LIGHTNING LS-218

~ gizmag.com



You might think electric vehicles are there to be clean and green and a little bit sensible, but the Lightning bike shows that battery power can deliver absolutely ridiculous levels of performance too. With 200 horsepower and a monstrous 168 lb.ft (228 Nm) of torque, this is the fastest accelerating vehicle. Sure, it’s seriously quick.

The LS-218 is the king of a new breed of electric motorcycles – one designed to take on the world's best petrol bikes and beat them on performance, not just emissions figures.


With an aerodynamic fairing and a smaller sprocket on the rear wheel, it recorded a top speed of 218 miles per hour (351 km/h) on the Bonneville Salt Flats, making it the world's fastest production bike. Now, we can argue about the fact that the major motorcycle manufacturers have kept their top speeds limited to around 180 miles per hour (290 km/h) as part of a "gentleman's agreement" so as not to infuriate governments into making the decision for them, but the fact remains that when the LS-218 raced against a field of primarily petrol bikes up Pike's Peak in 2013, it demolished everything else on the mountain by more than 20 seconds. In racing terms, that's an absolute pants-down spanking. This thing is capital-F Fast.


The LS-218 is even better looking in the flesh than in photos. The bike's designer Glynn Kerr is known as well for his design critique columns as he is for actually designing motorcycles, so it's fantastic to watch him walk the walk with a totally new brand and blank slate. It's a stunner.


The bike's hand-wrapped carbon fiber bodywork shimmers in metallic blue and silver, sleek lines running back from its eight projector headlights, over the broad tank and back to the business-like Corbin seat. There's a huge bump-stop behind the seat and the Lightning logo pops up everywhere from the nose cone and triple clamps to the huge rear sprocket and chain adjuster – nothing is off the shelf. Mind you, that's reflected in the price of the first batch – 150 are being built, at a base price of US$ 38,800.


The Aim MXL dash, like the rest of this pre-production demo bike, is set up purely for racing. It's a confusion of voltages, amp-hourages and RPMs with comprehensive datalogging capabilities. The tacho is an odd inclusion on a single-speed, clutchless bike – it merely serves to remind you that even as you hit 100 mph, you're still not even half way to the LS-218's top speed.


In the interests of safety, there's two kill switches. The one on the left bar switches the bike on, the one on the right arms the throttle. Not that you'd know; even with both armed, the bike sits silently, glaring forward.

Once it's moving though, the LS-218 is creamy smooth and disarmingly easy to ride. One of the great strengths of electrics is that there's really no impediment to a perfect throttle mapping; no flat spots or unwanted leaps in the power delivery, no drivetrain snatch as petrol gets squirted into dry throttle bodies. Instead, you get what you ask for at all times, and if you use the throttle like a sane, rational human being, the Lightning bike feels perfectly civilized. Lots of power, excellent delivery, piece of cake.

From the reports of racers, the LS-218 is said to switch directions with the quickness of a bike far lighter than its 495 lb (225 kg) "wet" weight – that's because with the simplicity of an electric drivetrain there's vastly less gyroscopic inertia to fight when you go to tip it over. Imagine the gyroscopic effect of a spinning crank at 10,000 rpm, a flywheel, all the movement of pistons and clutch components and heavy gears – all gone.

Build that infrastructure out, and the LS-218 as it stands today is an electric superbike that soundly out-performs its combustion-engined cousins, goes just as far as they do on a "tank", refills almost as quickly, requires very little maintenance and looks a million dollars to boot. With the world's richest company starting to eye off the electric vehicle sector as an opportunity, it's not hard to imagine charging infrastructure appearing sooner rather than later.


Battery range is an issue Richard sees disappearing in the next few years: "Of all the battery companies that we're talking with, everyone is working on 300, 400 watt-hour per kilo batteries – that's twice the run time, twice the energy density, twice the range of the very best batteries that are available now. They're in the bench for one reason or another, maybe it needs more cycle time, maybe they need to squeeze some of the cost out .. There are a variety of different issues that have to be resolved, but there's so many really bright people and so much money pursuing it that it'll be really surprising if we don't see those types of things soon."