Finland's Verge TS looks like nothing else on the road because it is like nothing else on the road.
Most electric motorcycle designs simply replace the basic layout of a gas-powered motorcycle, swapping an engine for a motor and a gas tank for a battery. The problem with that is the battery sits too high in the frame and, as it's heavy, means such bikes have the habit of tending to topple over.
Verge Motorcycles’ engineers knew they needed to put the battery down in the bottom of the frame, keeping the centre of gravity as low as possible. But by dropping the battery to the base, they filled up the space usually occupied by a motor. “We came to a conclusion that we would need to move the motor outside of the main chassis, out of the body of the motorcycle,” says CTO Marko Lehtimäki. So they decided to try something different by putting the motor inside the rear wheel.
Verge came up with a hubless ring design, which means you can put your hand right through the centre of the wheel.
The result is an inadvertent head-turner. “We didn’t start from ‘Let’s create something that looks like a Tron bike,’ we started from how can we make a better motorcycle with a completely redesigned EV architecture,” he said. “The answer was this ring motor.”
Verge Motorcycles says they’ll start shipping to American consumers sometime in the summer of this year, but Verge Motorcycles has already delivered a few production TS units to lucky customers in Europe. So despite the sci-fi look, this thing looks set to become a reality.