Diesel ... sportbike?!?

[unixronin]

Yup.  You better believe it.  Gizmag has the gen here, and drops hints about four other turbo-diesel motorcycles in development.  See another viewpoint here.  It's designed and built in Holland, uses a modified 1200cc VW 3-cylinder turbodiesel engine, weighs 445lb, and reportedly makes up to 120BHP and 200lb.ft of torque ... and gets 150mpg.  That's about 700 miles between fuel stops on a 5-gallon tank, or two weeks of your daily commute between fill-ups.

Photo gallery page here.

Comments

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

150mpg?!? that would very quickly be worthwhile for anybody with a long commute. What mpg does the average motorcycle get. I looked quickly and couldn't find anything above 80mpg.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Few on the US market do much better than 40mpg, and most of the ones that do are scooters. 125 singles and the like can get very good gas mileage, but while they're readily available in places like China, just try finding one new in the US ...
(Small singles and twins used to be popular in the UK. I don't know if they still are. I assume so, due to the graduated licensing scheme over there which limits riders first to 50cc, then to 250cc before turning them loose.)

[motomuffin.livejournal.com]

Fie! Inaccuracies! :)

If it's not a huge-engined supersport, (i.e. something rational and around a 600) you can easily expect 40-50 mpg.

The bandit 600 gets ~45mpg. My old shadow reliably got 55 mpg. My 1100cc bike gets 35-40 :P

[blackcoat.livejournal.com]

It also massivly depends on how you ride. If you're like alot of people on sport/supersports, then you're gonna get 30-40, because you're gonna keep it at 9-10Krpm all the time. Smarter riders, even on literbikes are gonna get 50sih on the highway. Yamaha YZF-R1, and I average 35 on my commute, but that's been an average of about 15mph since the Slide closed. I typically *cycle* in. It's faster.

Somedays, I miss my old XT-500. I'd easily get an average of 50mpg around town.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

OK, maybe I slightly overstated. :)
But I wasn't considering 50mpg to be a big improvement over 40mpg when compared to 80 or 90mpg, and I didn't say "none", I said "few". The obvious corollary is that some subset of bikes do, indeed, do much better than 40mpg. :)

[bfudlmint.livejournal.com]

So what is good on the market for somebody who wants great gas milage, isn't concerend much with power since I'm just starting to ride and is over 6' tall. Ohh yeah and I can't comfortably touch my shoulders with my knees.