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

[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. :)