Beautiful machine work and less is more design make the new Hellcat an Ed Jacobs tour de force
Let’s face it, if you’re reading this you probably don’t have the scratch to afford this machine, the new Confederate Motors Hellcat X132.
But it won’t stop you from appreciating the near-Bauhaus simplicity and brutality of this Ed Jacobs-designed piece of motorcycle art.
Jacobs was the philosopher and creative vision behind Confederate’s X132 Hellcat – a shot to the chops aimed directly at the chin of the custom motorcycle building fraternity.
And it landed – flush.
Ed Jacobs
“Ed couldn’t have been more perfect for us than if the stork brought him,” said attorney and owner of Confederate, Matt Chambers. “No one else could make such an honest expression of the machine.”
And that was what Jacobs was looking to accomplish. Simple, solid, zen-like precision and beauty.
“We don’t cover anything. That structure is real, it’s not wallpaper,” Jacobs says. “I have a universal design philosophy that I’ve believed in for years: to listen to what the product wants to be,” Jacobs said. “Don’t force your aesthetic on it. Allow the intent of the structure to be the aesthetic. Usually the frame of a motorcycle is a just a cradle for the engine.”
Jacobs went to work at Confederate six months before Hurricane Katrina wiped the company’s New Orleans shop and headquarters off the face of the earth, and there was no way he wouldn’t relocate with his employer to Alabama in pursuit of his unique vision of what a motorcycle should – and can – become.
“The aesthetic is not arbitrary,” says Jacobs. “It’s made of up functional components speaking to each other, of the conversation of the parts of the bike.”
And then again, you may well be able to come up with the money to lay boots to one of these at come point. Confederate hopes to come up with a more affordable (if $45,000 can be considered affordable for a motorcycle) in this, the X132 Hellcat.
This machine uses Renovatio‘s frameless concept, and the 132-cubic-inch, S&S-built engine has become a load-bearing structural element of the bike suspended as it is like a girder between the front engine mount and swingarm.
So start gathering the returnable bottles and hope they’re not all sold out before you can take back enough to buy one.