It is amazing the premium on EV in both bikes and motorcycles. I mean a honda Navi motorcycle is only $2000 somehow.

With bicycles weight and refinement is a huge issue so to get something nice you do have to use more premium materials and production techniques. If you forego low weight and refinement, there are plenty of Alibaba specials both in kit and kickstarter brand form, but if you want a 40lb middrive with 300-400w of power, 0.3-0.4kwh and a natural feeling torque sensing control, you need to open you wallet to the tune of $4k.

Motorcycles are also interesting because they're at most 1.5-2x as efficient as cars, especially on the highway (poor aerodynamics). They're small so people assume they're gas-sippers, but at 80mph a sportsbike is not giving you much more than 45mpg. A typical bike carries 3-ish gallons for an effective range of 150 miles. To give an ev motorcycle a comparable range, you're looking at close to 20kwh of battery. In China a kwh of NMC battery is said to be $120-ish, so you're looking at $2k in just battery, excluding drive unit, inverter/charger, thermal management. Conversely a motorcycle engine and transmission is typically a single unit, all bathed in the same oil and amortized over huge production runs, for a simple 80hp drivetrain, I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal cost of production is $2k for the whole thing.

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alistairSH 3 days ago | parent [-]

My Vespa Sprint 150 gets ~100mpg around town. It cost ~$5000, much of which is a brand premium. 150cc scooters from other brands (Genuine, etc) are much less.

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hnav 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

right, EV city scooters are arguably already doable, modulo annoying charging, since in places where you'd feel compelled to ride a scooter you'd be less likely to have dedicating parking with charging for it. Motorcycles though require more range to be useful, it's pretty typical to fill up at least once on every ride.

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euroderf 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How realistic timewise is plugging e-bikes into plain old wall power ? Is it any improvement over trying to charge a e-car from wall power (i.e. all-night plus) ?

	▲	alistairSH 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Depends on the battery size (which depends on bike weight). For a pedelec (actual e-bike meant to be pedaled), wall charging with a brick/wall-wart works fine. That's how they all work, at least any that I've seen. Some have removable batteries to make that easier, but the high-end models tend to have the battery wedged into the down tube and not removable (with complete disassembly of the bike). For an e-scooter or light e-moto, wall charging should work fine, but it won't be fast. YOu're looking at 3+ hours to charge. Fine for most commuters and running errands, but not suitable for a delivery vehicle - they'd have to hot-swap batteries (or complete bikes). Not sure about large electric motorcycles - there aren't that many out there right now. I'd guess similar to e-scooters, just with an even longer 10-80 or 0-100 charge period.
	▲	fragmede 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ebikes from wall power works well. Also at ebike size, batteries are swappable, so you just get two and charge one while you're using the other one.