EMX Bike is an Electric Motocross Bike from Holland

Ever since the demise of Alta Motors, the motorcycle industry has been in need of a proper electric dirt bike offering.

There is some hope that Honda’s electric CR prototype could come to fruition, and Yamaha’s electric trial bike certainly looks the business, but as of yet, there is surprisingly nothing on the market that looks like it would be at home on a motocross track.

That might change if the Dutch have anything to say about it, though. Here is the EMX Bike – a joint-project from SPIKE Technologies and Dohms Projects, with support by Yamaha Motor Europe and KNMV, which has been in the works for the last year and a half.

The official launch of the EMX Bike is set for the end of this year, but the team is already teasing their project, which promises 250cc performance, a swappable battery pack, and a potent off-road package.

At the core of the EMX Bike is a Yamaha YZ250F frame, which holds the electric power train, and hopefully should provide a platform that behaves similarly to what current dirt bike riders are accustomed to.

The rest of the bike looks fairly standard to your typical dirt bike (and in fact might be more pieces from the Yamaha parts bin), and the motor has an obvious internal gear reduction.

While the bike looks the parts, there are certainly some question marks about the EMX Bike project that we would like to see answered.

First off, beyond the donation of a YZF chassis, it is hard to say how involved the tuning fork brand is with this project (in fact, this seems to be the extent of Yamaha’s involvement).

“We are happy to support this project as we feel it is important to boost developments in electric technology,” said Leon Oosterhof from Yamaha Motor Europe’s Product Planning Division. “We are very much looking forward to test and evaluate the prototype to understand how the technology from Dohms and SPIKE performs in our YZF chassis.”

Finding hard tech specs on the EMX Bike so far seems next to impossible, beyond the impression that the bike will have 250cc four-stroke class performance levels, though we do know that SPIKE is providing the battery pack, presumably sourcing its cells from other firms.

The large radiator at the front of the machine suggests a water-cooled package, though it’s hard to know what specific pieces of the drive train could be benefitting from a liquid heat exchange setup.

Product planning details might be too nitty and gritty though, because what consumers will really want to know is how much power, torque, and weight this electric dirt bike will bring to the table, and then of course whether it can all be packaged into an affordable price.

Hopefully in a few months the Dutch will have answers to those basic questions.