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The new emission restrictions for 2017 make it even harder for the manufactures to offer a decent running motorcycle to their customers.
Motorcycles are still approved under the same restrictions as cars, which is not really fair because the motorcycle have a lot less rotating mass, and is therefore not capable of running as lean as the heavier car engine.
So we will still have bikes that are not as safe as they could be and less than perfect to ride, because they will continue to stall easily and have the lumpy low speed running and snatchy throttle action.
The factories development teams are using every trick in the book to make the engines run as good as possible, but the emission limit requirements seem to tighten up faster than the development of new technologies, so our bikes does not really improve year by year.
We can obviously expect the emission restrictions will be even tighter in the future, but there is also talk about different anti-tampering feature requirements that will make it difficult to improve automotive fuel injection systems. There are not a lot of details on these future requirements yet, but we can expect the following requirements in a not too far future: - Standardized on board diagnosis (OBD), will allow the authorities to check if your ECU is using the standard fuel map (Some modern ECU’s allow the owner or the authorized dealer to load other maps to the ECU)
- A warning device that will monitor input from different sensors and flash a warning in the dashboard if a sensor is not providing a “likely” signal level.
- Best example here is the lambda sensor: It is designed to regulate the mixture in closed loop mode, and the signal from the lambda sensor will change constantly as the AFR changes. If the ECU receives a fixed signal from the Lambda sensor because it is disconnected or not working, the monitoring system will see an “unlikely” signal and flash a warning in the dashboard.
- This will most likely mean an end to the Power Commander and the common Lambda sensor tweaks.
Looking further ahead, it’s a fair guess that we will see full time AFR monitoring requirements that will flash an alarm (or even stop the vehicle) if the required AFR level is not met. This would require better and more reliable wide band lambda sensors than we have today – otherwise we would see plenty of cars and motorcycles with false alarms from the rather fragile wide band sensor :-)
But electric cars and motorcycles may well have taken over the majority of the market by then, and no matter how much we love our gasoline powered motorcycle engines, we WILL see a different picture in a not so distant future.
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