Big power, weird motor
The TS looks like nothing else on the road because it is like nothing else on the road. It’s electric, for starters, making it still a rare thing in the world of motorcycles, but its performance is even more radical. It has a whopping 201 horsepower and 885 pound-feet of torque, almost twice as much as a Corvette E-Ray.
That torque comes from an unusual source. When coming up with the initial design for a motorcycle in 2018, Verge Motorcycles CTO Marko Lehtimäki said that the team was unhappy with the few electric motorcycles on the market.

Lehtimäki said that most electric motorcycle designs simply replace the basic layout of a gas-powered motorcycle, swapping an engine for a motor and a gas tank for a battery. “We thought that cannot be optimal,” he said.

Placing the battery high in the frame was one particular concern. “These batteries are very heavy,” he said. “The center of gravity gets high and these are top-heavy and not very enjoyable experiences compared to traditional motorcycling.”

It has a whopping 201 horsepower and 885 pound-feet of torque, almost twice as much as a Corvette E-Ray.
Verge Motorcycle’s engineers knew they needed to put the battery down in the bottom of the frame, keeping the center of gravity as low as possible. But, by dropping the battery to the base, they filled up the space usually occupied by a motor.

“We came to a conclusion that we would need to move the motor outside of the main chassis, out of the body of the motorcycle,” he said. So they decided to try something different: putting the motor inside the rear wheel.

In-wheel electric motors are not exactly rare. In fact, they’re common in the e-bike scene, found on options like the VanMoof S4 or the BirdBike. The TS Ultra’s motor, though, is something different.