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The global pandemic might have disrupted the plans of many motorcycle manufacturers, much to their chagrin, but the folks at Energica found a way to make a positive out of the negative situation.

Planning to upgrade their electric motorcycle offerings for the 2022 model year, the Italians have jump-started that process with a new motor design, which they are phasing into their current bike sales.

Lighter, more powerful, and water-cooled, the motor was designed and developed with the help of Italian engineering firm Mavel, and is being called the “Energica Mavel Co-Engineering” (EMCE) motor.

News out Japan sees Honda and Hitachi starting a joint venture that will focus on providing motors for electric vehicles.

The two companies signed today what they call a “memorandum of understanding, which is the Japanese business version of getting a promise ring to start a future company together.

The still unnamed joint venture will be located in Hitachinaka City in the Ibaraki Prefecture, and be initially capitalized with ¥5 billion (~$44 million).

It seems Erik Buell Racing has been thinking about alternative-fuel vehicles, as the company from East Troy had filed and received a patent for a hybrid drive motorcycle design.

There is nothing particularly astonishing about EBR’s patent, after all with hybrids being all the rage in the four-wheeled world, it was obviously only a matter of time before that same trend transitioned to motorcycles as well.

However, what is interesting about Erik Buell Racing’s patent is that it doesn’t set forth the Prius-inspired setup that you would expect, where an electric motor takes over or assists an internal combustion engine.

Instead, EBR’s setup is more like the Chevy Volt, with a small petrol-fueled generator being on-board to charge the bike’s batteries once they have been depleted by the electric motor, and thus killing the range anxiety that is prevalent in current EV bike designs.

While the video of MotoCzysz putting their new D1-10 electric motor up on the dyno is not terribly captivating (it’s hard to see anything really moving since all the fun bits are inside the motor’s casings), the performance figures the company quotes surely are impressive. The liquid-cooled IPM motor makes 250lbs•ft of torque, generates over 100hp, and employs a proprietary cooling system to allow a higher percentage of that peak power to be used over extended periods of time. This is particularly important because of the large gap between peak power figures and sustainable power figures in the electric motorcycle world, with the latter being the more important figure to quote.