THE SPARROW STORY
Cycle World Cover, 1974
While scanning through Mike Corbin's personal archives, the team came across an old copy of Cycle World from 1974 with the Corbin electric motorcycle on the cover. It was a reminder that Corbin is no newcomer to electric vehicles.
From the Sparrow archive. Product plans, events and availability described here belong to the original historical period.
Electric bikes before it was fashionable
The magazine cover came from the same period as Quicksilver, the silver-zinc racer that set an electric motorcycle land speed record at Bonneville that year. Corbin electric bikes also made climbs of Mount Washington in New Hampshire in the mid-1970s, one of which was later pictured in National Geographic being recharged from a windmill at the summit.
Seeing the machine on a national magazine cover shows how much notice these early efforts drew at the time. The Sparrow, two decades later, grew from the same conviction that electric power could move people well.