I’m going to try and be as honest as I can about my first impressions
riding an electric motorbike;
I’d seen a few prototypes before which were usually modified
road bikes with motors batteries and control gear grafted in, they were usually
technically brilliant things but were aesthetically challenged at best . When I
was told I’d be riding a full production bike I had an image of a polished neat
little race rep’, so I was a little disappointed when I saw the Zero S on it’s
paddock stands in the awning… Although it was very nicely finished and clearly
a high quality production item it looked exactly like a modern ‘facelift’
version of the CB500…and my spirits weren’t lifted when I saw that it had
street commuter tyres on from someone I’d never heard of…still, the sun was
shining, I was in France and I was being offered a free ride on a motorbike and
they race CB500s don’t they?..Sweet.. J
Now, let me get something straight before we start, I’m not
an EV evangelist I don’t think they’re going to save the world or bring
dinosaurs back from the dead. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, born and bred petrol head…I
grew up on a farm driving noisy smoky old diesels and two strokes and loved
every minute of it…and I’m right at the front of the save the 2 stroke parade
so I’ve not even advanced to the ‘4 strokes rulez’ gang yet..… But there’s
something about the concept of electric motorcycles that has my interest
piqued. There’s an an elegance about the solution offered to a question, a
question I’m not asking yet but I don’t think it’ll be long before I know what
that question is.. J
I think they’re closer to the two stroke ethos of simple elegant designs that
lend themselves very readily to prototyping and exploring exciting new ideas
that might just make motorbikes better…and they’re arguably already pretty good,
so that bodes pretty well doesn’t it?
On the production bike I was about to ride there was a nod
to the futuristic aspirations electric bikes are bound to foster, an LCD
display giving speed, voltage and remaining charge among other superfluous things.
And perhaps un-surprisingly the option to connect wirelessly to a smart phone
that could be mounted or held independently to give yet more information about
various parameters every tech head clearly had to know…Nice touch… Not really
on my list of priorities just at the moment, that was more in the, ‘which
button makes it go?’, genre of queries… J
Turns out it was, “that one”. Simple as that, just flick the switch that looks
exactly like the engine stop on any other bike, twist the throttle and go. No
warming up, no flexing the clutch to loosen the plates no dry clunk to coax a
gear from the cold gear-box and most refreshingly of all no tiresome warm-up
regimen.. just click to ‘on’ and go.
So the first thing I found that I like about electric bikes
is the utter simplicity…switch it on, go; No clutch, no gears, no turning on
fuel or chokes, just smooth silent progress ready to go from cold. Then,
straight in to the next thing I found that I liked about electric bikes, the
torque! Blimey! I’ve already said it looked like a CB500 it felt a bit like one
too and in the scheme of things I’d say the overall performance is better but
similar, but the torque! It was like hanging on the back of a greased weasel. This
was a road going bike with the standard controller on too..twisting the
throttle felt more like the race prepped SV650 I’m used to but without the
thumping power pulses generated by the
big v twin pistons…just smooth boundless torque..The third thing I liked about
electric bikes is also the first (stay with me)…the utter simplicity…Because there’s
no clutch, and no gears there’s nothing to do with your left hand or foot, now
far from leaving you feeling like you could have a stroke and not notice, what
actually happens is it frees up the whole left hand side of your body to move
more freely and with no impedance around the bike, the limitations that needing
to use a clutch or foot gear selector puts on your left hand side is only
really markedly noticed when you don’t have to do it…what a refreshing
feeling..
So here I am swooshing (that s the best way to explain the
sensation ) around the wide open sweeping turns of the Le mans racetrack and I become
very very aware of where I am…normally I’d be bombarded with assaults to my
senses Noise, vibration smell, coordinating the huge number of tasks my major
limbs are trying to persuade my brain to engage in..But here I had a sense of
experiencing the intensity of the ride in the environment without the usual
distractions…To be perfectly honest even after years of experience, one
racetrack experience is much like another, aside from each circuits nuances you’ve
generally got to wrestle a noisy heavy motorbike around left and right turns
with out killing yourself or anyone else and you have to make lengthy and
protracted negotiations with the bike that more often than not result in at least
one, if not, both of you returning safely to the paddock.. This wasn’t like
that. This felt like I was captain of the boat, there was no negotiating. I was
asking, I was getting. I found this had a profound effect on the way I could
ride it..free from the usual distracting assaults on my senses I was free to
concentrate more on the lines, how deep I could brake and most weirdly of all I
could hear the effect of what I was doing on the brakes and tyres. Normally
drowned out by the vibration and noise from a combustion engine I could hear
pitch changes in the brake sound, I could make the notes longer or shorter
higher or lower depending on how deeply or hard I braked, and the tyres would
give little chirps of protest as I approached the limits of what they were able
to give me…something I wouldn’t have normally noticed until I was actually
sliding or more usually on my backside.. All this was improving the way I could
ride a bike, at least that’s how it felt, the stopwatch may say different but
It didn’t matter, I was grinning like a loon and that is why I ride motorbikes.
I already knew that, but just then in that moment it was clear as day. It’s not
just the noise and the smell and the assault on the senses (which we all enjoy)
that makes riding a motorbike fun, it’s the engagement and the challenge and
symphony that can be achieved when you get the chance to really click with the
bike you’re riding…
Now, I think there are quite a few people out there who are
making a good fist of building perfectly splendid examples of these machines,
some are more conventional and have insisted on keeping a clutch and gearbox
format like the excellent Brammo Empulse, some have spent more time and effort
going for a more futuristic aesthetic like the British built Saietta..But the
problem is that until the price is sorted out, until you can either get
something that actually looks like it’s worth two of it’s fossil fueled
relatives or blends itself quietly into the same cost demographic as its
available peers then these bikes are going to remain niche. They’ll stay in the
relm of the well-healed techie and a whole world of other motorcyclists are
going to miss out, which is a damn shame…The questions around longevity, noise
and smell and range are all just small questions that will be forgotten when
they’re solved because they will be or they’ll be rendered moot, but unless we make
these things more realistically available and start selling them in greater
numbers to people who aren’t early adopters at the sacrifice of price, we’re not
even going to get that far.
