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In many ways, Ducati’s MotoE project is the opposite of all the electric motorcycle projects which have gone before.

Up until very recently, conventional motorcycle manufacturers have mostly stayed well away from electric motorcycles, preferring to wait and see how the technology, and the political and legislative framework in which this all takes place, will play out.

Exceptions have been few and far between: beyond electric scooters, KTM have the Freeride, an electric enduro machine, and Honda worked with Mugen on their bike which dominated the TT Zero race on the Isle of Man.

That has left the field open for a host of new companies, which have operated with varying success. Silicon Valley produced a large swathe of start ups, mostly run by motorcycle enthusiasts from the area’s electric vehicle and technology industries, and funded with VC money.

A few others, such as Energica, are engineering start ups producing electric vehicles and based in areas with strong automotive industry links. Small companies with limited manufacturing and engineering facilities which relied on widely available components and techniques for a large part of their bikes.

So when Energica won the first contract to produce the MotoE racer, they were competing against other specialist electric motorcycle manufacturers, sometimes no bigger than a handful of people based in of small workshops.

But all had the same philosophy: to take their existing products and turn it into a race bike, by stripping unnecessary ballast and upgrading suspension, braking, and various chassis components.

Their race bikes, and the Energica Ego Corsa which became the MotoE bike when the series first started in 2019, are basically the electric bike version of Superstock spec machines: production bikes which have been turned into racing machines by upgrading existing components to racing spec.

At the technical presentation of their MotoE machine on Thursday, the contrast between what has gone before and Ducati’s approach couldn’t be greater.

It has been hard to make sense of the start of the 2022 MotoGP season. In the first three races, nine different riders filled the nine podium positions.

In Texas, we had our first repeat winner in Enea Bastianini, and Alex Rins repeated his podium from Argentina, while Jack Miller became the tenth rider to stand on the podium in four races.

In one respect, the 2022 season is picking up where 2021 left off. In 2021, MotoGP had eight different winners in 18 races, and 15 different riders on the podium.

The 2020 season before it had nine winners and 15 different riders on the podium from just 14 races, the season drastically shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much of that variation can surely be ascribed to the absence of Marc Marquez as a competitive factor.

During his keynote address at Kawasaki’s EICMA presentation, Kawasaki Motors President Hiroshi Ito announced that the Japanese brand would unveil three electric models in 2022.

An ambitious plan, the news is part of Kawasaki’s previous statement that it plans to bring 10 electric and hybrid motorcycles by 2025. Clearly, Team Green isn’t waiting around to make good on that promise.

Transportation is changing. If you need proof beyond that statement, take a look at how brands like BMW are envisioning transportation in the future.

There has been no shortage lately of two-wheel brands reevaluating how people will move in close urban environments, and no brand has been experimenting more in this space than BMW and BMW Motorrad.

The German company already showed us last week its electric Honda Grom contender, the BMW Concept CE 02, which is aimed at younger riders (or non-riders) with a fun pint-sized form factory.

Now, the Bavarians have envisioned two more concepts for their last-mile arsenal, dubbed the BMW i Vision AMBY and BMW Motorrad i Vision AMBY. Names only an engineer could love.

For the 2022 model year, the Honda Africa Twin 1100 family isn’t getting too many updates, save for one that might turn a few heads – Honda is updating the settings on its dual-clutch transmission.

According to Honda’s release, both the Africa Twin and Africa Twin Adventure Sport with the DCT will see “refined” settings on the ECU, which Big Red says will bring smoother handling in the first two gears when starting and at low speeds.

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.