Yahoo Autos Horwin launches three Senmenti battery-electric two-wheelers at CES 2024
Wired says that Wendsor Zhou Wei combined the words "horizon" and "win" to create his company name Horwin. Based in China and recently expanded to Europe, Horwin's launched its U.S. bid for two-wheeler market share at the Consumer Electronics Show with three bikes. Let's deal with the form factors first. Horwin calls these motorcycles, but in the U.S. they're between a small bike and a scooter. Compared to a Honda CB300R motorcycle and Suzuki Burgman 400 scooter, the Horwin's 16-inch front and 14-inch rear wheels are smaller than the 17-inchers on the Honda, but one inch larger than the Burgman's wheels. The Horwin's step-over height is noticeably lower than the Honda's, but the Horwin's 31.3-inch seat is just a few inches under the Honda, 1.6 inches above the Suzuki. It's the bar height and placement relative to the seat, which we don't have a spec on, that gives the Horwin that trademark scooter look like the Burgman instead of the Honda. So we're going to call it a bike or maxi scooter.
That out of the way, the Horwin range is called Senmenti — which sounds like another portmanteau word — consisting of a near-production bike and two concepts. The version closest to delivery is the Senmenti 0 that the company calls a "high-performance electric urban adventure ADV," or adventure bike. The model debuted at last year's EICMA Show in Milan, Italy, and although it's said to have been put on a diet that delivers better handling and agility, the maxi scooter still weighs 507 pounds. This is due in large part to the honking, liquid-cooled, 16.2-kWh lithium-ion battery, That's just down from the 17.3-kWh pack in the Zero Motorcycles DSR/X electric adventure motorcycle, which weighs 545 pounds. That pack powers an electric motor claimed to make 98 horsepower and an even-more-honking 659 pound-feet of torque good for doing the 0-to-60 in 2.8 seconds, a 125-mph top speed, and a range of 186 miles on the WLTP cycle.
