Motorcycle types through the ages
From Daimler's wooden Reitwagen of 1885 to the battery-swapping e-boda, motorcycles have been reshaped again and again by roads, money, sport and fuel. Each of the sixteen types has a labelled plate of the parts that define it, a photograph, its typical figures and the story of how it came to be.
When each type appeared
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About this page
Figures are typical ranges for each type, not the specification of any one model. The order follows the story rather than strict dates, and each entry ends with what came next. Text and plates are CC BY-SA 4.0, Transitions Lab. Photographs load from Wikimedia Commons under the licence shown on each file page, and from the Transitions Lab collection.
Take it with you: page text (Markdown), all content as data (JSON), single-file offline version (HTML, 2.8 MB). The plates are on the downloads page.