More Electric Motorcycles Please: Introducing the Regent

There’s a new electric motorcycle company popping up every day. We are living through a renaissance, I’m telling you. We will look back on these days with nostalgia the way people look back on the global motorcycle manufacturer explosion of the early 1900s.

As battery technology advances with dizzying speed, so too does every new electric motorcycle’s range increase, its charge time decrease, its curb weight get lighter, and its design get prettier.

Meet the Regent, a bike as stately and British-looking as its name, but wait! It’s made in Sweden. Apart from a blank panel hiding a battery where any traditional motorcycle’s engine would be, this looks the part of a classic Brit bike. These machines are self-defined “retro cafe racers.”

Their website waxes a bit hyperbolic, however: “Yes, electrical bike and we don’t need to tell you what comes along with that with regards to sustainability, a clean conscience, easy charging, and absolutely, positively zero maintenance. So if you’re hard into leaking fluids, clogged filters and planet-destroying, look elsewhere.” I’m not sure anything with wheels and tires can claim zero maintenance. They do tout a maintenance-free hub-mounted electric motor, and it’s absolutely true that you don’t have to change the oil in one of those. Also, get that stick out of your rear-end, you guys.

The Regent website claims “dry” weight of 130 kg (that’s about 330 lbs), but unless this bike houses a few traditional wet-cells or perhaps several large AGM batteries (which I will bet you a whole dollar is not the case), I do not know what would distinguish an electric bike’s “dry” weight from any other kind. There is no motor oil in the thing and never will be, neither does it carry any gasoline. Electrons famously do not weigh much. That particular specification is a bit of a head-scratcher.

The "maintenance-free" electric motor is integrated into the rear hub, the bike has an accident alarm by a company called Detecht, regenerating brakes, and an Active Safety System with no real descriptor of what exactly that is.

The current published retail price of the bike is 9,500 euro, which for reference is just shy of $10,800 USD. The bikes are so new they’re only available for pre-order, and definitely will not available in the US anytime soon, if ever. The gorgeous styling, though, gives us all hope for more pretty electric bikes! Keep them coming!

Source: Regent Motorcycles, EvNerds