Ever wondered why you never saw oil burning engines on bikes? There were a good number of attempts and some were quite impressive. But for some reason they just didn’t turn a dollar.
When standing in a crowd of bikers someone uttered the phrase, ‘Why don’t they make diesel bikes?’ Like other situations, it can sometimes feel that like someone’s farted in the room. A pause as everyone works out who dropped the bomb, maybe a cough or two, then everyone changes the subject and moves swiftly on.
Yes, it’s true, diesel bikes have never caught on… and there’s a good reason. Diesel engines are perceived to be heavy, dirty, noisy, ugly… the list goes on. Well almost.
They are heavy. You get a car and take out the petrol engine and pop in a diesel equivalent for the same power and whoah, there’s another half tonne. In a car, not a problem, just beef up the springs, fill the engine bay with all the extra stuff and off you go. Bikes, well where do you put that junk?
https://youtu.be/_jf0P0hCnH4
Noisy? Well yes again, you see a diesel runs with a compression ration at up to 16:1 where as petrol only needs about 10:1. That makes a lot of noise, heat and vibration. In a car you can line an engine bay with the old carpet underlay if you want to deaden the noise, there’s no such joy on a bike.
Ugly? Well erm, yes, they can be. Experimental diesel bikes have often use small car engines, which aren’t always pretty with all that stuff hanging off like a heavily laden lumberjack’s tool belt or they can have engines that look like a boiler from the Titanic – beauty-wise, they sometimes just ain’t got it going on.
Dirty? Well yes, there is that. With recent changes things just got a bit more cloudy on this front.
But hey, fans of the turbo oil burner will say, ‘but what about performance!’ The Star Twin Thunder Star above had a claimed output of 120bhp with 250 lb-ft of torque from a VW Lupo engine, but even with 95mpg economy it didn’t swing the punters towards the ATM, because, after all, it’s a diesel.
A well tuned diesel turbo has a lot of grunt, and almost flat power band and bucket loads of low down torque which will spin wheels with very little effort, and despite the extra pounds, fuel is sipped in a very genteel fashion, making riding any great distance extremely easy on the pocket.
At the top of this page and above you will see a Neander; a tidy and somewhat butch machine you have to admit. It bucks the trend on all of the negatives (okay, maybe not the weight at 650 lbs) and packages it up with super-cool styling.
Performance wise it is no slouch either, running a cool 4.5 second 0-60 time with a reasonably handsome 145 top end. The unique engine layout has twin cylinders both driving 2 cranks each, making it a very smooth operator indeed – a beautifully designed German equivalent of a Swiss watch scaled up to haul probably the world’s heaviest production two-wheeler.
Quad forks, a beefy frame and super-wide tyres make it a bike Arnie would be pleased to pop down the shops on. The German manufacturer got it all right, a very nice buffalo of a bike. You would have thought they would have pulled at least one or two customers away from the Triumph Rocket 3? But hey, again, no one seems to be buying it… maybe because it’s quite expensive …and a diesel.
So, what have we learned?
Has the diesel bike missed its moment now the sparky electrics are coming over horizon? Maybe, just maybe, no matter how you dress it up, what ever the benefits, which ever way you market it, the diesel bike is probably not quite ‘New Millennium’ enough for anyone. Especially now.
CW