Hacker News Reader

Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

The problems with electric motorcycles are well-summarised here: "Why electric motorcycles are failing" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2zlYpy6QCM . It's just kind of a bad product/market fit. I am not willing to pay 6 grand for a bike with a 37 mile highway range, sorry. My equivalently-priced ICE bike gets two times that _per gallon_.

The key, i think, is to realize that what good electric motors give us is a moped that doesn't suck. It's a different market entirely, it's The Right Answer, and they are predictably selling like hotcakes. 3 grand, no license or insurance paperwork, you can use 'em on bike paths, and 50 mph range and if your battery shits out, well, you have a _bicycle_, you'll get home -- that's a city commuter worth considering!

View on HN

6 grand new for something street-legal, 70mph capable, with enough range for me to get to town and back, that's magically always full of energy whenever I'm ready to leave home, does not seem like a bad deal at all.

I used to ride sportbikes quite a lot in decades past, even rode cross-country a number of times. Putting gas in a motorcycle alone is nuisance enough for me to be willing to pay good money to never have to do again if I wanted to commute to/from town on two wheels. But I'd probably wait to pick one up on the used market, since I never buy any vehicles new.

However, sharing roads with today's drivers on two wheels is a completely different problem that will likely prevent me from getting one of these. Though the Enduro model might make a good fit for my off-road play at the desert cabin, and I could put up some solar panels to keep it charged.

not to mention that not all countries get fuel for the silly cheap prices the Americans do.

True but the 70MPG you could get on a more capable ICE bike isn't terribly expensive even at EU prices for gas, and Americans don't ride motorcycles for primary transportation anyway.

Depends what you mean by primary transportation, but lots of Americans commute by motorcycle. Especially in california lane splitting is a huge time savings in traffic (and legal here).

This is huge for places like LA. 2 hr commute or a 40 minute one where you lane split. I have never personally experienced this but my dad described getting his first bike a cb750 in LA as orgasmic. Being able to ride through traffic and not wait the hours he had to before was like nothing else he says.

Yes, I've done it for years myself. By "primary transportation" I mean that very few Americans own motorcycles and do not have an alternative means of transportation, often a car. Motorcycles are pleasure vehicles in the US -- you won't see a family making a Home Depot trip on the back of a Super Cub in the rain.

California looks outside and sees $5/gal. This is cheap?

Well, looks like it's around ~$7 in Europe based on www.globalpetrolprices.com, so yeah that would be cheap.

Yeah in a lot of Europe it’s more like $6-7. Used to be a bigger price difference, but california is not far behind. Texas though is still a lot less.

yes. add 40% on top of that for the UK price.

yeah its closer to US$7-8 a gal in Australia.

Europeans tax themselves significantly higher on gasoline than Americans are willing to go for.

I looked up the specs, and was surprised that this bike has no ABS, which is a requirement for all bikes sold in the EU. So, this is German bike that isn’t even legal in Europe? Odd.

Abs is required from a certain power/engine displacement. I suppose this bike is smaller than that.

Yikes, I think I would want ABS well ahead of 70 mph. I’ve done some traction training on a motorcycle and it has made me 100% a believer in ABS if the statistics hadn’t already.

the only reason i wouldnt buy an electric motorcycle for that price is because a car driver will eventually run me over

Super agree. I would own and use a menagerie of personal electric vehicles if I weren't worried about death by [someone else's] car.

(I mean, my main transportation these days is a mechanical bike, and I still worry about death by car)

stay safe, friend! remember that the first roads with motorized vehicles on them were private, and exclusively used by their tycoon financiers :)

The idea that louder motorcycles are less likely to be in accidents has been debunked.

Well, I'm saying that people run over motorcyclists regardless of any controlling factor.

Ive been riding a zero around a central coast city for a while now and I can say youre spot on. I could have spent less than a quarter the price and got a motor assisted cargo bike. Its going to be years before electric motorcycles catch up but I look forward to when it does.

