Exploring the Pros and Cons of Electric Motorcycles in 2024

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Is it still a motorcycle without an engine? Can you imagine swinging a leg over a bike, thumbing the starter. And then silence.

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Welcome to the Throttle and Roast podcast. I'm your host, Niels Meersschaert. Every year we hear more about electric motorcycle cars. And with many new brands starting up, are we finally reaching the critical point where they become mainstream?

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So as we get started, I think it makes sense for us to talk about what some of the advantages are, as well as some of the disadvantages and how this all fits in. So we're going to cover a lot of that in this episode.

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So first thing is, let's begin with some of the advantages. Well, the first one is that, like in car EVs, an electric motorcycle has the benefit of instant torque. A lot of motorcyclists, the torque of the engine is actually what draws us into the bike. We roll on the throttle and the bike just pushes and pushes and pushes us back as it's catapulting us forward. And especially if you've got a bike, l say, like a large cruiser where they love low revving engines, it's all about the torque. And this is something where an electric motorcycle does have a benefit. The other thing that an electric motorcycle has here is it's effectively a flat torque curve.

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Now, this is really what we strive for in a lot of motorcycle engines, because this allows you to just continue to go. You don't get that dip in torque where suddenly the bike seems like it stops wanting to accelerate. It's just continuing to pull and pull. And an electric motor, unlike a gasoline engine, will have torque from zero rpm, and that can make it feel more powerful than a gasoline engine. The other advantage that I would point out, and this is particularly when we think of the goal of bringing new riders into motorcycling, is that there are no gears. So this can become easier for new riders to try.

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There's no clutch to worry about.

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There's no shifting of gears.

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They simply roll on the throttle.

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And that can be a huge advantage for newer riders. The third advantage is there are no tailpipe emissions, and this can help with ever more restrictive regulations. For some of our listeners that are on the other side of the pond. The Euro five emissions continue to get stricter and stricter every single year. And this is making every motorcycle manufacturer have to constantly be adapting and tweaking their engines to be able to eke out that little bit of performance while still fitting into the emissions standards. When you don't have that to worry about, an electric motorcycle can make this easier.

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And before I make it sound like electric motorcycles are the cat's meow, they're everything that's perfect. There are some distinct disadvantages, and I think we need to kind of look at that realistically. So the first one is probably what I alluded to in the teaser, which is really about the sound.When you think of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, it's nearly completely defined by the engine, sound and vibration, and without it, would riders still even be attracted to it? And this is, I think, the most difficult thing of electric motorcycles, but also in cars is that absence of engine noise and character. When you don't have that vibration in the motor, you don't have that sound, it can lose a lot of the essence that draws certain motorcyclists to wanting to ride all the time. So that absence of it can be disconcerting in some ways. The other thing is that it's not as though it's truly silent with an electric car, nor with an electric motorcycle. It instead has this almost high pitched whine is the sound that the motor will make as it continues to get into higher and higher revs, which, quite frankly, is not the most appealing sound out there. It's not as noisy. So if you're someone who is maybe against having all of that loud noise, you know, the loud pipes save, save lives crowd is going to vehemently disagree. But there are some riders who prefer to have a quieter engine. The sound may not be as big of a deal. The other one and this is something that is absolutely complained about on the car side of the equation is range. And when we think of a motorcycle, it is a significantly smaller chassis than you're going to find in a car. And as a consequence, battery space is even more limited. Now, while there are manufacturers such as Zero Motorcycles, where they claim urban ranges of up to 171 miles on their top end models, that does match many motorcycles that are out there. When you think of a typical four, maybe five gallon tank that you'll have on most motorcycles, you're going to have a similar range. But the distinction is when you're riding up in the mountains where it's the fun road, you want to be out there and enjoying it.

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It's pretty easy to find a gas station where you can refill on a petrol bike. But how many charging stations are available outside of urban or major highways? I think this is one of the biggest limitations to electric motorcycles today. And quite frankly, for cars.If you're outside of a major urban environment, it's really hard to find a way to recharge or refill the travel capacity onto an electric vehicle.

