Eighteen months ago, Chip Yates filed for a patent on his front-end KERS design for motorcycles, which means that today the United States Patent and Trademarks Office (USPTO) can disclose Yates’s patent application to the public. Detailing the only front-wheel regenerative-braking system for motorcycles that we know to exist, the design built by Yates allows a motorcycle to scavenge power from the braking force applied to the front wheel of a motorcycle, and store it in an electric battery system.

Current regenerative-braking systems on the market, like the ones that help power the 2012 Zero S that we tested just a few months ago, use regenerative-braking off the rear wheel, and are more prone to locking the rear tire up if too much force is applied to the system. With 70% or more of a bike’s potential braking force coming from the front wheel, a front-end KERS system has a substantially greater ability to put power back into an electric motorcycle’s battery pack, thus either increasing the range of an electric motorcycle or allowing more electric power to be used over the same distance.

While we are excited and anxiously awaiting the AGV PistaGP helmet, one American helmet manufacturer is less-than-thrilled with the Italian company’s latest offering: Del Rosario. A small boutique firm based out of New York, Del Rosario’s aim was to bring to market helmet designs that were “caught up to the rest of the industry.” Showing off a number of CAD renders since its inception, Del Rosario has clearly missed its late-2011 shipping date, and as far as we can tell, has not actually produced any physical prototypes or finished models.

Getting a fair bit of press and then falling off the radar, Del Rosario is back in the limelight as the company sent a worded warning to AGV through its corporate Facebook page. According to a message posted by Del Rosario on its social media portal, one of the company’s former advisors showed AGV Del Rosario’s stylebook, and now three years later the PistaGP has emerged with a shell design that has some obviously similar characteristics to Del Rosario’s renders.

The rumors that Harley-Davidson has been eying a liquid-cooled motor design have always been in abundance, and 10 years ago we saw the company test the waters of that pool with the Porsche-engineered lump that was found in the V-Rod. While the VRSC line may not have been as big of a success compared to the other models in Harley’s line-up, the water-cooled bastard child of Milwaukee still seems to sell in the tens of thousands each year, even after nearly a decade of only cosmetic revisions.

Faced with an aging demographic, an uninspired motorcycle line-up, and 21 takes on the same motorcycle design, there’s a push internally at Harley-Davidson to break-out and find a new way to engage riders, especially younger riders. The core ethos of change seems to start at the motor itself, and Harley-Davidson has already done the rounds at various electric motorcycle and drivetrain companies. There also exists amount of external and internal pressure over Harley’s pervasive use of air-cooled motors, and now whispers of a water-cooled v-twin power plant have gotten louder in Milwaukee. With those rumors now reaching a boiling point (see what I did there?), Harley-Davidson has patented a very clever way of adding liquid-cooling to its iconic v-twin motor design.

Bombardier has been busy over the past two years, presumably working on something new for the Can-Am Spyder. While not exactly a new idea, the Canadian company has devised a control system for a leaning vehicle…a three-wheeled vehicle shaped like a Spyder according to the patent application that was filed in in July 2009, and published this January (yes, it really takes the USPTO that long just to publish an application, let alone grant a patent). While the technical drawings have little bearing on the final product, it would at least seem logical to conclude that we can expect a leaning Can-Am Spyder in the near future.

For now this technology is just in the application process, and Bombardier hasn’t received a patent from the US Patent and Trademark Office yet. Likely unable to get past the prior art for other leaning trike designs as a whole, Bombardier’s patent focuses on the linkage for the steering mechanism, and how to overcome some of the deficiencies in current designs. Diving into the claims of the patent, Bombardier actually has a pretty clever way of having the Spyder’s frame lean and not lean under the right circumstances, which should make for a more refined three-wheeled leaning chassis.

Math can be tough sometimes, especially when it comes to counting, so we can understand the confusion surrounding the news that Erik Buell has recently been awarded a patent for a design that incorporates a motorcycle exhaust system inside the swingarm of the bike (now that’s some engineering). However we have the unpleasant responsibility of saying that this patent is not in fact owned by Erik Buell and Erik Buell Racing, as the filing date and patent assignee information were clearly over-looked by early reports on Buell’s patent.

While the patent was published on October 28, 2010, its was filed by Buell last year (April 24, 2010), well before Harley-Davidson closed the company, and while Erik Buell still worked as a Harley-Davidson employee. As such, the patent is assigned to the Buell Motorcycle Company, whose intellectual property is still owned by Harley-Davidson.

Visordown is reporting that Honda has filed patents in Japan that would allow the motorcycle manufacturer to port their dual-clutch transmission, a la VFR1200F, over to multiple platforms in the Honda line, including the Honda CBR1000RR. The patents reportedly center-around reducing the cost to implement the DCT into other motorcycle models by simplifying the electronics and sensors that go into the transmission, and removing expensive components of the existing DCT transmission.

Modular motorcycle design is the wave of the future, and it would seem Ducati agrees with this same sentiment that we’ve been harping on for the past 9 months or so. Perusing through the USPTO’s records for patent applications, we found this interesting nugget submitted by Ducati Motor Holdings S.p.A. Known better as Patent Application #US 2009/0308677 A1, or “Simplified Motorcycle”, Ducati’s patent application outlines a motorcycle that is devoid of a frame, and instead has all the components of the motorcycle bolt on directly onto the motor.

KTM has filed with the German Patent Office a number of patents that cover the used of a two-wheel drive system of off-road vehicles. The patents hold claims for a two-wheel drive system that can be fitted to either an enduro or motocross type of motorcycle. KTM’s patent centers around having a conventional motor to drive the read wheel, and an electric motor for the front wheel.

This would be a different method than the hydraulic method for powering the front wheel that Yamaha has been prototyping for over a year now.

Source: visordown

I’m still waiting for the 2WD Akira bike.