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The engineers at Honda are busy looking at the future of how we will ride on two wheels, and their latest creation is a clutch-by-wire system for motorcycles, first spotted by the eagle eyes at Cycle World.

Similar to how a brake-by-wire system works, the clutch actuation begins by measuring the pressure applied to the clutch lever by the rider, and then sends an electronic signal to a slave cylinder, which replicates and applies that force on the clutch, either engaging or disengaging it.

The question around electric motorcycles does not seem to be “if” they will come but “when” they will come, and from that comes a slew of other questions on how we are going to handle mainstream adoption of this budding two-wheeled segment.

From this momentum comes ideas on how best to charge electric vehicles, and we already see the great debate about the various charging standards available to manufacturers. 

BMW Motorrad is tackling the issue was well, and patent applications show that the German brand has a very smart solution for how to charge motorcycles.

Rumors out of Italy are suggesting that Kawasaki Heavy Industries has bought the Bimota motorcycle brand and its intellectual property.

We first saw the report on this news at the respected GPOne website, though details on the transaction remain virtually non-existent, with a press conference on the news expected in the coming days.

If true, this information is truly interesting, as it will likely set off a firestorm of speculation regarding what Kawasaki could want with the defunct boutique Italian motorcycle brand.

There has been no shortage of rumors about the “new” Honda CBR1000RR superbike. It is a story that pre-dates even the start of this publication, ever since Honda updated its liter bike offering for the 2008 model year.

And now, we seem finally set to see a new chapter in the Fireblade story, with the 2020 model year widely tipped to see the introduction of a new superbike from Big Red.

The machine has been rumored through movements in the WorldSBK Championship, the FIM Endurance World Championship, and other domestic series, and those stories have been supported by a series of patents found worldwide.

Now today, the eagle eyes of Ben Purvis at Cycle World have spotted another patent, one with an intriguing proposition – active aerodynamics.

It would seem that BMW Motorrad is the latest motorcycle marque to explore the idea of forced induction for motorcycles.

This means that the Bavarians will join the ranks of Kawasaki, which has already three supercharged H2 models on the market; as well as Honda and Suzuki, which have been toying with the idea of turbocharged two-wheelers on dealership floors.

Spotted by Ben Purvis at BikeSocial (he’s on a roll lately), the German brand has filed patents locally for an electric supercharger design, with drawings seemingly using the S1000RR as its basis (for whatever that is worth).

Just last month, Harley-Davidson was busy at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We know this because the Bar & Shield brand registered the name “Bareknuckle” with the USPTO, for use on motorcycles and structural parts.

While it is hard to say what Harley-Davidson plans to do with the “Bareknuckle” name, we do have a pretty good guess since the American company plans on debuting a streetfighter motorcycle in the next model year.

For quite some time now, manufacturers have been focusing on this concept called the “last mile” – the idea that the final mile of a daily commute will have to be undertaken with something other than an automobile.

Driving this concern is the vehicle crackdown in urban centers, with cities like London, Paris, and others already creating congestion zones for their city centers, which all but outlaw the ability for one to commute via car into a downtown area.

Mass transit is surely filling this void, as are taxis, but we have also seen a shift towards two-wheeled solutions. That is where today’s story kicks in, as Ford is looking at its own city center solution, patenting a car concept that has a built-in motorcycle.

In this installment of “This Week’s Suzuki Hayabusa Rumor,” we again take a look at the motor of this venerable sport bike. The rumor going around the interwebs right now is that the 2019 Suzuki Hayabusa will feature a “semi-automatic” gearbox.

Side-stepping the part where saying a gearbox is semi-automatic is  a lot like saying someone is “semi-pregnant” (you either are, or aren’t), the rumor stems from a patent filed by Suzuki that shows a gear-shifting mechanism with the foot-shifter that doesn’t require a clutch.

If this sounds a lot like an up/down quickshifter system, then you score extra bonus points today for being a rational human being, but you would be very wrong about what this whole rumor should actually be about.

This is where reading the patent is actually really useful, because it turns out that this patent has a lot less to do with some sort of new transmission type, as the internet rumors would suggest, and a lot more to do with repackaging the transmission of a motorcycle (or any engine with an integrated gearbox) into a tighter unit, while retaining a standard manual shift mechanism.

Has Harley-Davidson just tipped its hand regarding its upcoming electric motorcycle? It would seem so, according to the latest trademark application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Registering the name “Revelation” with the USPTO, Harley-Davidson has set aside the trademark for two uses: 1) batteries for vehicles, and 2) drivetrains for electric motorcycles and vehicles.

Other publications are running this story as the “Revelation” name being the moniker for Harley-Davidson’s production version of the Livewire electric motorcycle concept, but the actual trademark makes a very clear alternative to that narrative.

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that’s the case, then the folks at Benelli are positively glowing for their fellow Italians at Ducati, as the Benelli 402S seems somehow very familia to our eyes…

Ok, let’s just call a spade a spade here: Benelli wholesale copied Ducat’s XDiavel motorcycle when the Pesaro company designed its latest machine, the Benelli 402S.