Ducati’s Future Electric Motorcycle Could Rev To 18,500 RPM

Ducati already built the electric race bike. Now give the rest of us something stupidly fun.

Photo by: Ducati

By: Enrico Punsalang

Aug 14, at 7:01am ET

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There are certain numbers you expect to see attached to a Ducati. 200 horsepower? Sure. A five-figure redline? Absolutely. An insurance quote capable of ruining your afternoon? Naturally.

But 18,500 rpm coming from an electric motor is a little more unexpected, and that's exactly what appears in a Ducati patent describing the architecture of a potential future electric motorcycle.

Now, patents aren't product announcements, and there's no guarantee this thing ever rolls into a Ducati showroom. But the document gives us something much more entertaining to think about. Ducati is clearly working through the problems involved in building a compact, properly motorcycle-shaped EV. And while an electric Panigale seems like the obvious destination, I'm starting to wonder if the really interesting possibility is something completely different.

The V21L serves as the most likely blueprint for a theoretical electric Panigale.

After all, Ducati isn't starting from scratch here. The V21L already exists, and it's about as close as we've gotten to an electric Ducati superbike. Developed for MotoE, the purpose-built race bike has given Bologna a rolling laboratory for batteries, motors, cooling, electronics, chassis design, and all the other headaches that appear when you replace exploding gasoline with a very large collection of electrons.

So yes, Ducati could take everything it's learned from the V21L, combine it with ideas buried in patents like this one, and eventually build an electric superbike for the street. That's the low-hanging fruit. It would be fast, expensive, exotic, and probably covered in enough carbon fiber to bankrupt a small composites supplier. Basically, exactly what you'd expect from an electric flagship wearing Ducati badges.

But does Ducati's first truly compelling road-going EV actually need to be a superbike? What if Ducati built something stupidly fun instead?

An electric Hypermotard would have me frothing at the mouth.

Photo by: Ducati

That's where my imagination starts wandering. What if this compact electric architecture ends up underneath something closer to a Hypermotard? A relatively light, narrow electric hooligan bike with instant torque, wide bars, sticky tires, and absolutely no interest in behaving itself sounds hilariously appropriate. You don't need a 150-mile highway range to spend an afternoon terrorizing your favorite collection of corners.

Or take the same idea in a completely different direction and build an electric Scrambler. Keep it simple, approachable, stylish, and fun. Give it enough range for commuting and weekend rides, enough performance to make back roads entertaining, and crucially, keep the weight and dimensions under control. That's arguably a much more useful electric motorcycle for regular riders than some 200-horsepower battery-powered missile.

Frankly, I'd be far more interested in either of those. And the patent might actually make motorcycles like those a real possibility.

A reasonably priced electric Scrambler could be Ducati's breakthrough in the mainstream EV market.

Photo by: Ducati

The technical details suddenly matter more when viewed through that lens. Ducati's patent describes a motor spinning between 17,000 and 20,000 rpm, with 18,500 rpm identified as the preferred figure. A gear reduction system then drops that speed and multiplies torque before sending power through a conventional chain to the rear wheel. There's no indication of selectable gears here. It's simply the reduction drive needed to make a high-speed electric motor useful.

More importantly, Ducati is trying to make the whole assembly narrower. Instead of mounting the rotor-position sensor directly on the transverse motor shaft, it can place the sensor farther downstream on one of the reduction gears or shafts. The gears themselves can also occupy multiple parallel planes, allowing Ducati to package the drivetrain without unnecessarily increasing the motorcycle's width.

Ducati’s patent drawings show possible designs that keep an EV motorcycle’s drivetrain as narrow as possible.

Photo by: Ducati via WIPO

That's important whether you're building a superbike, Hypermotard, Scrambler, or something we haven't thought of yet. Electric motorcycles already have to accommodate big batteries, cooling hardware, inverters, and everything else required to make electrons behave. Saving space wherever possible gives Ducati more freedom to build an EV around the rider instead of simply wrapping bodywork around a battery.

What do you think?

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And that's what makes this patent exciting to me. An electric Panigale would undoubtedly be impressive, but the V21L has already shown us what happens when Ducati takes electric performance very seriously. What I want to see next is what happens when Ducati takes all that knowledge and builds something purely for fun.

Give me an electric Hypermotard that spins its motor to 18,500 rpm and wants to wheelie everywhere. Now we're talking.