You have hit the nail on the head. The group of people described in the last paragraph of the article should be the target audience for now. Electric motorcycles, for now, are utilitarian vehicles meant to be used within a city. They are not meant for the long haul pleasure drives.
California is big and spread out. As the article indicates motorcycles are less than 0.5% of vehicle miles. And most motorcycle miles here are for pleasure, not for commuting. It’s very dangerous to ride a motorcycle on the highway with all the distracted drivers and huge vehicles with poor visibility. That’s why most motorcycle use is big groups of loud motorcycles - for safety and fun.
To be successful here, an electric motorcycle needs to be annoyingly loud, and have a range of 200 miles, with fast charging. And nobody is making that right now.
Perhaps nobody should be making an electric motorcycle for this use case. At such low quantities, maybe it makes sense to have ICE vehicles for the pleasure aspect.
They’re well suited for commuting, but for larger distances, your’re out of luck if the battery is empty after an hour or so.
You have hit the nail on the head. The group of people described in the last paragraph of the article should be the target audience for now. Electric motorcycles, for now, are utilitarian vehicles meant to be used within a city. They are not meant for the long haul pleasure drives.
California is big and spread out. As the article indicates motorcycles are less than 0.5% of vehicle miles. And most motorcycle miles here are for pleasure, not for commuting. It’s very dangerous to ride a motorcycle on the highway with all the distracted drivers and huge vehicles with poor visibility. That’s why most motorcycle use is big groups of loud motorcycles - for safety and fun.
To be successful here, an electric motorcycle needs to be annoyingly loud, and have a range of 200 miles, with fast charging. And nobody is making that right now.
Perhaps nobody should be making an electric motorcycle for this use case. At such low quantities, maybe it makes sense to have ICE vehicles for the pleasure aspect.