This Jawa Electric Motorcycle Design Is Classically Modern

In July, 2020, we first shared the possibility that Jawa may be working on an electric bike. Just a couple of days later, the possibility of the Yezdi brand being revived as an exclusively electric marque also rose. As you may recall, both Jawa and Yezdi are owned by Classic Legends, a Mahindra subsidiary, so these two threads may very well be connected.

In August, 2020, Electric Vehicle Web worked with automotive designer Sreejith Krishnan to imagine what an electric Jawa design could look like. There still hasn't been any official announcement about any electric bikes on the docket from either brand, but Indian press speculates that such a bike could be coming in 2022.

The design Krishnan created is a strange mix of old and new. In fact, just about everything outside of where the engine would normally sit in the frame of a piston-powered Jawa looks exactly like a piston-powered Jawa. Rather than an engine, there is instead a big rounded parallelogram of a battery unit, which sits directly under where the gas—or petrol—tank would sit on a piston bike.

In one of Krishnan's renders, we can see a charging cable plugged into a port in that gas tank box, which answers one question I had. I wondered if it was some type of storage binnacle—not precisely on the order of the frunk found in the Honda NC750X, but definitely frunk-adjacent. The electric motor is a rear-hub-mounted design and seems pretty unobtrusive as imagined here.

Presumably, different colors and trims would be available—but Krishnan's render depicts a tasteful electric blue pinstripe accent around the front and rear fenders, side cases, tank, and also crisscrossing the battery unit to visually tie the whole thing together. It's a Jawa Classic, only built for a new era.

Considering why most Jawa fans are buying new Jawa motorcycles in 2020, a design like this would make a lot of sense. If you want to draw fans of the piston version into hopping on an electric bike, it makes sense to carry over the styling cues that they already know and love.

We must stress again that this is just one designer's vision for what Jawa could do, and that Jawa has thus far not confirmed that an electric bike is definitely on the horizon. If and when it does, it could definitely look a lot worse than this, though.