The Ridiculous $137K Superbike That’s Too Gorgeous to Ride

 This is not surprising, given that the C-01 was designed by Daniel Simon, the same guy behind the Lightcycles in the Tron reboot. It was built not by Lotus, but by the German motorsports firms Kodewa and the Holzer Group. They licensed the Lotus name for their pet superbike project. They’ll build just 100, and each will fetch a little over $130,000. That kind of scratch gets you a rolling piece of engineered art–not a proper superbike.

 “On a project like the C-01, things like seating ergonomics, airflow, engine cooling, suspension mounts, frame stiffness, etc. have a direct influence on the design,” Simon tells WIRED. “Conventional bike design avoid most styling trouble with very modular thinking, meaning each part like a gas tank, seat, tail, and fairing have their own lives, even if they come together in great harmony. With the C-01 we tried to blend many of those elements together, creating continuous automotive shapes and lines that run all the way from the headlight to the tail.

 The fairing, which sweeps over the headlamp, is sleek. It’s pretty. And it’s almost certainly useless at speed. If you’re lying flat across the fuel tank and squeezing all 200 horses from the modified KTM 1,195cc engine, that fairing won’t offer much protection from the wall of air pushing against you, trying to rip your hands from the grips.

 This is not surprising, given that the C-01 was designed by Daniel Simon, the same guy behind the Lightcycles in the Tron reboot. It was built not by Lotus, but by the German motorsports firms Kodewa and the Holzer Group. They licensed the Lotus name for their pet superbike project. They’ll build just 100, and each will fetch a little over $130,000. That kind of scratch gets you a rolling piece of engineered art–not a proper superbike.

 The fairing, which sweeps over the headlamp, is sleek. It’s pretty. And it’s almost certainly useless at speed. If you’re lying flat across the fuel tank and squeezing all 200 horses from the modified KTM 1,195cc engine, that fairing won’t offer much protection from the wall of air pushing against you, trying to rip your hands from the grips.