The future's bright, the future's green?

Al's been on *a lot* of motorbike launches over the years. And they've all, to a greater or lesser extent, claimed to move motorcycling on in terms of technology, innovation, performance, practicality, style. Sometimes all at once.

-  Alan Dowds

Kawasaki Ninja 7  

But none of them have been as genuinely innovative as this one, the Kawasaki Ninja 7 hybrid. At a push, you could make a case for Yamaha's Niken I suppose (though that's a trike...). There have been plenty of battery-powered bikes, too, but even those are pretty old news now. Kawasaki genuinely went outside of the box to produce this hybrid machine, which is a proper world first. 

But what is a hybrid? Well, they're common in the car world, and were made famous by the Toyota Prius. Essentially, a hybrid vehicle has a petrol engine and an electric motor, arranged so that either, or both, can power the driving wheels. There's a battery pack that's charged up while moving, and the stored energy is then used to drive the electric motor, recycling otherwise-lost energy, and allowing a smaller petrol engine for a given performance. Up till now, a conventional hybrid powertrain was too big, complex and heavy for a bike - hybrid cars generally used automatic transmissions to combine the petrol and electric drives. But Kawasaki has managed to produce a hybrid bike using a conventional transmission set up, mixed with some cunning tech.

The full tech lowdown is in the sidebars later in this piece. But basically, Kawasaki's taken the EL500 Eliminator's parallel-twin engine and added computer-controlled gears and clutch actuators. It's also fitted an electric motor behind the cylinders, with a chain drive to the gearbox input shaft, and a generator on the engine which charges a battery pack.