Report

Ducati planning electric bike, might not arrive until 2030

Why so far in the future?

The Volkswagen Group has done everything short of skywriting to promote its electric push. At last month's Frankfurt Motor Show, Volkswagen Group Chairman Matthias Mueller told his audience that every Group brand would have electric vehicles by 2030. A subsequent VW press release reiterated the range of the directive, saying, "There will be at least one electrified version of each of the 300 or so Group models across all brands and markets." With Italian motorcycle maker Ducati included — for now — among those brands, that suggests Italian engineers somewhere toying with a battery-powered, two-wheeled redhead.

Admittedly, the news here is the 2030 deadline, not the fact of an electric Ducati. Company CEO Claudio Domenicali's stock answer to the question of a juiced Duc is the same one we once heard from every major automaker: An electric Ducati will come, but the batteries aren't there yet. At the reveal of the motorbike maker's new V4 engine in September, Domenicali told the press, "We will have an electrical engine before later." The same month, he told Motorcycle, "I think electric propulsion will be very interesting for the future, uh, even if we still consider today to be too early for how the technology of the battery is." Asked for clarification, Domenicali said battery density needed improvement.

So — following the template we saw with automakers — VW, Domenicali, and the rest of us will watch while engineers and garagistes convert their Ducatis to battery power. Mission Motors worked over a Multistrada almost 10 years ago. Zero Motors Thailand lashed up an electric Hypermotard in 2015, then got Domenicali on it when the CEO visited Thailand during the launch of the Scrambler there. Earlier this year, students from the Milano Scuola Politecnica di Design worked with Ducati on a school product, producing the Zero electric concept (pictured) that we'd buy right now even if it had a range just short of two electric feet. Critical mass and the genuine, in-house article will come for the rest of us by 2030. Except for toddlers, who can get on an electric Ducati today for a few hundred euros plus shipping.

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