A Validated Full-Powertrain Digital Twin of an Electric Motorcycle Developed for Sub-Saharan African Conditions

Electric motorcycles are central to Sub-Saharan Africa’s transition to electric mobility, yet manufacturers in the region typically rely on costly and time-consuming physical prototyping to optimise powertrains built from imported components. This paper presents a validated full-powertrain digital twin of the Roam Air, an electric motorcycle assembled in Nairobi, Kenya, developed in MATLAB/Simulink as four interconnected subsystems: the battery, the controller, the motor, and the vehicle dynamics. The battery is modelled as a Thévenin equivalent circuit whose parameters were experimentally derived at the pack level through Hybrid Pulse Power Characterisation tests, and the controller replicates the motorcycle’s field-oriented control with a maximum torque per ampere strategy, including its battery current and voltage limiting behaviour. The motorcycle’s regenerative braking characteristics, drag coefficient, and rolling resistance coefficient were experimentally obtained through braking, coasting, and coast-down tests. The digital twin ingests rider inputs and environmental information, and it predicts the motor’s speed and the battery’s power. Validation against six measured drive cycles in Stellenbosch, South Africa, demonstrates high correlation between predicted and measured profiles, with Pearson’s r values of 0.905–0.981 for battery power and 0.912–0.996 for motor speed, and energy consumption predicted to within 2.71% for five of the six trips. The presented modelling and characterisation framework offers manufacturers a transferable, computationally efficient alternative to iterative physical prototyping for powertrain optimisation.