There is a reason our humble motorcycle blog is called Asphalt & Rubber, as we tend to stick to the street side of the motorcycling equation. Growing up in a house where motorcycles were verboden, I often think that I’m the only person “in the industry” that didn’t grow up riding a dirt bike (something I hope to rectify this year, so more on that later). Still, I wanted to give some love to our friends across the bridge, as BRD Motorcycles is about to unveil the next motorcycle in its electric line-up: the BRD RedShift MX.
As the name implies, the MX version is not terribly dissimilar from the BRD RedShift SM prototype that I rode at Infineon a couple months ago, and will make its public debut at the Indy Dealer Expo later this week. Changing out the brakes, sprockets, wheels, and tires, the conversion from SM to MX seems fairly straight-forward with the BRD RedShift (I’d expect to see some kind of kit available from BRD for this). Perhaps that’s because the digital drivetrain is where most of the magic happens as far as making the RedShift a dirt-clawing demon instead of a street-chewing monster (can you gasoline motor do that?).
With lites-class performance on tap, the BRD RedShift SM (photos here) features a 40hp motor (42hp if you believe BRD’s latest dyno test) and has enough battery on-board (5.2 kWh) to do 50 miles of aggressive riding according to the San Franciscan company’s more reality-based measurements (65 miles if you want to base your measurements off the EPA UUDS standard used by Brammo and Zero). You can also expect fully-adjustable WP suspension pieces front and back, which make for a nice piece of kit for race-minded riders.
With the supermoto version of the BRD RedShift easily taking on its 250cc gas equivalents performance-wise, we expect similar results from the new MX bike. But since we are still street bike guys at heart, what we are really looking forward to is BRD’s next project. Stay tuned.
Source: BRD Motorcycles
Comments