We picked up this at the Adventure Bike Rider Festival in Ragley Hall last weekend – and it’s a very interesting piece of nonsense indeed. Say hello to the Royal Enfield Flying Goat – a prototype electric variant of the firm’s sweet Himalayan off-roader, which has been built to help the Indian giant learn more about a possible electric future for two wheels.
Let’s start with the basics – the bike is based on a Stark Varg motocross powertrain, which was launched last year, and properly wowed the proper off-road world with its performance. The Stark ‘engine’ features a carbon fibre sleeved motor which runs at 360 volts, and puts out a very saucy 80hp, or 9hp per kilogram. It makes 275Nm of torque at the counter shaft and 938Nm at the rear wheel (a Triumph Rocket 3 makes 225Nm of torque at the crank).
This ultra-modern motor claims to provide more than 95% efficiency over the majority of the power range and is built inside a water-cooled aluminium casing which is strong enough to be a structural part of the bike’s chassis.
The inverter – claimed to be the world’s smallest for 50-100kW power range – uses advanced power control electronic algorithms and is integrated into the motor case in order to reduce mass and simplify the cooling process. The result is 30% more peak power than a 450cc four-stroke MX engine: 80hp and 938 Nm of torque on the rear wheel, from a motor which weighs just 9kg.
The Stark battery is also impressive: it has a 6.5kWh capacity that, on the original bike, allows up to 6 hours of trail riding ‘depending on rider ability and track conditions’. Charging to full takes 1-2 hours depending on the charger. It has a finned air-cooled magnesium outer case with a patented honeycomb-structure, pressure relief system, and IP69K waterproofing.
And the ‘Flying Goat’ electric Himmy has TWO of these beefy battery packs, giving comparable range to a petrol machine, and mounted side-by-side between the rider’s legs, with cooling air channels in between, and a cooling fan to reduce heat when charging.
Enfield has taken that powerplant and battery pack, and fitted it into its own hand-made prototype chassis, with a main frame crafted by the folk at Harris Performance (which Enfield of course owns). There’s a pair of super-sweet forged aluminium plates on the swingarm pivot area, and the best bit – a fabricated asymmetric aluminium swingarm, again by Harris.
That’s an amazing piece of work, which wouldn’t look out of place in a MotoGP paddock we reckon, with massive braced sections, lightening tunnels and welds you could put in the Louvre.
The rest of the chassis is up to scratch too: Öhlins front and rear, with what looks like the Öhlins EC3.0 electronic semi-active damping both ends, and a curious large remote hydraulic reservoir on the rear shock, as well as a piggy-back unit on the shock body. Brakes are basic off-road kit: a single radial-mount Nissin four-piston caliper and wave disc up front and a single-piston Brembo caliper at the back, on.
The wheels are SM Pro Platinum MX wire-spoked units, with Bridgestone adventure rubber, and they also mount ABS reluctor rings, which shows this is a road-focused machine. Dash is an ADU7 race display by ECUMASTER, and there’s what looks like an auxiliary display using an Android phone/tablet, no doubt for R&D use while testing (the Stark bike uses such a device as its dash, so it’s probably doing a multitude of jobs there).
Factory sources tell us that the performance is pretty amazing. At 80bhp it’s by far the most powerful Royal Enfield ever (perhaps except the supercharged custom 650 we saw a few years back), and being loosely based on the Himalayan design, with trick magnesium/aluminium frame and swingarm, it’s very skinny and light. We watched a video of the bike hustling down a mountain road in the north-west of India, and it looked like a proper hoot.
We also snaffled the pic of one of the prototype test machines parked up near the K2 mountain, on the Indian side of the Himalayan mountain range.
When can we buy one of these beasties? Well, not for a while, if ever. The cost of the handmade machines is steep – estimated around £60,000+ – and the custom nature of the build means it’s not a production-ready project. Rather, it’s being used to assess technology options for the firm, which has two R&D teams in the UK and India.
The lessons will no doubt trickle down to the ‘Flying Flea’ sub-brand which Enfield launched last year, though that will be a much lighter, low-powered urban mobility solution rather than a screaming 80bhp road-going motocross monster.
Having said that, we can’t remember seeing such a gorgeous prototype in ages, and we could definitely see the firm selling more than a handful of the Flying Goats, if it put out a limited edition run of ‘em…