AMD273 April 2022 Aftermarket Moto Design 273 April 2022 | Page 31

Hugo Eccles ', Design Director of Anglo- American company Untitled Motorcycles ( UMC ), premise for the XP Zero was triggered by a parallel reality ' Sliding Doors ' moment . Eccles wanted to explore how things might have been if electrification - the dominant motive power at the dawn of the automotive industry - had triumphed over the concept of combusting hydrocarbons between our legs . With the benefit of 130 years of development , how might electric motorcycles look today ? Not at some stage in an imagined future , but right here , right now ? Designated in recognition of experimental craft , the XP is " not a futuristic bike , but a proposal for what an electric motorcycle design language might have evolved to be if things had been different from the ' get-go '. That ' s why it looks simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar : it uses state-of-the-art technology from this reality , but the design comes from an imagined alternate reality where combustion motorcycles have never existed ," says Eccles . " We are entering an exciting new era of motorcycling . If we can shed our preconceptions of what a motorcycle should be like , should look like , we can liberate ourselves to fully explore the novel directions that this new technology - the first new propulsion technology in 130 years - allows us to go in ." " The XP doesn ' t look like a conventional motorcycle because it isn ' t a conventional motorcycle . The XP produces twice the torque of a superbike and accelerates faster than a supercar , while the onboard computer can transform the character of the XP from a cruiser on the highway to a café racer in the canyons ." In reality , the XP incorporates Zero www . AMDchampionship . com AFTERMARKET MOTO DESIGN - APRIL 2022 31