Electric Dreams?

Nah.

Can I be persuaded to part with my petrol driven BMWs in favour of electric bikes? In a word, no. If they can produce something with a decent range that can be recharged in a matter of minutes, then maybe. My current R11200RT can cover 300 miles between fill-ups and takes about five minutes to top up. Match that – along with the comfort and convenience, then get back to me. Until then all you have is an expensive toy. And, frankly, we aren’t all interested in power rangers sports bikes, either.

18 Comments

  1. I remember being at the NEC bike show a few years ago and seeing an electric scooter that seemed like a fairly practical piece of kit for commuting on. As I recall the purchase price was a bit of a stumbling block. The fuel saving over the cost of commuting by car would have been significant but I thought that a four stroke 125 would have been a better buy. My commute is a 22 mile round trip and during the summer I cycle it. This year I have carried on cycle commuting into the winter and taking the car whenever the weather forecast suggests that cycling is a bad idea. At least my bike is genuinely low emission.

    The thing about electric vehicles is that ignorant people think that they are saving the planet by driving a vehicle with zero emissions. The fact that generating electricity is a source of pollution just as much as driving a vehicle with an internal combustion engine seems to be beyond their comprehension. There is also the issue that petrol and diesel are very heavily taxed so that electric vehicles only appear to be cheap to operate. If everyone started using them a way would have to be found to tax them in the same way. Lastly there is the little matter of the closing of coal powered power stations with no thought about what to replace them with. What are the planet-savers going to charge their zero emission vehicles with when the windmills aren’t turning?

  2. Too damn quiet for my liking. Not to mention the whole non-environmentally friendly aspects of build materials and recharge issues. It’s an expensive toy, a parody of the real thing. Being fairly long in the leg that ride position would give me cramps in ten minutes flat. No.

  3. To be fair BS, an electric bike doesn’t have to have a sports bike riding position. If they ever did become common they would presumably become available in lots of different styles. I found the presentation to be rather silly, when you start it up it doesn’t go ‘voom voom’ and it is really smooth. It reminded me of the news reports about CDs in the early eighties. The really brilliant thing about CDs is that you can cover them in jam and then wipe them clean and they will still work.

    • That was toe-curling. Along with the suggestion that having a large motorcycle has something to do with a mid-life crisis. I’m middle-aged, but I’ve been riding bikes since my teens. The whole attitude was cringe-worthy.

    • Electric vehicle technology is a dead end until batteries / power units can deliver better range and quicker recharge times. At the present state of the art, an electric motorcycle is still a toy, little better than expensive junk. Not fit for purpose.

      Incidentally, I’ve been riding motorcycles since I was nineteen (I’m over fifty now) and find very few motorcycle manufacturers cater for people of my height and leg length.

      • I have no trouble at all. I can sit on pretty much anything and it will fit. I dislike sports-bikes and customs, though. Uncomfortable and impracticable for serious long distance riding in all weathers.

        • Sports tourers, my preferred type of machine. Triumph (Not the Bonneville – commuted to Bristol and back on one for two days in ’02- ouch), BMW RT1150 and above, (but not the 1200LC) and Honda (Pan Euro) for preference. Plenty of leg room, comfortable for long distances and enough grunt to get you in and out of trouble – fast.

          • That’s my preference. The RT1200LC is everything the 1150 was and more. The Pan is a bit tall for me. I prefer the lower centre of gravity of the BMWs.

          • I have an ST1100 and a TL1000s one’s for making me smile and one’s for going anywhere.
            I’m in my sixties and 50 miles on the TL is enough but what a fifty miles.

  4. Lots of crowing by – I think it was Scania – about their hybrid truck. Its electric range is 2 – yes, 2 – km. To achieve this it wastes god knows how much diesel dragging a ton of batteries around. Green my arse.

  5. There is no reason why electricity can’t be green, it depends on how it is generated. For example, a bicycle that has generators built into its wheel rims. These could be used in two ways – either to charge a battery which drives a motor to assist pedalling, or to drive the motor directly. Either way, there is no periodic battery charging.

    But still, a motorcycle which makes no noise is just blasphemy. I’ll be sticking to my Bonnie with Arrow pipes.

  6. I remember that when I was a child, Birmingham used to have electric dustcarts.I used to walk faster than them at the end of the day as they crawled back to the depot.They could not be used after lighting up time as there was insufficient power left.

  7. Interesting thing on the Beeb last week when they raced an electric and a hydrogen car from London to Paris.

    The hydrogen car filled up in a few minutes, the electric took 30. The hydrogen wasn’t allowed on the Eurotunnel and had to take the ferry, but still won the race because the electric car stopped well short of Paris when it pulled in for a recharge and the charger came up with an initialisation error so they had to send for a tow truck.

    Software was probably written by Microsoft…

    • It was on Sky (who never have advertising from Shell…. ever)

      The BBC did a pretty good hatchet job on electric cars @5 years ago when they took 4 days to go from London to Edinburgh in a prototype electric Mini. Just to see how fast things are changing, last month a father and son took their Tesla from Lands End to John O’Groats in under 20 hours.

      Yeah, electric vehicles have limitations and they clearly not for everybody but to repeat what you hear on the news as a ‘fact’ is pretty daft – for anything!

  8. Regarding the mid life crisis. I have ridden motorcycles on and off since my teens, so when I bought my Triumph at around the age of fifty I was accused of having an MLC by some family members. The truth is that I had noticed that Hinckley Triumphs with low mileage had become affordable enough for me to save up and buy one so I did.

Comments are closed.