Motorcycle News & Reviews

Electrifying the performance bike world

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Category: Motorcycle News & Reviews (Misc)

Written by Suzie Healey

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I thought I was so clever. So cutting edge in getting a message across.

But it seems, when you're trying to promote a street legal, high performance electric motorcycle, image means much more than the roar of exhaust coming out of your pipes.

And having John Lloyd, a vice-president at California based Zero Motorcycles ( zeromotorcycles.com),pose recently, in front of the company's new urban street motorcycle-- the Zero S-- with a AAA battery, wasn't cutting it.

"I don't want people to think it runs on Duracells," he worried.

Instead, he began to pull out the battery box from the guts of one of his Zero X electric dirt-bikes-- part of the proprietary Z-Force power pack, which is melded to an aircraft grade alloy frame on both the dirt and street models.

"This is no (AAA battery). It's cutting edge technology that finally makes a bike like this possible," he boasted.

Zero Motorcycles was launched last year, and managed to sell out its production of dirt-bikes. Now, it has two-wheeled into the Canadian and European markets with the Zero S, an electric performance street machine that looks modern enough and sounds -- well, it hardly makes a sound.

Priced at just under $10,000 U. S. -- as of this writing, the company was still tinkering with a Canadian number -- the bike arrives at a good time in a market faced with concerns over the environment and even the future of the auto sector. But Canadians, unlike Europeans, have been slow to hug ecofriendly bikes, which have largely been defined as scooters or custom projects.

"The Zero S is a high performance motorcycle that also happens to be fully electric and green," company founder and inventor, Neal Saiki, said in a news release, announcing the bike's recent launch into Canada. "Our goal from the beginning was to engineer a high performance electric urban street motorcycle that would change the face of the industry." To read the rest of the article: http://www.brantfordexpositor.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1567264

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