Tork Kratos R review, first ride

Ahead of deliveries in April we get our first taste of the Tork Kratos, an electric motorcycle that’s developed and engineered in India from the ground up. 

The Kratos is the culmination of a long and tumultuous journey for Tork motors. Beginning in 2009 when Tork’s founder Kapil Shelke built an electric race bike that competed and won third place in the electric category at the Isle of Man TT. A few years later in 2016 later the brand announced the launch of the T6X and even opened for bookings. Then, there was radio silence. Funding issues followed by the pandemic pushed the brand on the back burner. The T6X would never make it to the black top.

Here’s the thing though, the core team at Tork Motors are a collection of dedicated engineers with a visible passion for what they do, and more importantly, how it’s done. So while the pandemic ravaged the world, the core team was slaving away on improving their initial prototype from major changes to motor, the battery, the controller and even changed the entire chassis. What they came back with was a motorcycle different enough to have a new name, and thus was born the Kratos. The Kratos will be sold in two trims, a standard version and the Kratos R that gets more power, more range, fast charging and a few extra bells and whistles. For our short first ride, we got to spend some time with an early production version of the Kratos R, and this is what we know so far.

I think that Tork has really nailed the design of the Kratos, it’s sharp angular body work adds presence to the motorcycle without really alienating the fundamental form of a motorcycle. It’s got some nice design cues too, with body work that lines up in the shape of an R along the side, or even the triangular headlamp cluster. Being an EV though, you do get some feature extras like a sizable tank storage with a USB port for charging on the go. Just above that, the Kratos R also gets another magnetic cover that’s supposed to cover the fast charger on the R, but our pre-production bikes missed out on that port.

Look even closer and the fit and finish is a little disappointing. Switchgear, exposed wiring and one conspicuously unplugged cable on our test bike all seemed to lead to a motorcycle that had been put together in a hurry. The saving grace for Tork is that all the important bits like the chassis, the motor and the battery assembly seem contrastingly clean. Hopefully, these pre-production issues of major touch points will be ironed out leading upto the launch.

Unlike most of the electric vehicles that we’ve seen in India to date. The Tork is a ground up new motorcycle, that’s been developed and engineered in India right down to the steel trellis chassis. The chassis is designed around the forged aluminium battery pack which is a stressed member in the frame, it’s place where the motor would be in a conventional motorcycle and centralises the weight of the Kratos. The axial flux electric motor is housed behind the battery and sends power to the rear wheel via a conventional chain drive. While the standard Kratos will have a 7.5kW motor with 28Nm of torque, the R gets a 9kW motor with 38Nm of twist. Tork claims that the Kratos will go from 0-40 in 4 seconds and will get up to a top speed of 100kmph while the R will hit the 40kmph mark in 3.5 seconds and go on to a top speed of 105kmph.