"An Electric Chopper? What Would Dennis Hopper Think?"

"You know those powerful choppers – customized motorcycles, often with unusual designs – that can be heard in the next county when they zoom down the highway.

Well, Orange County Choppers (OCC), the custom bike shop in Newburgh, N.Y., that has its own TV reality show, has a new take on the genre: no noise.

No, it’s not a special muffler developed by NASA. It’s what OCC is calling the first custom electric motorcycle.

Yes, it’s a chopper that can keep up with a Harley-Davidson “hog” at 100 miles per hour without even waking up a baby. And, because the machine is electric, it has zero emissions compared with most cycles, which pollute the air at about the same level as a car built in the 1980s."

Ron Scherer reports for the Christian Science Monitor August 12, 2009.