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Now, there is some effort to sort of split the difference in motorcycles. And this would be in the hybrid. And certainly when you think of cars before battery electric vehicles became widespread in the car market, hybrids were available as a way to both improve efficiency and to reduce emissions. And in the motorcycle world, this is actually starting to happen. In fact, the Kawasaki Ninja seven is now hitting the EU market. It has a 451 CC gasoline engine along with an electric motor, and it's capable of riding in full electric mode all the way up to about 40 miles an hour.

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But it only has 7 to 10 miles of range in that fully electric capability. This may work fine for that urban environment that we're talking about, but still allow you to get out into the mountains and still use your petrol engine and refill. So I sort of think the hybrid does situate us in a way that is a little bit more practical for at least the current time and the current capacity that we have of battery electric vehicles. Now the other one that we need to think about and this is something that Kawasaki is currently doing, is looking at hydrogen models. Now, hydrogen models are not as widespread as some of the battery electric vehicles in the car market. And fundamentally, they still work in the same concept, which is the propulsion in a electric vehicle is always in electric motor. And those electric motors are often at the wheels. There's no transmission to worry about.

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It is just powering the vehicle directly there. But the source of the energy for that electric motor is typically in most cars today and most motorcycles that are available today is coming from a battery. And those batteries will typically use a lithium ion type of a chemistry, which is a pretty decent energy density, but it is not the most dense out there. When you look at something like hydrogen, it has an interesting byproduct and is more similar to how we deal with gasoline engines today insofar as a battery, electric vehicle requires charging the battery. And this means that you have to find a charging station that has enough capability to be able to recharge that battery wherever you're going. This is a substantial limitation because not every location, not every place around where you'll find gas stations pretty regularly, you may not find charging stations. And because it takes time to refill that capacity, there's charging time. People will complain about that. Now, when you refill a gasoline engine, you're there for a few minutes and you're fully, fully have your maximum amount of range again. So people look at that as an advantage. With hydrogen, it works more similarly to what you have with gasoline engines. Instead of having a battery that you now have to charge and wait and maybe it's half an hour to get up to 80% capacity, maybe it's a couple of hours to get up to 100%. With this, with hydrogen, you're actually refilling a tank just like a gas tank. And the hydrogen is now oxidized in a combustion engine to produce your power. unlike a battery electric vehicle, the hydrogen engine is more similar to a gasoline powered engine. And in fact, you can often adapt a existent internal combustion engine to become hydrogen. So the changing is a little bit simpler. The other advantage is that you could have gasoline, gas stations, effectively still have hydrogen being deployed at them. So this may be another alternative that can come in.

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And Kawasaki is employing that as a potential fuel source for a electric motor on a motorcycle.

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Now, the downside of hybrid vehicles, you know, we talked about that Kawasaki Ninja seven, and this happens in both the motorcycle world as well as in the car world, is you effectively have doubled the complexity. I not only have an internal combustion engine that I have to maintain deal with all the normal stuff that comes into there. I also have an electric powertrain and managing both of those is more complexity.

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There's more maintenance involved and more opportunity for something to break. So this is not a panacea. It is not the perfect situation that is out there. And this is where we are in terms of electric motorcycles and more generally electric vehicles.

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Let's look at where the market stands specifically for motorcycles. And I'm going to head into a couple of things because there is some regional variation in this due to that leisure versus practical usage of two wheeled vehicles. So electric motorcycles are typically used more often in areas where two wheeled vehicles are used for practical consideration more often than purely leisure. And you'll see that in terms of the European or Asian spread versus, let's say, the North American spread of where the usage is. But let's talk about some of the manufacturers that are out there.

