Sparking off memories of Honda and their iconic RN-01 mountain bike, the Yamaha YPJ-YZ E-Bike looks extremely interesting.

>>> The best electric mountain bikes

It’s the Tokyo Motor Show later this month and motor companies are getting busy with the hype train and social media teasers.

Yamaha have announced a few electric powered two-wheeled machines. Granted, a couple of them are actually electric moped/scooter things but there is also an e-mountain bike in there: the catchily named YPJ-YZ E-Bike.

We don’t know a whole heap about this yet. But let’s not let that get in the way of some pixel peeping and wild speculation, eh?

First of all, we should reiterate the fact that this is a concept bike. It is not a real production e-bike. Yet.

What can we say about the YPJ-YZ E-Bike?

The fact that it’s called ‘YZ’ is interesting because that directly refers to Yamaha’s YZ motocross bike range. This alone, suggests that the bike will be heavily targeted towards existing motocross riders, not (just) mountain bikers.

The motor is almost certainly going to be a Yamaha (duh). The picture doesn’t look exactly like a standard Yamaha PW-X2 motor but then again, this looks a computer generated picture rather than a real photo of a real thing. The down tube looks like it could a fairly whopping sized battery. Yamaha work in partnership with Gogoro nowadays, a electric scooter manufacturer who do ‘battery swap’ models among other things.

The rear suspension is a 4-bar Horst Link arrangement, actuating a Fox Float DPX2 rear shock.

No room for a water bottle by the look of it.

But just check out those forks. Inverted single crown forks!

If you’re trying to work out what the graffitti plastered all over the bike says, it’s ‘YPJ-YZ’.

It’s a 27.5in wheeled e-bike. No mismatched mullets to be found here.

And… that’s about it. Yamaha have stated that they’re announcing two more electric machines at the Tokyo Motor Show itself but it’s unclear as to whether any of them will be e-bikes.

Speaking of Honda…

Ever wondered what was actually inside the mysterious sealed gearbox on the iconic Honda RN-01 downhill bike…?

There you have it. It’s fundamentally a derailleur in a box. Pretty simple in a way but moving all this geary stuff off the rear wheel (and not having a traditional freewheel; the chain was permanently whizzing around the drivetrain even when coasting) did wonders for the bike’s unsprung/sprung ratio as well as isolating suspension from drivetrain forces.