One of the greatest challenges facing electric motorcycles right now is that they’re limited by today’s battery chemistry. A manufacturer can give a bike a big battery for good range, but that drives the motorcycle’s price and weight sky high. If you take cells out, you drop price and weight, but also range. Ducati, with parent company Volkswagen, plus QuantumScape and PowerCo, just demonstrated a potential future for electric motorcycles. The Ducati V21L prototype motorcycle has shockingly good battery density and charging rates thanks to solid-state technology.
This motorcycle, which made its debut at IAA Mobility on September 8, is a huge deal for the Volkswagen Group. While Volkswagen is best-known for its cars, it’s also the owner of Italian motorcycle brand Ducati. This motorcycle, Volkswagen says, is the first Group test vehicle to be fitted with a solid-state battery. This technology was demonstrated live at IAA Mobility, too.
Volkswagen says that the technology demonstrated in the Ducati V21L prototype will be trickled down into Volkswagen, Cupra, and Škoda electric cars, but Volkswagen is also deeply understating its achievement here. This technology has the capacity to solve the biggest problem with electric motorcycles.
Solid Development
This development involves a lot of different players, so I’ll get straight into it. Volkswagen says that the parties involved in this project include Audi, Ducati, PowerCo, and QuantumScape. Those first three brands fall under the Volkswagen AG umbrella, with PowerCo, a company located in Salzgitter, Germany, functioning as Volkswagen’s battery cell manufacturer.
QuantumScape was founded in California back in 2010 with the mission of bringing solid-state batteries to market. Volkswagen AG is a major investor in QuantumScape, as is Bill Gates. As of present, QuantumScape is believed to be one of the frontrunners in developing mass-market solid-state technology, and given the news out of IAA Mobility, I believe it.
Last year, PowerCo was granted a license to put QuantumScape’s solid-state batteries into mass production, and that has since flourished into a joint development program. All of this work appears to be paying off, because company representatives took the stage at the IAA show to demonstrate what they’ve been working on.
The bike rolled out onto the stage is a modified version of the Ducati V21L, an all-electric racing motorcycle that marks Ducati’s first move into the electric arena. The normal version of the Ducati V21L features an 18 kWh battery pack equipped with 1,152 cylindrical 21700 cells. Less important for this piece, but still cool to know, is that the V21L has 150 HP, and on the track, it’s gone 170 mph on the Mugello Circuit. Amusingly, since this is a racing machine, “range” isn’t really a factor. Instead, these bikes have been known to go about eight laps or so. That’s fine since MotoE has even fewer laps than that.
Volkswagen and Ducati, with help from QuantumScape QSE-5 solid-state cells. From the release:
The demonstration bike contains a first-of-its-kind battery system designed by specialists at VW Group-owned Audi specifically for QS solid-state battery cells, and highlights the potential capabilities of the technology on the racetrack. This will be a rigorous proving ground for QS technology, which has shown unique capabilities, including 844 Wh/L energy density, just over 12-minute fast charging from 10% to 80% state of charge, and 10C continuous discharge.
“Today we’ve crossed the threshold from possibility to reality,” said Dr. Siva Sivaram, CEO and president of QS. “We believe that our partnership with PowerCo, together with Ducati as our demonstration launch partner, positions us to scale our transformative technology to gigawatt-hour production. Our world-leading battery innovation, combined with Ducati’s uncompromising craftsmanship and legendary commitment to performance, will help usher in a new era of electrified transportation.”
Volkswagen is pitching this achievement as being great for the car industry, and I’m sure it is. These companies have been working on this technology for a long time, and this prototype motorcycle is the first time their solid-state technology has left the laboratory and has been mounted into a working vehicle.
Why Solid-State Matters
QuantumScape explains why solid-state batteries are a big deal:
A solid-state lithium-metal battery is a battery that replaces the polymer separator used in conventional lithium-ion batteries with a solid-state separator. The replacement of the separator enables the carbon or silicon anode used in conventional lithium-ion batteries to be replaced with a lithium-metal anode. The lithium metal anode is more energy dense than conventional anodes, allowing the battery to store a greater amount of energy in the same volume. Some solid-state designs use excess lithium to form the anode, but the QuantumScape design is ‘anode-free’ in that the battery is manufactured anode free in a discharged state, and the anode forms in situ on the first charge.
The companies developing solid-state batteries tout a ton of potential benefits. By eliminating the carbon anode, solid-state cells can have much greater density, which is great for range. Charging speeds can also ramp up due to solid-state batteries not needing to have lithium diffuse into carbon particles. Developers of solid-state batteries say that their batteries would also last longer because they don’t have the chemical reactions between the carbon and liquid electrolyte that shorten the life of typical lithium batteries. Other touted benefits include greater safety due to better stability, and lower weight for a given capacity due to the higher density.
