I read an article a couple of days ago in the Wall Street Journal about electric vehicle subsidies being sharply cut back in China. It seems there are an incredible number of EV manufacturers in China. 487 electric vehicle manufacturers, to be exact. And if you build EVs over there, there are rich Chinese government subsidies (from both the local and central Chinese governments). China is scaling these back significantly. All of the local subsidies are being eliminated, and the central (what we would call federal) government subsidies are only being provided for vehicles with a range of 155 miles or more on a single charge.
You may remember my observations in Riding China about the preponderance of electric motorcycles and scooters over there. It turns out that the subsidies are not provided on motorcycles and scooters, so they are not affected. Interesting times.
I guess more financial mags are zeroing in on Harley-Davidson’s plans to introduce an electric motorcycle. You saw our post a week or so ago about The Motley Fool and their thoughts on the Livewire. Barron’s, another financial newspaper/advisory service, similarly reported on Harley’s woes but with a twist. This most recent Barron’s article strongly recommended that either Harley move into manufacturing pickup trucks, or allow itself to be acquired by Ford. Yeah, that’s right. Ford. The car company.
Ford has already produced F-150 pickups with Harley trim packages (seriously, I can’t make up stuff this good) and they are reintroducing a $100K Harley-themed truck for 2019…
Barron’s reasons that Harley’s brand recognition could help Ford (a company who’s stock price has been tanking for years). The Barron’s article actually recommends Harley as a buy (the stock, not the motorcycle), with a target price of $50 per share if such an acquisition occur (i.e., Ford buying Harley). Seeing as Harley stock (symbol HOG) is currently about $35 per share, Barron’s reasons that could be a wise investment if Ford acquires Harley (which I don’t think will ever happen).
I’m watching all of this in stunned silence. Well, nearly stunned silence, except for the tapping of my laptop’s keyboard as I whip out this blog. $35,000 electric motorcycles. Harley-badged $100,000+ Ford pickup trucks, which presumably will sell to folks whose judgement, common sense, and sobriety has to be questioned. Financial advisors recommending buying Harley stock because if Ford (a company with terrible stock performance) buys Harley (another company with terrible stock performance), the Harley stock price will go up (while Harley’s business has been tanking in a dive so steep they may not be able to pull out of it). Got it. Right.
My take on all of this? It’s hard to take it all in, let alone understand most of it. Your thoughts? Let’s hear them!
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Unlike motorcycles, I’m not fixated on doing things the old way for electrical energy storage. I run a lithium-polymer battery in the Husqvarna that has exceeded all my expectations. The thing never goes dead (no trickle charger needed) it has tons of cranking amps (no need to use the compression release to start the bike) and it weighs nothing. You can install the thing in any position and nothing will leak out. The only drawback to the lithium-polymer battery is cost.
Battery technology is advancing rapidly with so many new combinations of lithium with something else, molten salt or rare elements only found in war torn areas. It’s hard to know which technology will win out in the end but for now, in my solar-powered shed system, lead-acid still offers the best electron storage option.
Lead-acid batteries are messy, inefficient and half their capacity comes at a voltage too low to run your equipment correctly. They are heavy as hell and the cable connections are always corroding from the acid fog and hydrogen fumes escaping from the fill caps. You’re lucky to get 5 years service out of a lead-acid battery. The things are problematic in most every way.
But not in all ways: lead-acid is a completely mature technology. We’ve been building them since 1860 and there is a cradle-to-grave recycling system in place right now. Any auto store or Wal-Mart has the ability to take your old lead-acid batteries and deal with them responsibly. Unlike the new battery elements there are no ecological surprises with lead-acid: We know all.
Lead-acid batteries are available everywhere. Go to any town in the world with at least one gas station and you can buy a lead-acid battery. You don’t have to deal with Tesla or any of the high-tech battery startups that don’t actually have product. Your battery isn’t tracked online, the software will never need to be updated and your battery bank will never be monitored by anyone but you. Unlike most e-car and e-bike batteries, lead-acid batteries come in standard sizes (24, 27, 31, 4-D, 8-D) and for the most part are interchangeable unless you have a restrictive battery box or short cables.
