Suzuki’s Patent Shows A Whacky Engine Construction Layout

Cylinder runs parallel to the frame. Exhaust located right beneath the engine. Most likely for single-cylinder engines.

It is every motorcycle designer/engineer’s aim to spark the next big trend. The Japanese from Hamamatsu put on their thinking caps and came up with this whacky concept for a new engine layout. As you can see the cylinder runs near horizontal to the ground. Although that is nothing new, given that most of our commuter motorcycles have a similar cylinder orientation, the gearbox has now been moved to beneath the cylinder rather than behind it.

The purpose behind this shift in position is two-fold. Firstly, this makes for a very compact unit with better packaging options available to the designers for the rest of the components. Secondly, with the swingarm pivot now pushed further away from the rear wheel, the long swingarm will give better stability.

It will require certain areas of the motorcycle to be re-engineered though. Like the fuel tank would now have to be under-seat with the battery and air-box now in place of the conventional fuel tank location. In case of liquid-cooled motors, the radiators would have to be mounted on the side. Underbelly exhausts aren’t new, though this one allows for an easier routing. Lastly, this configuration would be extremely tedious for multi-cylinder inline motors as the frame would have to be extremely wide.

This concept sketch seems to be at a very preliminary stage and is not likely to see fruition any time soon.