British Police Hire WMC To Mutate A Yamaha Three-Wheel Scooter

[advrider]

What do you do, if you’re a British police department, and you want a new scooter for your officers, but nobody makes what you’re looking for?

If you’re the Northamptonshire Police, you hire White Motorcycle Concepts to hack up some Yamaha Tricity 300 scooters, add a secondary electric powertrain, and wham—you’ve got new hybrids. These machines have petrol engines, but can also run off removable batteries that recharge from a standard wall plug.

The name White Motorcycle Concepts might ring a bell. We’ve written about the company before, when it released the WMC250EV electric sportbike in 2021.

Behold the WMC250EV, an electric racer built around a Venturi tunnel

That was a wild, wild performance bike; the WMC300FR, as ordered by the Northampton Police is just the opposite, although it uses some of that same Venturi effect technology. It’s intended to be an environmentally-friendly commuter that bobbies can bomb around on without need for a motorcycle license. But while the Northampton Police may be the first force to use this machine it sounds as if that’s just because their chief is spearheading a project for law enforcement across the whole UK. Here’s what Chief Constable Nick Adderley told the BBC about the machine.

For the last three years – as the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for motorcycling – I’ve been working with a local company and we’ve been designing these motorcycles.

“It starts to attack that green agenda which all emergency services are battling with right now.

“We are the world’s first in terms of getting this machine running; in terms of a police force that has this bike… the aerodynamics and the engineering that has gone into it has not been seen anywhere in the world.

Errrr, sounds like a bit of hyperbole there, although WMC itself says “This project will deliver a proof of concept aerodynamic device, incorporated into a city motorcycle that under real world conditions, will deliver significant advantages over current production models, enabling electrification“). It can’t be cheap or in any way efficient to convert a leaning three-wheeler scooter to a hybrid powertrain, but if we are going to be pushed towards electrification, it’s good to know that some companies are trying to do a good job on the task.

It is also quite interesting to see the police now turning to third-party manufacturers to build what they can’t find from the Big Four… and it’s interesting to see that the British moto industry is seemingly preparing for a big rebound, with considerable growth in its electric segment.

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