The push to swap polluting combustion engines for cleaner electric alternatives is being felt in both two and four-wheel worlds, and the TE-1 is a fully working hint at what’s potentially in store for motorcycle fans from the legendary Triumph brand. Developed with the engineering boffins at Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE), the brain-for-hire sister division to the famous F1 team, it’s not a production bike, but a rolling testbed for lightweight electric powertrain technologies that will filter down to future street bikes.
Triumph had already announced the project
along with a rendered image last year, but it’s now given us a look at the
actual bike to mark the end of WAE’s development process, and the handover to
Triumph for the start of prototype testing. That testing will comprise rolling
road and track experiments and last around six months, after which the bike
will be fitted with its final bodywork ready for demonstration runs.
While the aluminium chassis frame gives it
fairly conventional styling compared with what we’ve seen from various
two-wheel EV startups that have popped up in recent years, the WAE-developed
drivetrain promises big things. The 15 kWH battery has a peak power output of 228 hp and a 174 hp continuous output, and
sends its energy to the rear wheel via a toothed belt rather than a chain.
WAE claims the performance, power,
efficiency and electric range will be “market leading” and says its 360-volt
electrics enable the battery to be charged from 0-80 percent in under 10
minutes. We’re
also curious to find out how much the TE-1 weighs, the weight figure being one
fact notably absent from this latest release. But WAE says that by designing
the battery pack from scratch it was able to mount it low in the bike for the
best possible weight distribution.
