliminate temperature problems altogether and we’ve done that.’
Because battery technology is advancing so fast, the bike is designed so that a new battery can be fitted relatively easily. ‘We had this idea of making a bike that would last forever,’ says Matt. ‘There are so few moving parts and because it’s over-engineered we feel it could last forever. If there’s a breakthrough in battery technology we can take the bike back to the factory and put the new battery in. Every time there’s a step forward we’ll fit a new battery. It’s like the cloud based software on the bike – it will be continually upgraded.’
‘In terms of what our customers want you just can’t get there with internal combustion engines’