Lead-acid batteries are tough. It’s hard to damage a clean lead-acid battery with tight connections. They put out gobs of amps on demand and as long as there is electrolyte in the cells they stand up to overcharging well. They’re even somewhat repairable: Go on YouTube and look up battery repair for ways to flush out debris from old lead-acid batteries to gain new life.
Lead-acid batteries are easily scalable and nearly any voltage or amperage desired can be achieved with large, simple jumper cables. I’m running 4, group 31, 12-volt batteries in my 24-volt system. My future plans are for 16 batteries total but there’s no rush. I can take as long as I want to get there or 8 batteries might prove to be enough for my usage level.
Most important for me: They are cheap! The four deep cycle marine batteries in my off-grid system @100 amp/hour each give me a total of 2400 watts of storage (@ 50% capacity) for 400 dollars. If I ever get to 16 batteries I’ll have 9600 watts of storage for around 1600 dollars. Compare that to 7000 dollars for 7000 watts of storage from Tesla’s Powerwall.
The newer Powerwall is AC-in, AC-out and comes with a built-in AC inverter which is a savings if you’re charging from the grid but you’ll need a solar AC inverter to charge the Powerwall from the sun so it’s kind of a wash for my set up. The lifespan/charge cycle of lead-acid batteries is supposed to be less, judging from the two-year lifespan of the lithium ion batteries used in my cordless tools, maybe not.
I’m not a Luddite when it comes to battery technology on motorcycles or power tools but for me the new designs and materials haven’t yet made sense for large, stationary storage banks at low cost. I’ll revisit the topic if Tesla reduces the price of their Powerwall by half or some new manufacturer comes up with a wiz bang combination of chemicals that outdoes ancient lead acid technology.
The Motley Fool is an investment advisory service newsletter I’ve been following since the 1990s, and my take on things is they generally have good advice and make predictions that have proven to be sound. Most recently, The Motley Fool published an article (Harley-Davidson Really Misjudged the Electric Motorcycle Market) about Harley’s Livewire electric motorcycle. Their take on the new Harley is the same as ours…Harley’s marketing muscle and distribution channels will help, but the idea of a $35K+ electric motorcycle nearly guarantees a dead-on-arrival introduction. The Motley Fool piece is well reasoned and mirrors our earlier prediction. Let’s hope both we and The Motley Fool are wrong.
So the price of the new Harley Livewire has been announced, and it’s just under $30K. With taxes, dealer setup, freight, etc., it’s a bike that will be somewhere around $35K. Every blog, motorcycle forum, and motorcycle news outlet on the planet is carrying the story, and I have little more to add. Everyone with an opinion is posting why this makes sense, or why it makes no sense.
When Harley came out with the V-Rod 15 or so years ago, I said it would flop, and I posted a comment to that effect on one of the forums:
Wow, a 600-lb motorcycle with 85 horsepower. Where does the line form?
That comment ultimately was proven correct, and it somehow seems Livewire-appropriate today. I’ll leave the Livewire pricing, marketing analysis, and deep thinking to the other online pundits. My prediction? It took the V-Rod more than a decade to die. The demise of the Livewire, at $35K, will be mercifully quick. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect I am not.
This is a blog I originally posted on the CSC blog, and I like it so much I want to include it here on ExNotes. The topic is, as the title implies, the ebike scene in China.
I encountered electric bikes in a major way on my RX3 ride across China (you can read that great story in Riding China). Electric scooters and other vehicles are everywhere in China. Quite simply, electric vehicles are a way of life over there. Rather than babble on about that, I thought I would include an excerpt from a Riding China chapter. The locale is Beijing, where I was struggling with the heat and a minor injury…I had been nailed in the eye by a bug the night before, and…well, let me get to the pages I’m talking about…
The next day we took the subway into Beijing. We already were in Beijing when we got on the subway, but Beijing is a megacity and you can’t simply drive into the center of it. We rode the subway for a good 45 minutes, and when we emerged, we visited the Forbidden City and Tien An Men Square. It was all grand. It was touristy, but it’s something that should be on any China visitor’s bucket list.
At the entrance to the Forbidden City.In the Forbidden City. It’s an amazing thing to see.A glimpse of ancient Chinese architecture in the Forbidden City.
