I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it until I'm blue in the face: the hottest segment of the motorcycle market right now is electric dirt bikes. Everywhere I go, no matter what state I'm in, I see The Youths™ and others on these small, inexpensive machines. And I can't help but smile.
They are, to me, perfect little get-arounds. Cheap, lightweight, and easy to get behind, they're the easiest way of getting into motorcycling right now. I know that absolute fact will wrankle some of my colleagues who are die-hard gasoline freaks, but get in, losers, we're going 21st-century motorcycling, and the kids are gonna be all right. In fact, they're showing us the way forward.
But while they're not the first to capitalize on this push—Sur-Ron, Niu, and other startups have absolutely dominated in recent years—Zero Motorcycles is the first of the legacy motorcycle manufacturers to do so with the brand's XB and XE electric dirt bikes. And they're finally getting delivered to customer hands, which is perfect timing as these could be Zero's most important motorcycles to date.
"The delivery of the first X Line bikes is a major milestone for Zero and for the future of off-road EV performance," stated Sam Paschel, CEO of Zero Motorcycles, in the brand's press release marking the first deliveries, adding, "It’s the start of a new chapter in how adventure riding is experienced. With the XB and XE, we’re making electric motorcycles more accessible and approachable for riders everywhere."
The major milestone, however, is delivering something that features far more mass appeal than regular EV motorcycles, Zero's prior bread and butter.
Now, I have to say that I've enjoyed my time on Zero's full-size electric motorcycles. They're good machines, and my youngest son actually cried when the FX S left our care after a few months in our garage. And the DSR/X, the brand's big adventure motorcycle, is a good machine that's great both on and off road. But they share a common problem, a problem that the rest of the electric motorcycling industry faces: range.
Regular electric motorcycles have the issue in that they look like regular gasoline-powered motorcycles. As such, folks think they should go as far as regular motorcycles can. Probably rightly so, too. But with the present technology, they just can't. They're limited in range and speed, and that makes them a hard sell for the average motorcyclist. They're just not ready for primetime.
Electric dirt bikes, however, don't share that issue, and I'm talking about the perception of required range.
Dirt bikes, gasoline-powered ones, don't have big ranges. They aren't used to go far. And, generally, they aren't used for all-day affairs, but rather short, high-intensity rips. That reality, that ethos, is a perfect one-to-one swap for electric dirt bikes. You can get away with a smaller battery and shorter range because the folks buying them are already used to exactly that in their gasoline dirt bikes. As such, you've got a lot more of a potential customer base than you would with something like a DSR/X.
Likewise, as I've harped on before, you don't have the same downfalls of gasoline dirt bikes either, i.e. noise and pollution. You can run these all day long in your backyard without your neighbors getting annoyed to the point of calling the cops. And no one is mixing fuel or worrying about two-stroke fumes because there's none emanating from the bikes. EV dirt bikes have all the pros of a dirt bike with none of the cons.
So yeah, these deliveries are a big deal for Zero, as the company is entering the hottest motorcycle market around. And from my limited test of them, I think they'll be a hit.
