Electric motor cycle, first impressions. (Re-published)

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.