After seeing the Forbidden City, we walked around downtown Beijing for a while. I told Tracy (note: Tracy was our translator on this trip) my eye was getting worse and I wanted to get antibiotic eye drops for it. It was Sunday afternoon, but there was a large pharmacy right in front of us and it was open. Tracy went in with me and he told one of the young pharmacists what I wanted. She responded and it didn’t sound good.
“She cannot sell it to you without a prescription,” he told me.
“Well, shoot, Tracy, it’s Sunday afternoon,” I said. “We’re not going to find a doctor. I’ll be okay. Let’s just go.”
“No, it is okay, Dajiu,” he said. “We are China and we have a bureaucracy. It is my bad.”
Good old Tracy, I thought. The guy felt responsible for everything. I was resigned to the fact that my eye was going to take a while to get better. Tracy, in the meantime, had walked not more than 8 feet away to an elderly woman sitting at a wooden table. He spoke to her in Chinese and pointed to me. She never looked at me, nor did she look up. She simply pulled out a white pad with a big “R” at the top. Nah, this can’t be, I thought. She wrote something in Chinese characters and handed the slip to Tracy.
“Our prescription,” Tracy said. “Such a bureaucracy.” He walked the three steps back to the pharmacist, Tracy handed her the prescription, and 30 seconds (and 24 yuan, or about $4) later, I had my antibiotic eye drops. I put two drops in my eye.
When we got off the subway after visiting The Forbidden City and the center of Beijing, we waited on a street corner for our Uber ride back to the hotel. I watched the scooters and small utility vehicles rolling by, and I realized that nearly every one of them was electric. I must have seen 200 scooters during the 20 minutes we waited, and perhaps 2 had gasoline engines. This wholesale adaption of electric scooters and small utility vehicles in China is nothing short of amazing.
One of many, many electric bikes and scooters in Beijing.Another electric scooter……and another……and another……and another……and another……and another……and another. They were all over. I’d never seen anything like it.
Sean (our guide) explained to me that the transition to electric vehicles started about 15 years ago, and the government has done a number of things to encourage people to convert to electricity. For starters (once again, pardon my pun), many of the larger cities in China now prohibit motorcycles and scooters unless the vehicle is electric. Electric scooters are allowed where gasoline-powered bikes are not. That alone is an enormous incentive. The next incentive is that you don’t need a driver’s license to take an electric vehicle on the street. You just buy one and go. And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, electricity is cheap in China. There are windfarms, solar panel farms, coal plants, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric power plants all over the country. We saw scooters parked on the sidewalk and plugged into extension cords running into small stores everywhere. People charge them like iPhones; they didn’t miss any opportunity to top off the batteries on these things.
An unusual electric trike in Beijing. We saw many unusual electric vehicles in China.
That night was a great night. The Zongshen dealer took us to a restaurant that specialized in Peking duck. The guys were excited about this development, but I was initially leery. I thought I didn’t like Peking duck. Boy, was I ever wrong! I tried Peking duck 25 years ago when I visited Beijing with Sue. We both thought the duck was awful. That’s because we went to a restaurant that served tourists. The food at that place didn’t have to be good. They knew they would never see us again, and Yelp hadn’t been invented yet.
This night in Beijing with the Zongshen dealer and the RX3 owners club was different. The Peking duck was incredible. The chef sliced it paper thin right at our table. They had thin tofu (almost like a crepe), and the guys taught me how to eat duck properly. The deal is you put a few fresh vegetables on the tofu, you add a slice or two of duck, you add this amazing brown gravy, and then you roll the affair up like a burrito. Wow, it was delicious!
We had several rounds of toasts at dinner that night and the liquor flowed freely. I got lucky. Kong sat next to me and he schooled me in the proper way to make a Chinese toast. To show respect, you clink your glass against the other guy’s glass, but you hold your glass at a lower level so that when the two glasses meet, the rim of yours is lower than the other person’s. When the Zongshen dealer toasted me, I followed Kong’s advice, and the Chinese riders all nodded approvingly. Ah, Dajiu knows.
It was funny. Sergeant Zuo and I had made several toasts to each other, and when we touched glasses, we both tried frantically to get our glasses lower than the other, so much so that we usually crashed the bottoms of both on the table (to a hearty laugh and round of applause from everyone). Zuo was being polite; I was being completely serious (I have enormous respect for him).
