Unless you closely follow the off-road electric motorcycle space, you may have missed the announcement a year ago of Yamaha’s investment in the small French electric motorcycle company Electric Motion (EM). Electric Motion makes full sized electric trials bikes (E-Pure), and medium sized electric dirt bikes (Escape).
Yamaha and EM have just teased the first product of their collaboration at EICMA 2025 in Milan, Italy with the YE-01 Racing Concept. The bike is a prototype, and no production dates or MSRP have been announced. Both companies’ bikes are blue, so we fully expect the name BLU CRU x2 will be taking off in the near future 🙄.
Details are thin so far, but the YE-01 appears to be a new version of Electric Motion’s electric-motor/clutch assembly than the one they’ve used on several other models, and a battery not used in other EM models mounted in a Yamaha YZ-F aluminum frame. Interestingly, there also seems to be liquid cooling. Whether this is for the battery, controller, motor or some combination, we’re looking forward to finding out. Also notably, there is no shift lever on the left-hand side of the bike, so the prototype does not use a version of Electric Motion’s newest 4 speed electric drive train. Suspension looks more like the YZ’s KYB components than what EM has been using for their Escape dirt bikes, which would be a step beefier. To us this sounds like an exciting combination that we’d look forward to testing!
We’ve reviewed combustion BLU CRU bikes with this frame several times –you can see our latest YZ-450X build here that took 1st place at the 24 hours of Glen Helen race in the business class.