All of this is great for cars, of course, but it’s really awesome for motorcycles. As I’ve written about pretty extensively, electric motorcycles struggle with present battery chemistries. As things stand right now, a small, lightweight, and more affordable electric motorcycle battery doesn’t have enough storage to permit a long riding range. Conversely, a battery that is large enough to provide a good range is pretty heavy and drives the cost of the electric motorcycle beyond the means of many buyers.
This problem is minimized in cars because a car manufacturer can just make an aerodynamic car that has its floor filled to the brim with batteries. At the same time, some of the heaviest electric cars knock on the door of 9,000 pounds. Motorcycle riders are a bit less accepting of adding more weight.
As a result, many electric motorcycles struggle to compete, at least here in America and in Europe. Why spend $20,000 on a Zero that can barely go 100 miles on a highway when you can spend half of that cash to get a gas-powered motorcycle that will go anywhere?
This is where solid-state batteries can shine in motorcycles. In theory, a motorcycle with a solid-state battery can go further on a charge, replenish that charge much quicker, and do all of that without gaining tons of weight.
Maybe, this Ducati is a sign of the changing times. Volkswagen and Ducati aren’t the only ones working on solid-state two-wheelers, as companies in China and in Japan are, too. Ducati CEO Claudio Domenicali does say that this technology would be great in a motorcycle, but sadly, there is no further information yet. So, I will wait with excitement for the first company doing business in America to announce a production solid-state motorcycle.
Top graphic: VW AG
Until someone invents a dry rattly battery Ducatists won’t accept it.
Im all for fast charging but range needs to be addressed, and im not sure if these batteries are doing that. I understand racing or sport bikes have always been a good way to test technology but I want to see these batteries on a bike that can do long distance on a highway.
The biggest issues with BEV motorcycle range are the terrible aerodynamics of motorcycles. Since motorcycles are so much less aerodynamically efficient, their range drops dramatically as speed increases. It is the primary reason e-bikes get so much more range per kWh than do BEV motorcycles.
A significant improvement in batteries is key to making BEV motorcycles viable. The cost of solid-state batteries is key, of course. But a brand like Ducati is definitely one that might have the cache to make it happen.
Far more exciting is what dramatically better batteries would mean in other applications. It would be great to get a BEV car that could have a range of 200-300 miles while not weighing significantly more than an ICE model. Because of the quick charge time, you wouldn’t need to carry around so much battery for the rare occasions you need more range.
Electronics and computers neeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrd here.
Yeah, wake me up when at least the battery itself reaches production. These things come and go and it’s equal parts hilarious and sad. Every six months or so, I hear about some new battery tech that’s gonna change the world, revolutionize electronics and daily life, and practically do everything but walk the dog and water the lawn, from all the hype it gets.
It gets about a full week of that. Two weeks if Marketing’s especially good at their jobs. Then it quietly goes away. A month later, nobody remembers it hardly at all, and after that it’s never heard from again.
I’ve heard of fuel cell tech, quantum freakin’ everything, capacitor batteries, aluminum batteries, graphite batteries, carbon nanotube batteries… molten-salt batteries tend to show up in the more realistic side of sci-fi.
Someone figured out a thing that really only makes sense, economically, as grid-balancing, where you sink excess power by pumping water up a hill, and make up for sag by letting it flow back down through hydroelectric turbines. They call it a gravity battery, of all things. I guess it’s kind of useful if you happen to be a power company.
Heck, someone even figured out how to make gasoline and diesel fuel out of algae a few good years back. The only problem he couldn’t solve was, well, Saudi Arabia and Qatar make it a goodly bit cheaper with big drills and bigger wells, pullin dino juice up through the sand.
Generally, that’s one of three common problems. Either it’s great R&D, but if you tried to produce it, the only people who could afford it own either multinational conglomerates or small countries, it behaves great in the lab’s tightly controlled conditions but can’t handle real life, or it’s so hard to build that factories and tooling to generate it don’t exist, and you’d have to basically invent tools just to make at-scale production something you could even begin to investigate.
Literally the only progress we’ve had so far was the leap from NiCd/NiMH to lithium ion and LiPoly cells, and that’s hardly been smooth sailing, to say the least (remember the Galaxy Note 7?). Outside of that it’s all toys for the fellas in long white coats.
Tesla really only got off the ground because of huge grants from Uncle Sam, renewable petroleum products are too expensive vs the real thing to compete, milk and cheese still generally come from cows, compasses still point north, and birds, at least in *this* hemisphere, still fly south this time of year. Jetpacks and flying cars are still as much the realm of The Jetsons as when it originally aired.
Oh, and batteries are still boring.