It was a great night, and the next morning was even better. Those eye drops Tracy had helped me secure a prescription for did the trick. When we rode out of Beijing the next morning, my eye was good as new.
So there you have it. It was in China that I realized this electric bike thing is for real. It’s not just a fad. I think it’s going to be for real in the rest of the world, too. It is the future.
You can read our other ebike materials here, and check back here on the ExNotes site regularly. We’ll be including new ebike materials often.
I like to read the ExhaustNotes blog. In the aerospace industry, if you liked what your team created too much, we called it drinking your own bath water. The risk in drinking your own bath water was that you lost sight of what was important to the customer and you stopped reviewing your work objectively. Anyway, every once in a while I’ll read through the blog to see what looks good and what we could maybe do better. And in doing that I realized that old Arjiu and I hadn’t done a dream bike piece recently.
That brings us to today and the dream bike bit du jour: The Ideal Electric Motorcycle. I’m going to define the specs for what I think would be a riotously successful electric motorcycle. Bear with me…I think this is going to be good, which can sometimes happen even with bath water.
I guess the first order of business is to consider the current crop of ebikes’ weaknesses. That’s easy. Limited range, limited top speed, long recharge times, clunky and bulky external chargers (for some bikes), and the biggest one of all (at least to me): A near complete lack of cool. Yeah, I’m defining the specs for an ebike that would do well in the US, and the lack of cool is a very big deal. We have to address that. It’s a serious shortfall in all the ebikes I’ve seen. I mean, nobody visualizes themselves as Steve McQueen jumping a fence in Nazi Germany on an ebike. Nobody thinks of themselves as Peter Fonda kickstarting a silent ebike to take Nancy Sinatra for a ride.
Remember that old Harley ad? The one that showed a toddler in a Harley T-shirt with the this question at the bottom: When did it start for you? That ad says it all. I know for me, and I suspect for nearly all of you, our fascination with motorcycles originated when we were wee ones and we saw a motorcycle that stopped us in our Buster Brown tracks. You know what I’m talking about. A bike that made us just stop and stare, usually for a long period of time. I have two such recollections: One was a 1950’s era Harley Duo-Glide dresser (with a monstrous V-twin engine, corrugated exhaust headers, and drop-dead-deep-gorgeous paint); the other was a ’64 500cc Triumph twin (white with gold accents, pea-shooter mufflers, Triumph’s “parcel grid” on the gas tank, a matching tach and speedo, and those magnificent, sweeping exhaust headers). Yeah, those bikes defined cool. They were visually arresting things. None of the ebikes currently on the market do that for me. Like my old platoon sergeant used to say, this is something we need to talk about.
Serious cool. Visually arresting. I’m not saying an ebike should look like a Panhead, but a Panhead has a cool factor that no current ebike possesses. We need to address that. We need to find a way to have an ebike elicit the same kind of irrational, emotional, I-need-this-in-my-life response.
Okay, enough reminiscing. Let’s get to the specs. The way I see it, we need to address weight, size, top end, range, recharging, cost, comfort, and the cool factor. Here we go, boys and girls…
Let’s hit the elephant in the room first, and that’s the range issue. We need more. Nobody has a motorcycle with decent range. The City Slicker, under best case conditions (I’m talking low speeds and summer temperatures) can do about 60 miles, maybe a scosh more, and obtaining the last few miles involves really low speeds and lots of prayer. Zero claims much greater range, but every magazine that’s tested the Zero shoots those claims down with a heartfelt dismissal that goes along the lines of “in your dreams, Zero.” Nope, the range on the current crop of ebikes just isn’t where it needs to be yet. Where is that? Hey, I’m writing the spec. I’d say 250 miles. Put an ebike out there that can go an honest 250 miles at normal speeds, and I’m in. I think that should be doable at a reasonable price (I’ll say more on that in a bit). Yeah, a 250-mile range would make an ebike viable for me.
We want range, and lots of it. If an ebike had a range of 250 miles and a recharge time of 30 minutes, I could ride to Mama Espinoza’s in El Rosario, charge the bike while I was enjoying one of the old gal’s lobster burritos, and make it all the way to Guerrero Negro in a day. Where do I sign?
