BMW ER80 electric motorcycle form study by Luuc Muis

Electric motorcycle form study by Luuc Muis is a redesign of old iconic BMW vintage motorcycle. It shows us what future BMW motorcycles would look like if they kept original form with new electric drive-train components and battery pack.

Based on my R80 E-drive concept of reusing the engine crankcase of the R combustion engine. Why not exchange the entire engine with an Electric drivetrain while keeping the BMW aesthetics of the R engine. Based on my R80 E-drive concept of reusing the engine crankcase of the R combustion engine. Why not exchange the entire engine with an Electric drivetrain while keeping the BMW aesthetics of the R engine.- LUUC MUIS

Based on one on the most recognizable engine design and custom trends I chose to look a bit further to an inevitable problem. Eventually, we will run out of BMW R type bike from the ’70s to customize as well as the parts to keep them running on the road with combustion engines. Imagine the moment, fossil fuels will be obsolete for everyday transport and your crankshaft wears out. What to do? No more crankshafts around time for an alternative.

In the easiest sense of the concept, pull out the guts take off the cylinders and slam in a 5Kw Electric engine. And continue rolling your custom BMW. But what I would like is that same excitement riding, besides the stance with a to believe silent E-drive. The Experience of riding a custom motorcycle is more than half the fun, an engine shaking, revving s, accelerating and turning heads as you’re strolling around.

Based on our basic 7 sense: taste, movement, balance, smell, vision, touch, and hearing. My thoughts on some of these senses are could be linked to certain aspects that make motorcycle riding experience. Smell of oil and gas, vision of our surrounding going places, touch to textures and heat, movement and balance to speed and handling and hearing as a prime sense to safety since it’s the only sense we have that doesn’t have to place us within direct contact with a situation to have immediate impact (you could say the same for smell but that takes a while). For example, someone could drop a mug of coffee around the office corner and you have an instant reaction and idea of what happened. So why make E-drive silent?

Give E-drive the sense of functional sound, the sound to indicate: the engine is on, someone is approaching, acceleration, speed, malfunction (we have all heard the weird ticking noises in our cars at some point). This sound could easily be generated through mechanical principles since it’s nothing else than frequency air displacement.

Next to functional sound the memory and movement handling of a regular bike, instead of a one geared E-drive. Ad a gearbox this keeps the experience of doing something with your machine. As well as lowing the load on the electromotor. Basically 8KW at 10kRPM that could approach 120khp a 4kw engine with gearing to approach 120kph at 5kRPM. Less RPM fewer Amps needed, fewer batteries to carry around. It may not be maintenance free implementing a gearbox but adds significant value to riding an electric motorcycle with sound. – LUUC MUIS

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BMW motorcycle was inspired by Barbara Custom Motorcycles that served as a basis for this project

Luuc KTM re-design