Bike-engined car
Type of modified car
A bike-engined car is a small or light weight car that is powered by an engine that was designed for use in a motorcycle.
Characteristics
Early examples of bike-engined cars include the 1948 Invacar and the 1949 Bond Minicar, both of which were designed as basic, low-cost transportation.
Modern motorcycle engines are often available with higher specific outputs than car engines, which provides a performance advantage in a lightweight car. The motorcycle's sequential gearbox is often fitted with the engine, allowing for fast gearshifts.
The drawbacks of using motorcycle engines in cars are the lack of reverse gear and reduced torque output at low RPM.
Performance models of bike-engined cars are often based on the Lotus 7-type kit cars.
Motor racing
In the United Kingdom, the 750 Motor Club runs a national race series for cars powered by road going motorcycle engines (RGB series). Radical Sportscars also runs a racing series for its bike-engined cars.
In the United States, the Lites 2 category of IMSA Prototype Lites (formerly IMSA Lites) consists of cars using a Kawasaki motorcycle engine.
The Formula BMW junior racing series (often used as a stepping stone towards Formula One) used open-wheel cars powered by the BMW K1200RS motorcycle engine.
List of production cars with motorcycle engines
Non-production motorcycle-engined cars
Suzuki GSX-R/4
Westfield Megabusa
Westfield XTR2
These are all Suzuki Hayabusa-engined cars.
“Bike-engined car” enters the record as type of modified car. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bike-engined, Type and modified can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4907329. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1948 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bike-engined car” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.