Next up: Recharging. Look, the bottom line is I don’t want to wait 8 hours to recharge a bike. As long as I’m writing the spec and dreaming out loud, I’d like to see a sub-30-minute recharge time. When I stop at a gas station, it’s about 10 minutes to pull up to the pump, put the bike on the sidestand, get off, take off my gloves, unlock the fuel cap, get out my wallet, put the credit card in the gas pump, enter my zip code, pick the octane level I want, take the nozzle out of the pump, peel back the nozzle’s foreskin so the fuel will flow (hey, we live in Kalifornia), put fuel in the tank, and then reverse the process. Add another rider or maybe another ten riders (if I’m on one of my Baja tours and I’m being my usual hardass self about not wasting time), and a fuel stop grows to maybe 30 minutes. I’m used to that, and that’s what I want in an ebike: Quick replenishment. That’s beyond the current state of the art, but don’t tell me we can’t do it. The solution is obvious: We need to change the state of the art.
On the recharger, I want it built into the bike, with a simple cord that pulls out of the bike to plug in someplace (kind of like you get on a vacuum cleaner). Give me a 15-foot cord and I’m good to go. I don’t want to screw around with an external power converter, because then I’d have to find a place to carry it on the bike. Build that thing into the motorcycle. Zero has the right idea on this one.
I think an 85-mph top speed is good. I know, I know…maybe you’re one of those guys: Ah need at least a 1000cc and Ah need to go at least a hunnert else they’ll run me down on the freeway. If that’s you, don’t waste any more time here; go back to posting stupid stuff on Facebook and the other forums. Here’s the deal: I’ve been riding for a few years, and the times I’ve needed to go above 85 mph are few and far between. In fact, I’ve never actually “needed” to go over 85. Adding top end takes a big bite out of an ebike. I’m willing to give up stupid top end to get more range, shorter recharge times, and less weight. So, 85 mph it is. Give me that in an ebike and I’m a happy camper.
I want a reasonable amount of stowage space so I can do Baja without bungee cords. Some folks look like they’re moving when they go on an overnight motorcycle trip. I’ve ridden with those guys. They and their bikes are like the opening Beverly Hillbillies scene with Granny on top of the pickup truck (not that’s there’s anything wrong with being a hillbilly, or a Granny, for that matter). The City Slicker has a cool stowage compartment where the fuel tank would be on a gas bike. Something like that would work just fine for me. I don’t need to change my underwear every day on a motorcycle trip.
The ideal motorcycle (not just an ebike, but any motorcycle, in my opinion) should have a seat height no higher than 30 inches, a weight of 400 lbs or less, and physical dimensions that allow for easy u-turns on two-lane roads. None of this 36-inch seat height, 800-lb silliness. The ergonomics should be straight standard motorcycle, too. No Ricky Racer, stupidly-low-clip-on, first-two-years-of-chiropractor-visits-are-free seating positions. And while I’m on doctor references, no gynecological-exam, silly-ass cruiser seating positions, either. If the designers of my ideal ebike could just get a 2006 KLR 650 and duplicate its handlebar/seat/footpeg relationship, that would be fine. My KLR had the best seating position of any motorcycle I’ve ever owned.
I’d vote for 17-inch rear and 19-inch front wheels because that combo just flat seems to work for damn near everything. I won’t be jumping any logs with my ideal ebike or trying to fly across soft sand, and that eliminates the need for a 21-inch front wheel. And everybody has all kinds of tire combos for the 17/19 setup. To borrow a phrase, why re-invent the wheel?
I want a plug-and-play bike with BITE. Not as in “bite me,” but as in built-in-test-equipment (like the aerospace industry uses). That would completely eliminate the need for a dealer (come to think of it, it would also eliminate the need for a shop manual). No obscene, inflated dealer freight and setup fees. Nope, I want factory direct. And if anything goes wrong with the bike, it shows me which module I need to remove and replace. Plug and play. I don’t feel the need to fund an on-the-job-training program for a dealer-based, wannabe motorcycle mechanic. BITE me, baby.
I think the cost of such a bike should be about $7,500. That feels about right for what a motorcycle should cost. Yeah, I know, you probably couldn’t build it for that in America. Maybe India? Or China? Or maybe you could make it in America. Source the subassemblies wherever you need to, keep the UAW and IAM snouts out of the trough, and assemble the bikes here. Create 30 to 50 US jobs at an assembly plant, preferably in Texas or New Mexico. This is doable, folks. Trust me on this. I used to run manufacturing facilities before I moved up to blogging. We can do this.
