Honda’s Cheap Electric Motorcycle

Honda is building an electric motorcycle based on the Indian-market Shine 100 shown here.

It’s increasingly clear as electric motorcycles continue to be developed that manufacturers have a choice of two routes when it comes to creating them. They can pour in millions of dollars in R&D, developing clean-sheet designs that really maximize the potential of electric power and the opportunities it offers in terms of rethinking the most essential elements of motorcycles. Or they can rip the engine out of an existing ICE bike, bolt in an off-the-shelf electric motor and batteries, and take the rest of the afternoon off.

As you’d expect from a company that’s forged its name through the application of high technology, most of Honda’s early concepts for electric motorcycles have taken the first of those paths—as most recently seen in the EV Fun concept unveiled at last year’s EICMA show and scheduled to spawn a production model later this year. But it’s also working on a machine that takes the much more basic route, with several new patent applications showing an electric motorcycle based around the chassis of one of Honda’s cheapest and simplest motorcycles in the company’s range.

The new EV is clearly based on Honda’s Shine 100.

The patents reveal an electric bike built around the low-cost chassis of the Indian-market Shine 100. In internal combustion engine (ICE) form, the current Shine 100 was launched in 2023 featuring a 99cc air-cooled four-stroke single that puts out a mere 7.3 hp, and carries a price tag that’s equivalent to just $800. It’s basic transport in the purest sense, even eschewing such luxuries as hydraulic brakes in favor of cable-operated drums front and rear. It’s a successful recipe, achieving more than 300,000 sales in India in 2023 alone.

Honda’s patent revolves around the batteries and how they are cooled.

Honda’s latest patent applications—it has filed several of them related to this bike—show that all the main chassis parts for the electrified Shine are carried over from the ICE model. Does that introduce compromises? Of course, but it also vastly reduces the tooling and manufacturing costs. To create the electric version, the patent applications show Honda has designed a simple motor and single-speed reduction gear transmission that bolts directly onto the same mounting brackets that the Shine 100’s combustion engine uses, with two removable lithium-ion battery packs fitted above it, canted forward like a conventional engine’s cylinders. The batteries can’t quite slide into the gap between the top of the electric motor and the underside of the bike’s spine frame, so there’s one on each side, sitting on trays that incorporate the electrical connections. The gap between the two batteries becomes an element of one of Honda’s patent applications, as it’s used as a channel to direct cooling airflow between the packs and onto the electronic control hardware that’s sited behind the batteries, sitting in the space that would normally be occupied by the engine’s intake and air cleaner.

Honda’s Activa e: scooter has swappable batteries that use Honda’s Indian Power Pack Exchanger e: stations.

Honda has already established a network of battery-swap stations in India, with hundreds of them due to be opened in major population centers like Delhi, Bangalore, and Mumbai by early 2026. Initially those stations are catering to customers who buy just one bike, the Activa e: scooter—currently the only model offered in India using the Honda Mobile Power Pack e: swappable batteries—but with so much investment in the network it’s certain that more, and cheaper, machines must be on the way. The Shine-based bike seen here looks likely to be one of them.

Honda hopes to expand its battery-swapping system to more countries and already offers the “Power Pack Exchanger e:” battery-swap stations—which recharge the Mobile Power Pack e: batteries and allow scheme members to swap their flat batteries for fully charged ones by swiping a card to release a fresh battery—to companies hoping to operate battery-swap networks of their own. Could that mean an ultra-low-cost electric bike developed for the Indian market could one day be seen in other countries? It might go against the sophisticated image that Honda portrays in wealthier nations but there’s a certain rugged appeal to something so utilitarian in its nature.

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