10/07/2026
Automatic motorcycle shootout: DCT vs. E-Clutch vs. ASA vs. AMT
👉 Read on Common Tread: https://bit.ly/4h8FaMQ
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Motorcycle design has become stale. Stalled. The Superbike horsepower races are over or boring, the branches on the ADV tree are sagging with plump and overripe machines, and the small-bike craze has leveled into normalcy. Wings? Yawn. Huge TFT screens? Meh. Radar systems? In this economy? And no, dammit, I don’t want another round headlight; what is this, 2014?
There’s arguably only one place in motorcycling where a wildfire of R&D activity has broken out, and that is automatics. Transmissions, clutches, or a combination of the two. Y’see, most motorbikes follow a set of agreed-upon (or mandated) rules for how they work - clutch lever and shifter on the left, five or six gears to select, neutral between first and second, done deal.
The world of automatics is anything but that. Sometimes neutral is all the way at the bottom. Sometimes there’s a parking gear at the bottom, and sometimes there’s a seventh gear at the top. Sometimes you use your fingers to shift and sometimes you use your foot - sometimes it’s neither, sometimes it’s both. Centrifugal clutches, electronic clutches, electronic shifters but also regular ones. It’s the Wild West, and we here at Common Tread found ourselves curious how they all compare.