So there you have it. Do all of the above, and folks would beat a digital path to your online direct sales website. Yep, all of the above, at $7,500. That’s the ticket.
Oh, and one last must have: Electric start. Peter and Nancy (and the rest of the Wild Angels cast), my apologies in advance, but no kickers on my ideal electric bike. I know they’re cool, but this is the 21st Century.
Want to read more of our ebike stuff? Hey, just click here! It’s our new index page with all the good ebike articles we’ve done here on the blog.
More good stuff. It seems the Chairman of the Southern California Motorcycle Association, my new good buddy Gonzo, is a big fan of the ExhaustNotes.us site. We had a nice conversation yesterday, and Gonzo told me he particularly liked our story on the Jack Daniel’s visit (so much so they are running it in their newsletter this month) and our first intro piece on the 2005 Three Flags Classic.
One thing led to another…I’ve been invited to the 2019 Three Flags Classic (boy oh boy, I’m really thinking about that one), and I became an SCMA member. You should be, too, even if you’re not living here in the Southland because SCMA’s events are international in reach. You can join right here.
And one last thing: Want to win a free copy of one of our moto adventure books? You can get in on the drawing if you sign up for automatic email blog updates (the widget is in the upper right corner if you’re on a laptop, and below this article if you read the blog on a phone). We’ll never share your email with anyone else!
Wow, we sure are generating a lot of interest, a lot of hits, and a lot of comments here on the ExNotes website and blog. We appreciate the comments, folks, so please keep them coming.
I need more form-generated junk emails like I need a summer cold, and I’m willing to bet you feel the same way. That said, please consider adding your email address to the list of folks we auto-notify every time we post a new blog. We try to post every day, and I know many of you probably just check in when it’s convenient. Getting on our email list, though, will add one advantage you won’t otherwise get. On a quarterly basis, provided we get at least another 200 folks sign up each quarter, we’ll give away a copy of either Moto Colombia, Riding China, or 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM to a name drawn at random from our email database. The first winner will be announced sometime around Christmas this year. Please encourage your friends to sign up, too. If you’re already on the list, you’re eligible for the first drawing. We don’t give or sell our email list to anyone, so your address is safe with us.
More news: The next Long Beach Moto Show is just around the corner. I’ll be there, and I’ll have lots of photos of Bold New Graphics from the Big 4, and interesting new models from everyone else. And yeah, I’ll get a few photos of the young ladies in the Ducati, Harley, and Indian booths, too.
Buy it online or at your favorite newsstand!
Make sure you check the newsstands for the latest offering from Motorcycle Classics magazine. It’s titled Tales from the Road, and it’s a dynamite collection of great travel stories that MC, one of the greatest motorcycle magazines ever, has run in the past. Two of my stories are in there, and I know you’ll enjoy them.
We’re going to be adding a couple more index pages to the ExhaustNotes site, as we have already done for the Resurrections, Baja, Dream Bikes, YouTube, Tales of the Gun, and Books pages. We’re thinking the next index pages will be on e-bikes, and another one for the CSC RX4. Those areas are getting a lot of attention and a lot of hits on the blogs we’ve done, and the idea is to make it easy for you to find all of our blogs on a particular topic. And speaking of resurrections, Joe Gresh tells me we may not be too far from hearing Zed, the star of the Resurrections page, fire up. I’m excited about that. Joe’s work on that barn-find Kawasaki Z1 sure is interesting. And there’s more good stuff in the works…a feature on an old Ruger rifle in 7mm Remington Magnum for which I finally found the secret sauce (a load delivering less than 1-inch groups at 100 yards), and a special feature on something that weighs more and has less power than a full-dress potato-potato-potato cruiser (I know you didn’t think that was possible, but I have the photos to prove it).
It’s getting dark what with the time change being in effect, and my keepers are telling me I have to take my pills and get ready for bed. Stay tuned; there’s more good stuff coming your way.
