Article on Electric Motorcycles

This was in the G&M today.

Electric motorcycles can ride around the world, but they still have farther to go
Mark Richardson
Lakefield, ont.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published 9 hours ago
Open this photo in gallery:
Mark Richardson during a test ride on the Zero DSR/X.
Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail

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In the rush to adopt electric vehicles, motorcycles have their own special challenges. The most obvious is range: Electric cars can just stuff more heavy and expensive batteries under the floor to drive greater distances, but motorcycles can’t do that. They have only the limited space beneath what used to be a gas tank. So far, the greatest range squeezed out of an electric motorcycle is about 300 kilometres on a warm day, and that’s riding gently.

Motorcycles are exempt from the federal government’s mandate for new vehicles to be all-electric by 2035, but their time will surely come. This is why makers like LiveWire (Harley-Davidson’s in-house electric brand) and now Can-Am are producing all-electric bikes, but before them all was Zero, based in California. Zero sells only electric motorcycles, and has been doing so since 2006.

There are other makers of electric motorcycles, most often small and quick off-road or city bikes that are not so concerned with range, and that benefit from silent operation. They’re usually expensive and of high quality.

When it comes to getting around town, however, there are also battery-powered electric bicycles and scooters that are well-suited for urban commuting. These much cheaper machines are limited to about 30 kilometres an hour, so they do not need costly insurance or a licence to operate.

So most electric motorcycles are used for shorter distances and not the open road. There are some notable exceptions, though.

Five years ago, actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman rode a pair of modified Harley-Davidson LiveWires for most of the length of South America. They had to be rescued a couple of times – as did the electric Rivian support trucks that accompanied them, despite pre-installing charging stations in some of the most remote Andean areas – but they made it.

This year, a Croatian rider, Roman Nedielka, became the first person to ride around the world on an electric motorcycle without a support team. It took him nine months, including a couple of months for shipping over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but again, he made it. He would cover 350 to 500 kilometres in a day, recharging once or twice a day, even in the emptiness of Australia’s Outback and the Kazakhstani desert.

Open this photo in gallery:
The DSR/X adventure-tourer creates 100 horsepower and 169 lb-ft of torque.
Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail

Nedielka rode his own Zero DSR/X adventure bike, a large motorcycle with a claimed range of 288 kilometres, so I came here to Lakefield, Ont., about 1.5 hours northeast of Toronto, to ride a DSR/X and find out how the experience compares in the Ontario countryside.

The DSR/X is not cheap. It starts at $31,295, and it’s the most expensive of Zero Motorcycle Inc.’s eight models, across three product lines. The least costly is the little FX, a $17,000 dual-sport bike with a claimed range in the city of up to 164 kilometres. “City” means slower speeds and lots of regenerative braking. Take it out for a faster cruise on Highway 401 and the range will probably be half that.

The price of the DSR/X is in line with the LiveWire One, which starts at $30,000 and offers quicker Level 3 charging. Like LiveWire EV’s two less-costly models (which start at $20,000 and $22,000), the Zeros have slower Level 2 charging capability, but it only takes a couple of hours to recharge the 17.3-kilowatt-hour battery. Shell out another $4,400 for an optional faster charger on the bike and you can almost double the DSR/X’s 6.6-kilowatt capacity and recharge in about an hour. You can also spend about the same for a bigger battery and add 65 kilometres of total range, but you can’t do both. The faster charger or the additional battery each occupy the same vacant space inside what used to be called a gas tank and is now a storage compartment, and there isn’t the room for both.

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I rode around for half the day with a friend, who took a test ride of the Zero SR/S – that’s more of a sport bike and costs $2,700 less, but shares the same lithium-ion battery. The two bikes are tuned differently, of course: The adventure-tourer creates 100 horsepower and 169 lb-ft of torque, while the sport bike creates 113 horsepower and 140 lb-ft. We both preferred the larger, more comfortable DSR/X, but then we’re both older and less agile than we used to be.

It doesn’t take long to get used to the electric riding experience. The two major differences from the gas-powered dinosaurs we’ve always known were the absence of noise and of gears. Both bikes were quick, recording acceleration of five seconds from zero to 100 kilometres an hour on my FastR smartphone app; it was a thrill to just twist the throttle and hit that speed without thinking of shifting gears, or even hear the engine revs wind up. Just twist and go, like a scooter.

Open this photo in gallery:
The display screen on the Zero DSR/X adventure bike.
Mark Richardson/The Globe and Mail

(This can also be a liability. Several years ago, at the launch of the LiveWire, a journalist friend of mine was standing and chatting to another journalist friend of mine, who was seated on the electric bike. My standing friend, as a little joke, reached down and twisted the throttle of the motorcycle, which would normally just rev the engine. Instead, the motorcycle, which was in Drive and totally silent, shot forward and crashed into another motorcycle, which was parked with no one on it. The two bikes were only scratched, but Friend Number 2 hurt his hand, while Friend Number 1 was barred from Harley events for a while.)

My friend and I enjoyed our ride together, and both electric motorcycles handled just as we expected gas-powered machines to behave. Then again, we didn’t travel far, and we didn’t have the patience to stop and recharge somewhere, preferring to just head back to the Classy Chassis & Cycles store in rural Lakefield where we’d borrowed the bikes. The general manager, Josh Hinan, acknowledged that it’s a challenge to convince riders of the benefits of electric motorcycles, when most want to rumble or rip through the countryside.

There’s certainly a place for electric motorcycles on our roads, but despite Nedielka’s example, they’re not ready for North American road trips. Another friend once rode from Toronto to Montreal on a Zero SR/F that had similar power and torque to the DSR/X, and that claimed a city range of 259 kilometres with a charging time of 90 minutes. In practice, on Highway 401, she set the cruise control at 100 kilometres an hour and had to stop four times to recharge along the 550-kilometre route. It took 17 hours to travel what should have taken six, and the rain clouds she rode under kept catching back up. “If I ever say the words ‘road trip’ and ‘electric motorcycle’ again in the same sentence,” she told me then, “just punch me in the face.”

EV technology is constantly improving, of course. Electric motorcycles are clean and swift to ride, and simple to operate. Perhaps solid state batteries, which pack twice the power in a fraction of the size, will make the difference. Today, however, any gas-powered bike can deliver almost the same experience for half the price. Sound familiar?

I’d love to own an electric motorcycle as my second or third bike, but I ride primarily in the countryside and I can’t justify the additional cost for what is essentially a seasonal, recreational vehicle. That said, maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon. Maybe I like the sound and feel of a traditional motorcycle because that’s what I’m used to – when a vehicle is an emotional part of your life, like a beloved member of the family, you accept its strengths and weaknesses.

Even so, electric motorcycles are bound to keep improving as makers continue to invest time and money in their development. Major manufacturers like Honda, BMW and Yamaha are already all-in. If one’s already been ridden around the world, is there anything they can’t achieve?