Sturgis 2026: making the cut, and getting there on electrons

We made the cut

We're still a little stunned: our hand-built electric chopper was selected to exhibit in Motorcycles as Art at the Sturgis Buffalo Chip.

If you don't know it, Motorcycles as Art is one of the most respected exhibitions in the custom world. It's the show Michael Lichter built. It's free to the public, and every year it fills the Buffalo Chip's gallery with work from 30-plus of the finest builders alive. A spot in it is one of the highest honors a builder can earn. This year, at the 86th Sturgis Rally (ten days, half a million riders, the Black Hills of South Dakota), there was a silent, Detroit-built electric chopper on that floor.

We were proud of that. We also had to finish building it that week and get it there.

Detroit to Sturgis with no gas

I decided to haul everything on battery power, with no gas backup and no support vehicle: a Mercedes eSprinter towing a 12-foot enclosed trailer full of motorcycles, roughly 1,300 miles on I-90 through Chicago, around Milwaukee, and then west. A real electric van pulling real weight in real conditions.

Out past the Missouri River, the charging map gets thin. There's one working public charger between Chamberlain and Wall, South Dakota. It sits behind a convenience store in a town of 400 people, it has a single charging position, and if it's down when you arrive, the nearest alternative is 82 miles away, which was 12 miles more than I had left.

I found that out somewhere past the Missouri with a half-full pack. Past Chamberlain you have to decide: commit to the plan, or turn north and spend a few more hours just to know you can connect. I stopped doing arithmetic and went with "why the heck not".

The efficiency numbers decided how fast I could drive. Planning an electric trip across empty country is as much about the math you do at every stop as it is about the vehicle. The van made it, and so did I, a little later than planned.

What was in the trailer

The chopper is built on our patent-pending V-Twin system: a modular-power mounting case that replaces the crankcase of your traditional combustion engine to mate with the frame. Depending on how much motorcycle you're willing to hold onto, it delivers anywhere from a mild 55 horsepower to more than 200 at the drive shaft.

Shandoka builds patented Multi-Fit retrofit systems that convert almost any motorcycle to battery electric drive and keep it your bike. Modern frames increasingly use the engine as a structural member, and that's the problem our system was built to solve. Everything is hand-crafted in Detroit, proven on the dyno before it sees pavement, and built to be upgraded instead of thrown away.

For most daily riding you never touch a public charger at all. The bike plugs into a wall outlet like anything else, which is a kind of freedom the van doesn't get to enjoy.

If you've got a classic with a dead engine, or a custom build that's been living rent-free in your head, this is the system that puts it on the road.

Best regards from the shop and the road,

Ernest