Alta, a manufacturer of electric dirt bikes, very recently announced they are closing their doors. Here’s the article I read on it: Alta Motors Ceases Operations. This is interesting on several levels. Alta previously announced a strategic partnership with Harley-Davidson. I thought this would figure into Harley’s Livewire project and help both companies enormously, but I guess that isn’t the case. Last year, Alta lowered their prices substantially. I thought this would increase their sales, even though their prices were still high. Alta had the electric dirt bike niche all to themselves, and this niche seemed to be more suited to an electric motorcycle’s range limitations. Basically, motocross racing doesn’t require extended range, making Alta’s focus appear to be a well-thought-out strategy. And finally, Alta had sold a large number of bikes, and they had orders for several hundred more (see the link above).
I guess, in the final analysis, it all comes down to profitability and cash reserves, and if you don’t have enough of either, you can’t keep going. This makes Alta the second big US e-bike effort to flop (the first being the Brammo).
We are living in interesting times, and that is especially true with respect to the e-bike world. The e-bike industry is simultaneously emerging and going through a shakeout.
I have been to the mountain. In this case, I did it on Slick. Slick isn’t the last e-bike that will emerge from Chongqing’s inner chambers; he’s only the first of many.
The CSC City Slicker, the newest player in this arena, is already playing a significant role. The three big things Slick has going for it are its price, its quality (it’s world-class; see our earlier blog posts) and CSC’s well-earned reputation for customer service. The biggest challenges for CSC and the City Slicker, I think, will be overcoming the US aversion to Chinese products, the ongoing uncertainties in the US/China trade relationship, and redefining customer expectations.
Overcoming US aversion to Chinese products is the least of these issues, and personally, I wouldn’t waste a single second attempting to do so. I think CSC and Zongshen put that issue to bed with the RX3 (it’s a world-class machine, with quality as good as or better than any motorcycle produced anywhere in the world). To be blunt, anybody still singing songs about Chinese slave labor and low Chinese quality is too stupid and too ignorant to waste time listening to. They won’t change their minds, so expending any effort attempting to convince them otherwise is an exercise in futility. Hey, there are still people who think the earth is flat and that we faked the moon landing. Best to forget about them, thank your lucky stars you aren’t that stupid, and move on.
I think the current uncertainties in the US/China trade relationship will sort themselves out within the next several months. I think the tariff issue will either go away or have relatively insignificant effects, and I think much of what is going on now is posturing and positioning for a serious set of negotiations between our leaders. Our trading relationship with China is, to borrow a phrase, too big to fail.
So we’re down to that last issue, redefining expectations, and that will be the biggest challenge for CSC and the electric motorcycle market. There’s no question that CSC has a pricing advantage that is insurmountable, and I think when CSC announced the City Slicker it set a new reality in the US e-bike industry. I think Alta realized that and that it might have played a role in their throwing in the towel. I have to think that the folks at Zero are similarly eyeing the situation and ingesting huge amounts of Pepto-Bismol (and that’s using as charitable a phrase as I can think of). You might argue that Alta and Zero have (or had) bigger motorcycles with different missions, but that would be as shortsighted and wrong as arguing that all Chinese goods are low quality or the earth is flat. Yes, Zero motorcycles are bigger and have more capability, but that’s the world as it exists this instant. The world does not stand still, my friends. Do you think, even for one second, that the City Slicker is the only sensibly-priced e-bike that will emerge from Chongqing? Do you think that future e-bikes from China will be small and have the same limitations as do today’s e-bikes? I have been to the mountain, folks. The answer is no.
A street scene in Beijing. You might see 50 e-bikes for every gas-powered scooter over there. It’s a tsunami, and it’s coming this way, folks.
But I digress: Back to this expectations thing. The City Slicker is not a bike that you can hop on and ride 2000 miles through Baja with a few stops for gas (or topping off the battery). The range is limited to something like 40 to 60 miles today, depending on how fast you want to go. The challenge here is to reach customers willing to use their City Slickers like their iPhones…something you plug in and top off whenever you have a chance. That’s a different market than folks who buy internal combustion bikes. But it’s potentially a huge market, as I saw firsthand in China where zillions of e-bikes were tethered to extension cords in front of every business on every city street. More on this expectations thing: CSC recently announced the price for a replacement Slick battery, and I think it’s about $1100. Some of the keyboard commandos were choking on that number. Hey, go price a replacement Zero battery. You could buy three brand new City Slickers for what a Zero battery costs. Like I said earlier, the challenge is going to be redefining expectations. Are we up for it and will CSC market the City Slicker (and the Chinese e-bikes that will inevitably follow) in a manner that emphasizes this new reality?