Like I said. Wake me up when it hits mass production and you can actually buy one — the battery, to be clear, not the motorcycle. I may be overly curious about technology, but my balance falls off a cliff when I go from two feet to two wheels, and I don’t presently have a death-wish.
In the RV/overlanding world, Renogy and Li Time offer what they call solid state, ~100 Ah LiFePo batteries. However, they’re really semi-solid state that offer charging below 32 degrees F, which is not possible with conventional LiFePo batteries. Is the battery industry close to production of true solid state batteries? (shrug)
Who knows.
I sure don’t. I just know what I have and haven’t seen. Historically, I’m actually pretty bad when it comes to predictions and all that.
The original Google phone, the Google G1 here in the States, came out when I was in college. One of my friends had one. They knew I was a nerd, so they showed it to me. “Hey, look at this!” the fellow exclaimed. “It’s a new phone, Google made it. It’s got real Internet, like an actual Web browser. You can even check your email on it! The OS is also by Google, it’s called Android — you’ll like this! — it’s based on Linux and it’s open source!”
Keep in mind, back then, the fancier mobile phones (“feature phones”) had an actual keyboard built in so that you could text with them reasonably easily, or were almost literally PDAs that could make a call as well.
I took two looks at it and my lip began to curl. “First of all,” I told him, “Google doesn’t ‘make’ anything except software. Someone else built this for them, or they adapted their OS to it. Second of all, this hinge is weird as heck and twice as fiddly. It will break in three months and confuse *evdryone* who tries to use it. Third of all, everyone thinks Linux is for ‘smart people’ only, and open-source and corporatism just don’t mix well. This will do nothing, change nothing, revolutionize nothing, and in six months nobody will remember it.”
Aged like fine milk.
Hence why I said, “Wake me up when it hits production,” rather than, forget it because everyone else will have as well by the time Halloween lands — and why I’m *not going* to say that, now or at all. Each of these technologies has a chance. Almost all of those chances are discernably higher than zero… but they’re also all pretty small.
We’ll see what happens. I’m just not going to get excited till it’s actually worth it.
Having an actual existing battery, which actually powers something, still puts them ahead of at least 90% of ‘new battery!’ announcements though. Most of the time they’re nothing more than a promising lab experiment.
But yeah, there’s still a big gap between a demonstrator, and something that the public can buy.
Fair. Although for me, lab-only work still qualifies as ‘it exists’ for me — scientists aren’t going to say, ‘we think we may have a new battery but we aren’t sure yet’ as a headline. They’ll wait till they have ‘tested, working, known-good prototype’ first.
844wh/L is insane. That’s game changing, industry creating energy density. It’s about 1/4 the energy density of gasoline at 40% utilization.
For comparison, an f150 lightning with a frunk filled with those cells have a range of about 770 miles.
Getting the impression with yesterday’s announcement by Mercedes, and others recently, that everyone who’s been working on a SSB wants to now go public with a ‘me too, we are at the forefront of technology’ announcement.
I would LOVE to see if they could refine and scale this technology in time to stick it into the new Scouts since that’s also a VAG joint venture. 1200 miles of range in a REX?
SSB in production at automotive manufacturing scale would effectively eliminate any need (or expect any desire) for erev.
10C recharge rate stated here would mean the ability to recharge in 6 minutes.
And at this energy density range becomes a non-factor (2-3x energy density as the best li-ion)
SSB is still in the “valley of death” between proving in the lab they are possible to make and massive scaled production.
That’s why I think this announcement was made for a prototype for a Ducati, as Ducati is a very small manufacturer of expensive motorcycles, so a niche w/in a niche for ‘scale’. And no promise for production either.
So exciting yes, though it will be much more exciting when you or I can actually have the option to buy Any product with a SSB.
Earlier this week, I rolled past a neighbour and his young son on my motorcycle. Mostly because my neighbour is a terrible human that can’t help but say negative things about everyone/anyone, I revved it a little bit as I rolled past. His young son, jumped, and you could literally see the squeal of happy glee from the child seeing something loud and abnoxious roll past him, whilst I got a heavy glare from my neighbour.
I think of EV motorcycles as losing the ability to get an entire group of preschoolers to stop whatever they were doing to stare off at that loud motorcycle.
But conversely, as an adult, I don’t have to put up with the noise of a motorcycle going past my home.
Though, I’m sure I’m an outlier as I continue lament the loss of the rattle of a dry clutch, air cooled, Ducati (knowing, personally, what a hydraulic actuated dry clutch feels like when stuck in traffic on a hot day and you’re baking your legs with engine heat).
I was riding my electric motorcycle when a group of moms and children stopped in the middle of the road. They motioned for me to come closer, so I did and one of the little boys was crying. His mom said he wants me to rev my motorcycle, and I had to inform him I couldn’t because it was electric…it still haunts me that I ruined his day.
