In our evermore Green motivated world it seems the bad boys like diesel and of course the Two strokes are either rarely seen or in the realms of diesel set for a uncertain future in the current specification form anyway. but with the Work done by the Marine engine manufacturers initialy and the Likes Of the KTMs the last few years. Is there a future for the Two stroke in the Green Motorcycle world?
No. Nostalgia is certainly a thing, but everything I've seen about the world indicates that we're moving away from internal combustion engines.
Here are my off-the-cuff thoughts on use cases for bikes that drive production. Because you might care a lot about some ridiculous niche sport like rally racing but nobody is making 450s because that's what they run in Dakar. Demand just isn't sufficient to drive production.
1. Urban use - short trips, relatively low speeds. Here in NYC, all the delivery scooters used to be little 2t scooters and now they're either electric bicycles or electric scooters. So I expect cities will eventually have primarily electric scooters and e-bicycles as transport. Pre-pandemic I was in italy and they had scooters
everywhere in the cities. I expect those will all end up electric too across europe and that's a huge market. SE Asia I can't speak to and will be interested to see what happens there.
2. Cruising. I see no reason why we won't end up with electric cruisers too. Harley already came out with the livewire (and then promptly sabotaged it) and I expect we'll get an electric goldwing at some point. They're certainly heavy enough you won't notice the extra battery weight. If you're going on day long rides over the course of a week (or a weekend) then this seems like a fine use case to me. Same thing as any electric car - as the infrastructure for charging continues to expand, you're going to end up with more and more and more places you can stop and less planning you have to do. And as the battery tech gets better and better, it'll take less long to charge. But don't come at me with "oh, I totally don't stop and shoot the shit for half an hour when out riding with my buddies" because we both know that's a lie.
3. Commuting. Kind of the ideal for an electric bike - plug in at work, plug in at home. Electric bikes are already fast enough and with sufficient range to do this. Price does need to come down though but if you're ever looking at 6k for an electric commuter then I think that's a real winner.
4. RTW. Sorry, this doesn't drive bike sales but it's certainly one area where I don't think you can replace gas with electric. Although it's really the realm of the 4t and not the 2t for the reasons
Yinzer Moto pointed out above.
5. Dirt bikes. There are a number of different subsets of this market. I think for marketing purposes it's really just two - trail riding and motocross. Motocross is perfect for electric. Just a little more progress and they'll have the power-weight ratio down and then maybe even improve on it. Trail riding is where there's a real problem, I think, but we're also not
that far from being able to ride an electric bike instead. As it is, if you're going on loops you can come back to your F-150 lightning to charge. But I expect we'll hit 4-5 hours of straight riding in the next few years and that'll be the end of it.
It's important to note that there is a difference between whether or not there is a future for two strokes and whether or not folks will still ride two strokes. Folks will definitely still ride them. They feel nostalgia and love all sorts of dumb bikes that aren't as good as modern bikes just because it's what they rode when they were young. But even there, folks are starting their kids out on OSETs instead of pw50s now so who you've got another 20 years of nostalgia before the next generation comes up and doesn't give a shit about ICEs at all. You can still ride yours, sure, but the direction of the market and, in particular, the direction of the regulatory environment are very clear.
Without trying to be a jerk about it, I think maybe the question you're really asking is "hey, weren't our old 2t bikes awesome?" Yes.