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Looking at the rear wheel of the Verge motorcycle makes me grasp something: Futuristic things look futuristic because they look wrong. The wheel appears to have no visible means of support. Where the hub should be is just a yawning hole ringed by irregular steel ridges, looking for all the world like the portal of a wormhole generator. Like if you put your hand through, it would come out the other side in, I don’t know, Oklahoma. Or on Tatooine.
Look closer, and the mystery resolves. That ridge-lined inner surface of the wheel is the hub—just a very large, hollow hub. It’s anchored to the bike’s frame, while the rest of the wheel rotates around it. And the ridges are actually radiator fins. Their job is to dissipate heat from the engine. Because the wheel is the engine.
The heart of it is two concentric bands of magnets with a bearing in between, so one band can rotate around the other. The inner band is fixed to the hub and consists of electromagnets. The outer band is ordinary magnets. Pulses of power to the electromagnets create push and pull between the two bands and make the wheel spin.
Having the engine in the wheel means two key things. First, the entire body of the bike can be given over to a battery pack. This gives the thing a range of up to 375 km (233 miles) for the top-end TS Ultra model. Verge says it hasn’t even used the most energy-dense batteries it could, so the range could conceivably be made to go even higher. Low-energy-density batteries also charge quickly: The Ultra can get to 80 percent charge in just 25 minutes with DC fast charging.
Second, there’s no transmission: no shafts, gears, belt, or chain transferring rotational movement from engine to wheel. With fewer moving parts, Verge says, the bike is both more reliable and more powerful, because less energy is lost to friction. The thing packs from 700 to 1,200 Newton-meters (516 to 885 foot-pounds) of torque and 80 to 150 kW (107 to 201 hp) of power depending on the model, putting it among the top electric superbikes.
Without a transmission the bike is also more responsive, the company says. The delay of a few milliseconds between a change in engine speed and a change in the wheel’s speed is gone.
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We’ll come back to why this matters in a moment. But first, let’s talk about how this weirdo of a bike came to exist.
Wheel-Hub Motor Madness
Verge formed in 2018, the year Harley-Davidson debuted its first electric motorbike, the LiveWire One. The LiveWire and other bikes of the time “didn’t change the status quo,” says Marko Lehtimäki, Verge’s CTO. They copied the architecture of gasoline bikes, with batteries where the fuel tank would be, making them inefficient and top-heavy. More recent machines aren’t as beholden to old design paradigms (in LiveWire’s S2 Del Mar, reviewed here, the battery is a structural element of the frame), but they still have an in-body engine and transmission. Verge wanted to go one better.
Electric wheel-hub motors aren’t a new invention by any means. Ferdinand Porsche first put them in a prototype horseless carriage in 1900. Today they are commonplace in small scooters and even some bicycles, and at least one electric-truck company has recently gone into production with hub-motor wheels. But industry experts told Marko Lehtimäki and his brother Tuomo, the CEO, that the kind of performance they were looking for in a thin, doughnut-shaped wheel motor was “against the laws of physics”; there would be too much heat. (Hence, eventually, the radiator fins.)
The Lehtimäki brothers were bike and car hobbyists, but had never worked in the industry. Nor had any of their cofounders; Ville Piippo, the chief product officer, was still finishing his master’s in industrial design. “That’s why we were crazy enough to try some things that would have been deemed impossible by anybody from the industry,” Marko Lehtimäki says. It took them five or six versions over four years to refine the design and materials.
W.ith the engine in the wheel, the rest of the bike is mechanically fairly simple. The battery, though encased in a custom-designed shell, is made of commercially available lithium-ion cells, and many other elements are similarly off-the-shelf. With so few moving parts, “tires and brake pads are the only things you’ll need to change or service,” Piippo says. No liquid coolants either: The wheel hub and battery casing radiate all excess heat into the air.
All the same, you expect the factory for such a high-tech bike to look pretty high-tech itself; in fact, there’s not a robot in sight. Slightly more than half the Verge facility, a large warehouse on the outskirts of Tallinn, Estonia (a conveniently nearby tax-friendly jurisdiction for the Finnish-owned company), consists primarily of shelving where the components are stored and then assembled by hand into bikes. The rest of the warehouse is given over to rigs where the bikes are tested. One corner houses a handful of Verge prototypes, in which you can see the doughnut wheel evolve from its earliest and clunkiest iteration to its current form.
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The other major innovation is in the bike’s computing platform. Like most of its counterparts, the Verge has several ride modes offering varied levels of engine power and regenerative braking, depending on how aggressive a rider you want to be. There are standard safety features like traction control and ABS braking. But it will soon be able to do a lot more.