I think whatever the vehicle, be it motorcycle, moped or car, people generally are looking for good value and what that "value" represents to people. Some people will pay $xx.xx for high performance, or maybe acceleration or maybe range; customer preference is going to differ somewhat, especially since this industry is still defining standards and best practices. There are some companies out there already which are focused on best value vs range, and Evoke Motorcycles is offering pretty good range in that department. $8k USD gets you as much as 160 miles on a charge and a 90 min top up at a charging station.

Eventually batteries will hopefully come down further in price to make these things more competitive with traditional bikes. Personally I love the idea of an electric bike for the commute, and I think that one of these would be amazing to take out into the bush for camping (or in particular, hunting - going through a track completely silently would be great). The range is the big issue in that regard of course.

As with all of this tech, it's just early days I suppose. If you wound the clock back 150 years a fuel burning bike would likely have comparable problems

> The problems with electric motorcycles are well-summarised here...

They're also not obnoxiously loud at 2am, either. Apparently, being very obnoxious is a huge selling point for some people. It's an attention seeking machine.

People complained about the original leaf with its limited range too. And plenty of people used them to get around town.

Many people buy by judging what they "might need", without really knowing or accepting what they "do need"

I've only bookmarked the above video for later but isn't short range more easily filled by e-bikes? You can bypass traffic in the bike lane and lock up at any random street post. If a cheap e-moto is worse than an deluxe e-bike, why bother?

(That said, I'm not a fan of e-bikes roughing up regular bikes in bike lanes. People need to start behaving themselves before we get into "this is why we can't have nice things" territory and e-bikes are banned from bike lanes.)

Motorcycles are different than e-bikes.

Maybe e-bikes work in some heavily congested urban environments, but motorcycles are a different use case:

- they can go on the freeway

- they can park in places e-bikes might not have a place

- they don't need to be pedaled (if you can't be sweaty when you get there)

- ground clearance

- fenders if the ground is wet

- take a passenger

etc...

Does somebody on the west coast “need” an earthquake survival kit or is that just something they “might need”?

Weight is roughly 10x as important on bikes. My bike is 400lb and its not a heavy bike. The ratio of gas weight to total weight. 5 gal tank, what 8lb a gallon? So a very small part of the total weight of the bike. They're physically harder to handle at larger sizes.

The original leaf had underspecced batteries and could be easily upgraded. Motorcycles have severe volumetric limitations for storing chemical energy in any form.

Hail to the moto blog king. Ryan Fortnine.

Like you are going to have a choice. There is going to be a day you can't register a combustion engine vehicle, but frankly given motorcycle manufacturers are doing everything in their power to make their bikes as loud and obnoxious as possible, it's going to be much much sooner.

Don't conflate the manufacturers with the aftermarket pipes crowd. All my bikes have been quite polite, and have all had OEM pipes.

I don't see a day when ICE becomes impossible to use. I do see a day where ICE engines are what horses became: basically weird niche toys that weirdoes and rich people play with because they like them, but no longer even close to the dominant transportation method.

you just dont like harleys

The only people who like Harleys are the people driving them because the noise goes out the back and they don't realize it's a lot louder for everyone else.

Every loud bike you hear on the street in the US that was made after 1979 is illegally modified.

Loud pipes save lives.

I wanted to put quiet factory pipes on my used Harley but my wife wouldn't let me. She wanted to make sure cars and trucks would hear me even if they didn't see me.

I've never noticed a difference in distracted drivers pulling out in front of me when I'm on a quiet bike vs a loud bike. Most of the sound is going the wrong way anyway.

I'll grant you drivers pulling in front of you...

If you grant me that you're must less likely to have a vehicle beside you push you out of your lane if your bike is loud.

You’re much better off getting a headlight modulator. Pipes point the wrong way. Also wear high viz.

That theory has been debunked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com