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Well, the first one is Energica has actually closed down as of October of 2024 and they are liquidating their assets. This was a manufacturer that was hoping to get into the very high end of electric motorcycles, focused entirely on the sport bike type of motorcycle. Very high performance, very capable. But they have not been able to make a market out of it Now, another brand that is out there is Lightning Motorcycles,and they're kind of fitting in that same range. A lot of their designs are that sport bike design, as well as having very high end technology.

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They are claiming that they have a much faster charging capability than some of their competitors, promising an 80% charge in as quick as 10 minutes.

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They've also focused on that high performance. So they set a record for top speed at, I believe it's 218 miles an hour.

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So very high speed that they've been able to achieve from some of their models. And they even beat a gasoline powered bike to Pikes Peak in 2013. The thing with them is it's unclear whether they've actually started delivering their motorcycles to customers. While they've done some amazing technology and they've built and proved out some of the performance that they've been able to get, are they actually delivering these bikes to consumers? Now, they did claim in 2021 that they had recorded about$175,000 in revenue from motorcycles and about a half a million dollars in revenue in 2022.But it's been pretty quiet since then. Even looking on their website, I couldn't find anything newer than 2022 and any notification about it. So it's unclear that they're actually selling anything. And certainly when you think of a revenue of half a million dollars in motorcycles, that doesn't suggest it's a very high volume because they were typically going to be very high end models, probably 20, $30,000 each piece.

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So how many units that they sold?

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20, 30. This is something that I think is really, really a big question for for Lightning Motorcycle.

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Now, let's also look at Livewire Originally, the livewire was a model under the Harley Davidson brand and this was actually featured in the documentary movie Long Way Up featuring Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman, where they used these going from the southern tip of South America. All the way up to the top end of the United States. And this was a fully electric motorcycle. So they had all the new challenges that one would run into of how do we continue to power that?

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They had to use a lot of generators and in many cases of it. But the hope, I think, for Harley at the time when they did this was, hey, this would be a way to push the envelope maybe from their classic riders and their classic owners of their bikes. They did spin the brand off because they were not that successful in it, and they've put it under its own brands, the Livewire brand. And in the second quarter of 2024, they sold 158 bikes, not 158,000, no, 1 bikes. Now the third quarter of 2024, they sold 99 bikes. And while that's nearly a 100% increase from the 2023 unit numbers, a lot of that is due to actually the price reduction when they went independent and also the release of the lower priced Del Mar model. But when you look at the revenue numbers for them, it's essentially flat.

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They're making $4 million a year at the top end. So this is even though this has Harley-Davidson behind it, it's got all that in dollar behind it. They are not putting out significant volume of bikes. The public is just not going for them, at least with those couple of brands that we've highlighted.

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Now, I do want to talk about Zero Motorcycles, because Zero Motorcycles really is the market leader, certainly in the US, and they have a wide range of bikes and price points. They have an amazing marketing effort and I've seen some of their bikes in the wild. I actually have a riding buddy who has actually recently in the past year has actually bought one of their electric bikes and speaks very high praises of it. Now they raised another round of financing this fall for around$120 million. And while they sold about 3500 bikes in 2022 and they forecast about 4500 in the following year, it's clear with the latest funding that they're not yet self-sufficient, even though they sell in 29 countries around the globe. So this is probably the largest volume maker, at least that's oriented in terms of selling into the North American market.

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But they're still not in that massively profitable range. So this is some of the challenges that I think we face, certainly within in the United States perspective. And I don't want to speak too much about Asia or Europe, where they are different markets. They're going to do a little bit better. We're going to get into a little bit of them later. But this is, I think, where we're running into a problem is when you think of the main use cases for motorcycling in the United States, from a leisure perspective, none of these brands are really doing amazingly Where are the opportunities where one of these could be off highway? This could be a growth area now. KTM offers several of their offroad bikes for both for younger riders with the SX Line and the Freeride E for the adults as fully electric bikes. Their sister brand Husqvarna actually introduced the Pioneer at the latest EICMA show, which gives another option.

