Honda’s Weird Motorcycle Patent Uses A Fake Clutch, A Fake Flywheel, And ‘Vibration Motors’ To Simulate A Gas Engine

Electric motorcycles have a different character than their internal combustion siblings. They’re silent, they can deliver all of their torque the instant you twist the right grip, and they’re ridiculously smooth. This is great! But there are some traits of gas engines that might be appealing for electric riders, like being able to control power output like you can with a clutch lever. Honda has patented a weird system that uses a fake clutch, a fake flywheel, and a set of vibration motors to make an electric motorcycle feel like one powered by internal combustion.

There is a trend out there of manufacturers adding little touches to their electric vehicles as a nod to internal combustion. These touches are sometimes silly, fun, and mostly harmless. Hyundai’s N e-Shift and N Active Sound+ combine to simulate the engine sounds, brief power interruptions, and shifting feel of a hot hatch with an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission, even though the vehicles the systems are applied to are totally electric and with only single-seed gear reductions. Fake engine sounds themselves are pretty common across the car world. Then you have the absurd, like the fact that Dodge gave its electric car an external sound system that makes its fake “exhaust” as loud as a Hellcat. Only in a Dodge Charger can you break an exhaust noise ordinance in a car that doesn’t have an exhaust.

Electric motorcycles have largely avoided these shenanigans. Many riders of electric motorcycles find the relative silence, lack of vibrations, and lack of shifting to be pluses. Indeed, some of the most tranquil rides I’ve ever had were behind the bars of a quiet Zero. But some electric motorcycle makers have been experimenting with bringing a little bit of that internal combustion feel back to electric bikes.

Kymco developed a fake transmission that simulates the feel of a shift. Indian startup Matter made an electric motorcycle with a real four-speed transmission just for the fun of the game. Yamaha developed an electric motocross bike transmission that uses springs to simulate the feel of a clutch dump. Then, Yamaha went even crazier and developed an entire functional engine that’s driven by an electric motor and produces no power, but makes sounds and vibrates.

Now, it’s Honda’s turn to bring a little internal combustion flavor to an electric bike. According to Australian Motorcycle News (AMCN), Honda has developed a fake clutch and a fake flywheel to make electric dirt bikes ride like gas ones.

Honda’s ‘Pseudo Clutch’

Sadly, despite looking for this patent for hours, I wasn’t able to dredge it up myself. It doesn’t appear to be easily accessed on a patent site just yet. But what we do know is pretty fascinating.

The motorcycle illustrated in the patent is a Honda CR Electric Proto (below). This is an electric motocross bike prototype that made its debut in the IA1 class at the 2023 All Japan Motocross Championship Round 8 with former AMA champion Trey Canard behind the bars. The CR Electric Proto, which is based on a CRF250R/CRF250RX, marked Honda’s first time putting an in-house developed electric motocross bike into competition. It’s unclear what use depicting the CR Electric Proto has in the patent images, but the real meat is in what the patent shows attached to the bike.

The patent images show that, to facilitate the use of a fake clutch system, Honda placed a clutch lever onto the handlebars, no different from what a gas bike would have. But instead of pulling a cable that goes to a clutch, this system is purely electronic.

When you pull the clutch lever in, that tells the system to reduce the electric motor output. Pull the lever halfway in, for example, and the motor’s power will be halved. Pull the lever all the way in, and just like pulling in the clutch on a gas bike, the motor produces no torque, allowing the bike to coast. All of this is electronic, hence Honda’s use of “pseudo clutch” in the patent images.

Also electronic is the flywheel. When you watch a motocross race, you’ll probably notice that some competitors thunder out of the gates with a huge clutch drop and an engine pegged at or near redline. Doing this allows the motorcycle to launch at peak power with all of its guns blazing. Riders launch like that as they race to get the holeshot, or be the first rider through the apex of the first turn.

Well, there are no clutch drops on a regular electric motorcycle. That leaves you with a mix of motor control from the right grip and regen when you let off the throttle. Honda realizes that many competition riders will want to have the same fine control that they’re used to, and has been spending a lot of time making electric competition bikes emulate gas bikes. The Honda RTL Electric trials bike (below), for example, has a transmission, a clutch, and a flywheel. Because of this, the rider of the RTL Electric can dump the clutch, and the spinning flywheel adds a gyroscopic effect, which helps with balance.

For this new patent, Honda has decided to take this idea to an extreme. Instead of installing a real clutch and a real flywheel onto a motorcycle, it’ll just have the motorcycle pretend like it has these parts. In theory, what this means is that you can hold the “clutch” lever all the way in, crank up the throttle, and then drop the lever, getting a launch that should look and feel like a clutch drop. Yet, no clutch or flywheel is actually involved. It’s purely electronic.

I’ve searched Honda’s patent records and have found that the company has been working on this “pseudo clutch” idea since at least 2019. In the previous iteration of Honda’s pseudo clutch, an ECU would take in readings from the right grip throttle and a switch attached to the clutch lever. The inputs would be measured against a calculation and then sent out to the motor controller and the motor. The end result was that the electric motorcycle should behave like a gasser.

Basically, if you pulled the clutch lever in a certain percentage while giving the throttle grip a percentage of twist, the computer would give you a motor output that’s meant to feel like you’re slipping a clutch. Some motocross riders might use their clutch to keep their revs high while going through ruts, turns, or rough parts of the track. In Honda’s eye, by faking a clutch and a flywheel, the rider of an electric motocross bike can do the same things they’re used to on a gas bike.

Something that is new on the 2026 version of the Honda pseudo clutch is the feedback system. Honda wants the rider to get the same sorts of vibrations that they might get on a gas motocross bike. To simulate this, Honda has placed three vibration motors on the motorcycle. One is inside the throttle grip, another on the left grip, and a third in the fake clutch lever. Presumably, the vibrations produced by these motors will replicate the revving from a gas engine, which the rider might use to inform their movements with the fake clutch lever.

Of course, the weird caveat here is that there isn’t a real clutch, a real flywheel, or any mechanical device outside of the electric motor. Instead, it’s the bike pretending that your left fingers squeezing the lever is actually acting on a clutch, reducing output. When you drop the lever with the throttle grip turned, it tells the motor to give you max torque at that instant rather than ramp up, as would happen if you just twisted the throttle without messing with the clutch lever.

All of this, Honda thinks, is supposed to make an electric competition motorcycle have control behavior that’s on par with a gas bike. If you’re used to running gas motocross bikes, maybe this system would make the transition to an electric motocross bike easier.

I Could See A Fake Clutch On A Streetbike

I can see one big practical use for a part of this system on a road-legal electric motorcycle. A lot of common electric motorcycles go straight into regen the moment you stop twisting the throttle. This is great if you’re intending to slow down, annoying if you’re just trying to coast. A gas bike will slowly lose speed if you close the throttle, or just coast if you pull the clutch lever in. But replicating that in an electric bike sometimes means going through menus on a screen or thumbing a switch on the bar. A fake clutch lever could be used as a very easy way to add a coast mode to an electric motorcycle.

Of course, all of this comes with the caveat that it’s extremely common for companies to file weird patents and then do nothing with them. Honda hasn’t announced any plans to sell an electric motorcycle with a fake clutch and even its prototype competition bikes have remained just that. So, there could be a whole lot of nothing going on here.

Still, I love looking into patents like this because they’re fun and ask the question of “what if?” Do we really need electric motorcycles that try their hardest to pretend to have a gas engine? I’m not sure we do. As I said before, the lack of vibrations and transmission is a bonus of electric bikes to me. But I can appreciate the amount of thinking that Honda has clearly put into this idea over the course of several years.