CURTISS Motorcycles are about to launch a new (and fairly whacky looking, obviously) electric motorcycle and the company has their sights firmly set on Harley-Davidson and the recently released Livewire.
The new machine is called the Psyche, and it cuts a sparse silhouette when compared to other electric motorcycles on the market. The Psyche uses some design and mechanical elements from other bikes in the Curtiss range, the swingarm, for instance, looks to be lifted from the Hades motorcycle we reported on last week.
While the front suspension system looks totally different from the Hades, we can see the mounting points of the sliding girder are actually identical, just with a slightly different girder design, with more engineered strengthening.
From there down, the bikes go in totally different directions, with the Psyche using a small tubular frame that links the headstock to the swingarm pivot. This is probably done in a move to save money; the Psyche is aiming to go toe-to-toe with Harley-Davidson’s Livewire, to do that a sub $30,000 price tag is required.
Electric motorcycle site Electrek reported that the CEO of Curtiss, Matt Chambers, took to the soapbox to explain why he was squaring the new motorcycle in H-D’s direction:
“I’ve got something I’ve always dreamed of, a clean shot at Harley, exposing the hollow seemingly cynical nature of their EV effort, their own CEO referring to their rather commodity looking LiveWire example as a catalyst for their petrol line. How uninspiring. He goes on to say he will lead the BE motorcycle field. No!
Curtiss is the precise hard knock out punch he didn’t see coming. He is way too big and spread way too thin. The volumes will be too low for the next five years. We have out planned them, out designed them, out engineered them, out branded them and out promoted them. The market is very small, ideally suited to our core competencies, skillsets, and bandwidth. We have the experience and collaborative relationships to ideally grow with this market. Harley does not.”
Curtiss is so proud of the stats for the Psyche, they even released a head to head specification rundown comparing it to H'D's Livewire.
They also report that the Psyche will be released in two versions, either 48 or 96hp and weigh in at a lightweight (for an electric bike) 170kg. The claimed range of the bike is around 160-miles but with no mention of the batteries used or charging method utilised, we can’t assume what the recharge time would be.