Time will tell, but I know where I’d put my money.
A comparo…Slick and Zero. It was fun doing this one.
Hey, this is cool. Our story on the CSC City Slicker and Zero electric motorcycles was picked up (and quoted extensively) by a website called Electrek, an Internet magazine focused on electric vehicles. Imagine that…being quoted in a magazine. That’s cool…other people quoting me. I’m working on learning how to write gud (spelling and grammar mistakes intended, folks) because when I grow up I want to write as well as Arjiu (and that would be my good buddy and literary hero, Joe Gresh).
Okay, enough on that. I said I would someday explain the Dajiu and Arjiu business, and this is that day.
Dajiu and Arjiu in China. Yeah, we like gladiator movies…
So I’m Dajiu (which means big uncle, I’m told) and Joe Gresh is Arjiu (which means little uncle). Our Chinese buddies gave us those names on the Western America Adventure Ride (you can read about that in 5000 Miles at 8000 RPM). Joe and I were leading a ride around the western US with a group of guys from China, and they were having difficulty with both of us having the same first name. It’s funny…most of the Chinese guys had adopted English names (Hugo, Leonard, Kyle, etc.) to make it easier for us, but they were having trouble with us having the same English name (Joe and Joe). On the second day of that ride, Hugo (Zongshen’s factory guy) fixed it by giving us new names, Dajiu and Arjiu. Hugo called us all together to make a formal announcement, and he handled it in a very solemn manner. I imagine the ceremony was similar to becoming a made man in the Mafia, or maybe a Bar Mitzvah. The Chinese guys thought it was marvelous.
The pronunciation is “Dah Geo” and “Ar Jeo” and our new Chinese names stuck. Whenever we’re with the Chinese guys, they simply refer to us as Dajiu and Arjiu, as if those were our given names. That’s how we’re introduced to others in China. It’s pretty cool. You can call us that, too, if you wish.
I guess more financial mags are zeroing in on Harley-Davidson’s plans to introduce an electric motorcycle. You saw our post a week or so ago about The Motley Fool and their thoughts on the Livewire. Barron’s, another financial newspaper/advisory service, similarly reported on Harley’s woes but with a twist. 
Unlike motorcycles, I’m not fixated on doing things the old way for electrical energy storage. I run a 
in the Husqvarna that has exceeded all my expectations. The thing never goes dead (no trickle charger needed) it has tons of cranking amps (no need to use the compression release to start the bike) and it weighs nothing. You can install the thing in any position and nothing will leak out. The only drawback to the 
Battery technology is advancing rapidly with so many new combinations of lithium with something else, molten salt or rare elements only found in war torn areas. It’s hard to know which technology will win out in the end but for now, in my solar-powered shed system, lead-acid still offers the best electron storage option.
Lead-acid batteries are easily scalable and nearly any voltage or amperage desired can be achieved with large, simple jumper cables. I’m running 4, group 31, 12-volt batteries in my 24-volt system. My future plans are for 16 batteries total but there’s no rush. I can take as long as I want to get there or 8 batteries might prove to be enough for my usage level.
Most important for me: They are cheap! The four deep cycle marine batteries in my off-grid system @100 amp/hour each give me a total of 2400 watts of storage (@ 50% capacity) for 400 dollars. If I ever get to 16 batteries I’ll have 9600 watts of storage for around 1600 dollars. Compare that to 7000 dollars for 7000 watts of storage from Tesla’s Powerwall.
I’m not a Luddite when it comes to battery technology on motorcycles or power tools but for me the new designs and materials haven’t yet made sense for large, stationary storage banks at low cost. I’ll revisit the topic if Tesla reduces the price of their Powerwall by half or some new manufacturer comes up with a wiz bang combination of chemicals that outdoes ancient lead acid technology.
The Motley Fool is an investment advisory service newsletter I’ve been following since the 1990s, and my take on things is they generally have good advice and make predictions that have proven to be sound. Most recently, The Motley Fool published an article (
