Hybrid cars are all the rage these days, aren?t they" And I can see why. You can achieve over 100mpg without worrying about running out of juice every five minutes. I?ve been lucky enough to have a go in a few, and they?re actually quite good; the best of both worlds. And hybrid cars have been around for a little while now, so why hasn?t the technology trickled down to motorcycles" And will it ever"

Emissions

One of the main reasons most car manufacturers have invested in hybrid technology is to get their average emission levels down. In most countries, government legislation says a vehicle manufacturer must have a sensible (it keeps changing) emissions average across the board of all its models. That means they can offset their gas-guzzling supercars with some baby-engined hybrid motors.
In car terms, bikes have already got baby engines anyway. And bike manufacturers aren?t subject to quite the same emissions legislation. And certainly not in the same way. So there isn?t the same need for hybrid motorcycles, as far as the manufacturers are concerned.

Size

Even bikes with small engines don?t have a lot of room left for a battery, an electric motor and all the charging gubbins that goes with it. There?s bags of space in cars; there simply isn?t on a bike. So if you wanted to develop a hybrid bike, you?d have to rethink the whole thing. To shoehorn everything you need into a normal bike chassis would be almost impossible, so you?d end up with...