Sigh, Honda’s Totally Badass New EV Motorcycles Don’t Get Swappable Batteries

Having owned bikes from manufacturers from several countries—Austria, Italy, the UK, Japan, India, and yes, even China—I can unbiasedly say that the Japanese just have a knack for reliability and dependability.

And sure, their bikes aren’t the flashiest, neither are they the most performance-oriented. Yet, there’s just something about sleeping easy at night knowing that your bike will fire up first thing the next morning.

To that end, when Honda pulled the covers off two new EV motorcycle concepts at EICMA, you could bet that my interest was piqued. Could we finally have a super robust, super reliable, super dependable mainstream electric motorcycle? Well, for the most part, signs point to yes, and the new EV concepts are almost perfect. They just miss out on one super important feature.

More on that in a bit.

As for the concept motorcycles in question, one of them is targeted towards enthusiasts and aims to bring the enjoyment of motorcycling to the future. It is, of course, called the EV Fun Concept. Very Honda. Very Japanese.

And with a similar naming convention, the EV Urban Concept is just that: an electric scooter designed for urban mobility.

In concept, the two bikes are pretty damn awesome—especially the EV Fun Concept. Styling-wise it looks very much up my alley, boasting naked sportbike styling complete with a single-sided swingarm and seamless, flowing lines. It’s sort of how I envision a future iteration of the Honda CB1000R, albeit one that’s fully electric but equally performance-oriented. Best of all, it’s CCS2 compatible, which means you could charge this thing in pretty much any electric car charging station.

As for the EV Urban Concept, well, it’s an electric scooter that looks like it ripped a page straight off the BMW CE 04’s book. I mean, it is what it is: an electric scooter designed for city slicking. And sorry, Honda, I have to disagree with the part where you say that the “EV Urban Concept reconstructs from scratch Honda’s vision of what urban electric mobility should be.”

And while I love the idea of the EV Fun Concept and think that the EV Urban Concept’s BMW-reminiscent styling is forgivable, what I can’t wrap my head around is the fact that Honda makes absolutely zero mention of swappable batteries in these concept bikes. All this while we know for a fact that Honda has quite the impressive swappable battery tech with the Mobile Power Pack e:.

We’ve talked about this nifty gadget before. It’s essentially a universal power solution for all things electric. Honda’s been testing it for quite some time over in Japan, and has used it to power everything from construction equipment to delivery scooters—heck, even tourist boats. As such, there’s really nothing stopping Honda from using its Mobile Power Pack e: to power something as awesome as the EV Fun Concept, or something as practical as the EV Urban Concept.

With all that being said, Honda has proven time and time again that it knows what it’s doing. And hey, I’m almost certain that the engineers over at Honda are way smarter than some dude who writes motorcycle articles on a (super cool, super awesome) internet website. So who knows, maybe these two electric motorcycles will actually be what changes the game?