[visordown.com] - Yamaha’s Tricity, the leaning trike

[Ninjette Newsbot]

YAMAHA is getting in on the leaning-three-wheeler market with its newly-revealed ‘Tricity’ – a concept bike that it says will be on sale by summer next year.

Yamaha calls it an ‘LMW’ – or ‘leaning multi-wheel’ – machine, and suggests that it’s the first of several such devices it has planned.

Despite its name, which seems to hint at electric power, the Tricity is actually a 125cc single with the usual scooter twist-and-go transmission. But Yamaha says its different to its rivals, for which read Piaggio’s MP3, because it’s no heavier than you might expect a 2-wheeled bike to be. The firm says the Tricity is ‘approximately’ 150kg, or in other words, approaching 100kg lighter than a 125cc MP3.

Just how the firm has achieved such savings isn’t mentioned in the official press kit, and details of the suspension system are also thin on the ground. It appears to have two fork legs for each wheel, mounted in line, but the exact details of the linkage that allows the suspension to operate and the bike to lean are hard to see.

As well as being lighter than other three wheelers, the Yamaha hopes to be cheaper. The firm says the bike is targeting a price of under 4000 Euros when it goes on sale next year. It also opens the doors for more leaning multi-wheel models, perhaps even some higher-performance machines like the firm’s leaning four-wheeled Tesseract superbike concept from a few years ago.





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