with less range and smaller swappable batteries is available so if you feel the need you could take one of the two batteries out of those bikes and bring it indoors to the home or office for charging. Imagine a quiet motocross bike.
For the road-going set the regular S and DS models have much larger batteries and charging requires plugging the bike into a regular socket, halving the charge time with a special charger or getting connected with an adapter to the same sort of charging stations used for electric cars. That is if you can actually find one outside Silicon Valley, Japan or your local capital city. Listings show some in Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Belfast and London. If you do find one then charging is possible inside an hour. More than the traditional petrol station cigarette break but a good excuse for lunch. It’s all about the motor rather than the components they’ve put around it. The motor is the same across the model range with the variations being in the controller and battery size. Low down turbo diesel-like torque comes to mind when powering up hills. It’s no coincidence that the fastest bike by a margin at the challenging Pike’s Peak hill climb was electric. Expect to hear that a lot over the next couple of years. At the same event Zero set a new record for production electric motorcycles.
The nearest competitor to Zero is probably Brammo who with their Empulse R have taken a more conventional but possibly less confident route by keeping the old-style gearbox and putting watercooling around the electric motor. This delivers better off the line acceleration and
conventional gear changing feel at the cost of more transmission noise, cost and complexity. After trying the Zero DS without a gearbox it’s hard to see the need for these legacy solutions. On the other hand ‘RideApart’ magazine rated the Empulse R above the conventional Triumph Speed Triple, citing the greater mass centralisation as a serious plus. There are several other road- going motorcycle makers but it’s unclear how many are capable of producing an affordable bike at scale as opposed to limited production for racing like
Lightning or one-off and costly customs like Brutus.
Zero have recently taken two police fleet orders so their ability to ramp up is clear. This space is changing fast though and the major OEMs are obviously monitoring closely. Wait and see. So it’s all good for sunny warm and dry California but how does it work in Ireland or the UK? Does perpetual damp and cold affect the electrics or the range? This is relatively unexplored but unlikely to be significant given there’re already quite a few of these bikes out there in mainland Europe. As there’s a big battery inside then leaving it outside in the freezing cold is less than ideal. Indoors on a trickle charger is a far happier state. On the other hand, provided there’s a charge on board this thing will definitely start unlike an internal combustion engine in extreme conditions.
One of my colleagues has already put 5000 miles on the 2013 model and with thirty years of riding behind her, having stepped off various Harleys and a Kawasaki 600 sports bike she claims she’s never had so much fun on a bike.
the smartphone app (available to non-owners in the usual App stores for Android and Apple ‘Zero Motorcycles’) which pairs the bike over Bluetooth. This allows regenerative / engine
at least half the total cost of the vehicle and is best seen as an up- front payment on fuel. How this front loading works for you depends on your pocket, annual mileage, whether it’s made up of daily commutes and your overall riding style.
‘I was flying through forest with only wind noise in my ears, it was getting dreamlike’
This is new technology and one of the quirks she found was with the regenerative braking system that charges the battery on the overrun. This feels just like engine braking but it used to abruptly stop a few miles into her daily commute leaving her with no engine braking rather like a two-stroke. The battery was fully charged, it no longer needed more charge so it turned off the regeneration. This problem was resolved with a firmware update after a routine service. Welcome to the 21st century. The 2013 Zeros come with a
Sport/Eco switch on the dash which swaps profiles. Further customisation can be made with
braking to be increased, top speed to be limited and other stats and logs to be pulled. When it comes to the torque, comparison is difficult as the standard definition requires a crankshaft. Suffice to say there’s far more torque than you’d expect. It’s there all the time and especially when you want it. Pulling up hills is where these machines excel and roll-on overtaking power at 50mph surprises every time.
Much of electric motorcycle thinking focuses on the interplay between insignificant running cost (equivalent to an mpg figure in the hundreds) versus up-front high battery cost. The battery is
On top of that, European costs on the bike, the electricity and the petrol alternative are different from the US. Probably it pays back in three to four years or less. Factor in your time fiddling with the bike or visiting the dealer and you’re very likely ahead.
These are not just utilitarian modes of transport, there’s passion involved in the purchase and that’s hard to measure. Power in the 2013 models is up 90% on the 2012 models. Zero stress that this magnitude of advance is very unlikely to be repeated and from now on we’ll see incremental improvements. Of course the real question for a potential buyer is not whether the 2014 model is likely to be stunningly better but if the 2013 model meets your needs now. Founded in 2006 and based in California, Zero Motorcycles is on a mission.
The purpose of this piece is simply to say that despite the positively dreamlike unreality of the riding experience these are very real motorcycles in all the ways that matter.
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