Confederate Motorcycles
announced its name change to Curtiss Motorcycles last year, but that's not all
the gorgeous bike making company has reverted to. The now Curtiss Motorcycles
also announced it will be swapping the mighty V-Twins for a more future-ready
electric powertrain (borrowed from Zero Motorcycles) on its future offerings
and has now revealed the quite aptly named - 'Zeus' fully-electric prototype.
The Curtiss Zeus is the first offering from the newly named company and will be
making its production debut in 2020.
Confederate Motorcycles were known to make extremely
stylish and unique bikes. Curtiss Motorcycles continues to retain this idea of bikes and
the Zeus prototype manages to look retro-cool with its bold styling. The
prototype uses machined aluminium chassis that uses bolted members instead of
welding. The bike uses Racetech internals at the front in a double-wishbone
design, while the swingarm at the rear uses a concentric pivot point with the
electric motor's drivershaft.
The Curtiss Zeus is loaded on features with an
iPad/tablet dash mounted console, LED lights, and see-through panels that
reveal the twin electric motors sourced from Zero Motorcycles and the set-up is
called 'E-Twin'. The electric units have been tuned to produce 170 bhp and a
whopping 393 Nm of peak torque.
Bringing
in all that power in control are brakes from Beringer, while the bike uses BST
wheels wrapped in Pirelli rubber. The Curtiss Zeus prototype has been showcased
with a 14.4 kWh battery pack, which should be a larger unit by the time the
production model arrives two years later.
The prototype holds its own on the styling front
remaining unique, stylish and desirable, as far as Confederable bikes go. That
said, a tamer version of this design is what we expect to make it to
production. Pricing will be anything but cheap on the Zeus, but definitely
looks worth it.
