WV inventor's recumbent electric motorcycle prototype now road-ready - Charleston Gazette-Mail

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WV inventor's recumbent electric motorcycle prototype now road-ready Charleston Gazette-Mail

Should Evan Stewart’s 9-foot-long, 500-pound motorcycle coast to a stop alongside your vehicle at a stoplight, you won’t hear any engine noise when the light turns green, and you might need to take a second look to spot its rider.

Stewart is the inventor and fabricator of what might be the world’s first fully operational recumbent electric motorcycle, capable of operating at interstate highway speeds while allowing its operator to lean back in comfort in a low-mounted reclining seat with a backrest.

A reliability engineer for Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastics in Buckhannon, Stewart, 24, grew up in Charleston, graduated from George Washington High School and went on to earn a degree in mechanical engineering from West Virginia University.

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“While I was at WVU, it didn’t take long to find out there was no good way to get around Morgantown, so I built two electric bikes,” he said, during a recent visit to his father’s Slack Street fabricating shop. “The recumbent motorcycle is the next progression.”

Electric motorcycles have been around for decades and are now being mass-produced, but “as far as we know, this is the only recumbent electric motorcycle out there,” Stewart said. “It seems to be one-of-a-kind.”

It took a little more than a year for Stewart to design and build the motorcycle, with help from his father, Tom, a retired builder and now a full-time inventor. Most of the work was done on weekends at Tom Stewart’s Charleston shop.

Before beginning the hands-on phase of the project, “we read everything we could find on electric motorcycles, and watched every YouTube video we could find,” Tom Stewart said.

Next, Evan Stewart used computer aided design (CAD) software to create the motorcycle. Then, work began on fabricating — from sheet metal, aluminum and stainless steel — the parts needed to build the one-of-a-kind bike.

Stewart was able to buy the motorcycle’s front fork, batteries and front wheel-mounted electric motor, but all other parts had to be custom built...

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