Towards Green Transportation, This Is BMW Boss's View Of The Future Of Motorcycles

BMW Motorrad celebrates the 1 millionth GS with a boxer engine on June 21, 2023. (Doc. BMW Motorrad)

JAKARTA - Along with the world's efforts to get to environmentally friendly transportation, predicts the driving force of the future of motorcycles is an increasingly difficult challenge and this is also true for big brands like BMW.

Big motorbikes, particularly moge sports and moge touring, have a reputation that builds on high performance and speed. The challenge for manufacturers is to produce electric motors that can match or even exceed the performance and speed of conventional motors. The development of electric motor technology capable of providing acceleration and high speed is the main focus.

To that end, big motorcycle manufacturers are racing against time trying to overcome this challenge by conducting intensive research and development in electric motorcycle technology. With the right time, innovation, and support, switching to electric motors can be easier and more attractive to moge manufacturers.

While some brands are completely turning to electric motors, there are also those who choose different lanes such as Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, and Yamaha which announced research partnerships to learn the feasibility of hydrogen.

Then what about BMW? Quoted from MCN, June 23, Head of BMW Motorcycle Division, Dr. Markus Schramm, along with BMW's Head of Design, Edgarmen shared some interesting views.

"The position of BMW Group - especially in motorcycles - is that we want an open technology solution," says Dr. Schramm.

"We certainly plan on electric mobility. We've started it, but we're also continuing to develop the story of an internal combustion engine (ICE) further. I think we're going to be serious about electric motorcycles before synthetic fuels," he added.

He also gave an idea that BMW had planned in the near future to launch a real electric motorcycle.

"We started for motorbikes in urban areas, so this year we will see another model for urban areas," explained Dr. Schramm.

He also explained that the "real motorcycle" he said would design a roadster. He also believes that synthetic fuels will play an important role going forward in the motorcycle industry.

"Synthetic fuel is a very important part of all of this, and I personally firmly believe that political discussions and conditions will change in the next 10 years," he explained.

While BMW's Head of Design, Edgarmen highlighted more about the big motorcycle designs so far and if it was changed to an electric motorcycle would certainly be something strange.

"Electric motorcycles open up new design fields, because if you look at the existing motorbikes, they are mostly designed based on the engine," said cap.

"A cool motorcycle or iconic motorcycle is determined by its engine - such as V-twin, inline-four, flat boxer engine, or L-twin from Ducati. If you lose all the engines and just enter a large black box [electric motorcycle] and all brands have the same black box, what is the icon of the motorcycle?" he asked.

He continued, the removal of machines is a huge loss in the perception of motorcycles, but this is something that must be faced.

"If you look at motorbikes from the 1920s or 1930s, the space is very wide for any suspension, chairs, valve tuning, brakes, whatever it is. All of this becomes limited to some common concepts. The pipelines are now all the same, the brakes are the same, there are four basic machine layouts, and three different frame layouts," he concluded to MCN.