What exactly? Here the execs become cagey. “We can’t talk about it much yet,” says Lehtimäki, but he allows that the bike’s onboard sensors, and perhaps data sucked in from online sources, will “allow us to create a perfect ride recommendation,” picking the best motorbike route for the current weather and road conditions instead of whatever your phone’s maps app suggests.
Moreover, with the transmissionless engine eliminating those tiny delays between engine and wheel, the bike could react much faster to surprises, such as a skid caused by an oil puddle or sand in the road. “It provides some opportunities that are almost magical,” Lehtimäki says, such as “the opportunity to have the most accurate traction control in the world.”
The word opportunity, though, is clearly doing a lot of work here. It seems Verge isn’t ready to talk yet about how far advanced these magical capabilities are.
Event-Horizon Acceleration
I took a TS Pro, the midrange model with 1,000 Nm of torque and 102 kW of power, out for a spin. On Estonia’s quiet back roads, speed limits and short stretches made it difficult to really put the bike through its spaces.
OK, let’s be more honest. What made it difficult was my abject terror at what the bike did every time I turned the throttle more than a few degrees. A long wheelbase means the Verge is unlikely to pull a wheelie, Piippo says. Instead, the acceleration merely makes it feel as if you might lose your grip on the handlebars or be stretched into spaghetti like someone approaching the event horizon of a black hole. Verge promises 0 to 60 mph in 4.5 seconds for the baseline TS model, 3.5 seconds for the TS Pro, and 2.5 seconds for the TS Ultra, with electronically limited top speeds of 112 to 124 mph.
The in-wheel engine means a very low center of gravity, so the bike feels stable and firmly stuck to the road when cornering, if perhaps not as nimble as some machines. The regenerative braking means you rarely need to touch the actual brakes, but when you do, they’re strong and quick. You brake with both hands, like on a bicycle. Not needing a clutch or gear changer, Verge has also dispensed with a foot-operated brake. Instead, you get an extra set of forward foot pegs to give you an alternative riding position. The throttle felt a little twitchy for my taste, but the company says future versions of the software will include the ability to customize the throttle mapping as well as tweak the ride modes and the firmness of the suspension.
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I do have some ergonomic gripes. Being on the shortish side at 5' 7" (160 cm), I found the handlebars a slight stretch from the seat and my riding position, canted a little further forward than I found comfortable. The main display screen, which shows the ride mode, battery life, and other data, sits on top of the body, so looking at it requires you to tilt your head down and take your eyes fully off the road. A smaller display out front for the speedometer and turn signal lights is better positioned, but those lights are tiny and dim. There’s also no audible turn signal, and it doesn’t automatically cancel after a turn. All this meant I found myself repeatedly peering at the display and fiddling with the controls to try to work out whether I was signaling or not.
The kickstand feels like it leaves the bike standing slightly too close to vertical. I was constantly worrying that it wasn’t stably parked. Also, the kickstand folds up right under the left foot peg, and the foot pegs can fold, too, which meant that after raising the kickstand and starting to ride I often found myself having to fiddle the foot peg back down with my toe.
Finally, designwise, although the rear wheel and body are futuristic and eye-catching, the off-the-shelf handlebars, mirrors, and controls feel like an afterthought.
All of these details combine to give the bike a somewhat unpolished air, more like a production prototype rather than a fully finished design that has already shipped to hundreds of customers. That may not matter to its early buyers, but at this price range—from €22,900 ($24,000) for the TS to €44,900 ($47,100) for the TS Ultra—I think most people will expect a machine that’s outstanding in every detail.
Expect this to change, though. Now that it has a working machine and customers, the company wants to scale up production, and for that it has brought in C-suite managers with experience at McLaren, Lotus, Aston Martin, GM, Toyota, and electric-truck maker Rivian. Their newest hire, George Blankenship, a veteran of Tesla, Apple, and the Gap, will be the company’s “retail guru,” responsible for snazzy showrooms and customer experiences. I would be surprised if these new hires don’t also push the company to smooth out the rougher edges in the TS’s design.
For now, though, Verge has something of potentially greater value: a genuinely new application of electric motor tech that pushes motorbike design forward. And with a patent on the in-wheel motor, the company thinks competitors will have trouble out-innovating it. As Lehtimäki notes with evident satisfaction, “there’s no other place they could obviously place the motor” without robbing battery space.
You can preorder a Verge electric motorcycle now at the link below. Deliveries are set to take place in the second quarter of 2024.