During a 5-month trek through the western national parks, hiking and tent camping from my Suzuki V-Strom 650 with stock muffler, I often hiked up the various mountains around me. One particularly beautiful day from a magnificent resting point, I stopped to ponder the world. Then was rudely interrupted by a pair of loud-ass bikes breaking the peace. It took a while to actually see them, way, way down below on a sliver of road barely visible.
Great that you ride electric. Once the range issue is solved, I can see trading in my 2008 for a BEV 2030 (or whatever). Maybe the kiddos will breathe easier knowing that, likely one day, they’ll find delight in some peace and quiet, or just play whatever loud sounds that entertain themselves through earbuds.
I like to cross country ski and some of the trails share space with snowmobiles. Nothing shatters the tranquility like getting my ears assaulted by 100 decibels and then having to choke on the exhaust as I am essentially jogging on snow.
Ugh, I hate that. And in the winter the noise carries so far that a snowmobile 3 miles away will still wreck the serenity of the trail.
Check your facts – LiveWire dropped their prices rather dramatically. The very cool DelMar is now only $10k. The Mullholand is $11k and the newer Alpinista is $12k.
I also had to check the battery capacity in the Delmar. They use a 10.5 kWh battery and get around 110 miles city range.
This Ducati has an 18 kWh battery. That should theoretically give it around 200 miles of city range. Obviously this is just a prototype, and I am sure this prototype Ducati costs many times what any production LiveWire does, but it is demonstrating what can be done.
This is when electric motorcycles start to get interesting!
Even with only 110 mile range, the new price drops on all the LiveWire bikes makes them very tempting.
Fixed it for you.
Is that a movie or video game reference? Or something completely different altogether?
“Delmar (not his real name)” is what David has been calling his baby on this site.
That is my mistake, I mentioned LiveWire, but meant to say Zero, which hasn’t dropped its prices. That said, my point about highway range still stands, regardless of whether it’s a Zero or a LiveWire. The $22k Zero DSR/X that I tested went over 100 miles on a charge, but only when I avoided highway speed, which sort of betrays the point of an adventure bike.
Of course, wanting to ride far is a very American problem, which is one factor of why electric bikes have done extremely well in Asia despite their struggles in America.
Anyway, a solid-state battery can change that! You could get more miles out of a charge, or a smaller battery that’s cheaper that charges really quickly. Either way, it can be a win-win for motorcycles. Also, thank you for reminding me to write about LiveWire’s new prices!
Write about their new prices, but also borrow and review that new Alpinista model. I have not heard much about it.
Either way, you simply can not get around the fact that bikes at highway speeds are simply not aerodynamic. I don’t care what brand it is. That’s why the Del Mar is speed limited to like 99 or 100 just to preserve some semblance of range.
When Ducati took over the MotoE contract from Energica, this was exactly the type of development I expected, eventually, given the resources of VAG.
Any word on whether this revamped version will be used in MotoE next year, and did they offer any predicted improvements in power or particularly range, that is, more laps per race?
Unfortunately not, it was just announced today that Dorna/the FIM are axing MotoE for 2026.
That sucks, I’d rather have MotoE than bagger racing, but I’ll withhold final comment on that once I actually see a few bagger racing.
Baggers already race as part of MotoAmerica, so you can get an idea from that (race itself starts at 6:31): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtkwtO3QpQs
Even with all the modifcations made to them, I can’t imagine hustling one around COTA of all places.
I personally enjoy MotoE and it’s something different but also a good test bed for Ducati. The Baggers are fun but less relevant to anything.
I like MotoE also, the races are short and therefore frequently intense. It seems to me to be short-sighted to drop it now but maybe Dorna was tired of pumping money into it.
I know the bike will never be sold to the public, but I am here to support the transition to solid state batteries. Can someone fill me in on their biggest negatives?
Dendrite formation. Little structures that grow over charge/discharge cycles from anode to cathode. When that happens, the battery shorts out. No one can seem to make a seperator that prevents dendrite formation and still allows the solid state battery to function as a battery for solid state.
I am assuming it is a bit like blood vessel occlusion in humans? It builds up over time until one day it just triggers and boom goodbye battery?
That does seem like a pretty large negative, unless the batteries are easy enough to swap, and the lifespan is over 10 years or so.
I’m not a battery expert so I don’t know a ton about them, just that they are what is keeping solid state batteries from going to production. Everyone has them working in lab conditions and is able to get impressive performance from them, and they seem so close, but they can’t quite overcome this issue.
There’s been a lot of research recently into electrolyte formulation to limit dendritic growth. It is close to a solved problem, which is crazy.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adw9590