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Now the Freeride E, that was just brought out for EICMA is actually a really interesting one because this is a full dual sport bike. Some of the earlier freeride had been a pure Off-Road bike, but this one is dual sport, so you can actually be tagged both for use on street as well as off highway. And unlike some of their other smaller sized dual sports in like let's say the 300 to 500 CC range, it doesn't have the crazy maintenance issues that you would have there where you're having to re redo all the oil every 10 hours. So you do get an opportunity for a lower maintenance. The downside is that you really only get about maybe 2 to 3 hours of ride time with that bike. So maybe that's fine enough to go and hit the trails for a few hours in a day.

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But it's not necessarily practical for riding, touring, certainly, but riding for a longer distance. The other thing and you have to sort of look at the elephant in the room is that KTM is facing some financial hurdles. They actually had recently, in the past few weeks an announcement that they were going into self management for bankruptcy. Whether or how they will emerge from that situation is still unknown. So while they're pushing the envelope, there are still some serious considerations that they have to look at. Now, other brands like CF Moto and Zero have been showing some concepts at EICMA in the off road segment. So there could be more brands that are going to be playing into this. And when one thinks about noise and emissions, this could be a way to ensure access to offroad riding while meeting those emissions requirements.

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There are certainly a large number of people who will complain about the noise of two stroke motor in the woods of just being disruptive and loud.

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An electric motor would address a lot of that and potentially keep some of these areas that are becoming more restricted for off highway riders still open by reducing some of that noise. So this could be an interesting avenue.

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But if we really look at electric motorcycles, I think the area that is the true current sweet spot for where they're working is really this urban mobility. And this is the area that I think BMW is really exclusively focused on with both their CE-04 and their CE-02 electric scooters. Those models in particular are really focused on how do I transport and deal with commuting to and from work, maybe running a few local errands and stuff. And this is the sort of situation that scooters are exceptionally good at and the distances that they're traveling is not so excessive and they're usually within a urban environment. So charging opportunities are a little bit more practical for it.

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So this seems to be that real sweet spot for where electric motorcycles are coming in.

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Now, at the same time with electric motorcycles, we're also hitting this movement to add electric augmentation into bicycles. So we're almost getting a bit of a grey area here of whether this is a smaller electric scooter and motorcycle or is it a electric bicycle with perhaps a a pedal assist that you would get into?

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Y know, we have class one, two and three in the U.S. so class one and two are going to be pedal assist, but limited in terms of the maximum speed that the assist can go. Class three would be throttle actuated, which would be more like a motorcycle. So there is a bit of this gray area of are users buying electric motorcycles or are they buying bicycles that have electric augmentation? When we think of this from a practical perspective, one advantage of the bicycle part of that equation is an electric bicycle can still be ridden with a dead battery. It just won't give you any boost. You still are carrying around that excess weight from the motor and from the battery, but the bicycle can still continue to move. Whereas if we were looking at a motorcycle, let's say like one of those zero motorcycles or even something like the livewire, once they're out of juice, they're really sort of stuck on the road. It's no different than a a motorcycle really running out of gas. And so I wonder if the electric bicycle and the electric motorcycle are really how much of the overlap is truly there. We'd love to know what you think and see. Is there significant overlap amongst those riding groups or not? You can always text the show through the link in the show notes or even leave us a voicemail at our

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//www.

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throttleandroast. com/voicemail.

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Ultimately, today, electric motorcycles have the same benefits but also the same issues as car EVs. They have range and charging constraints that limit their utility outside of urban environments and for motorcyclists, the character and experience of the engine is a big part of the appeal for motorcyclists and a near-silent electric motor while having amazing torque and acceleration may not be that appealing. And thus far, certainly in the United States, the market hasn't been showing a lot of demand for these electric motorcycles. So my question to you is, would you ever consider buying an electric motorcycle and why or why not?

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You can text the show through the link in the show notes or you can leave us a voicemail at

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//www. throttleandroast.

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com/voicem. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you next week.