Based in Santa Cruz, California, Zero Motorcycles Inc. is an American Electric Motorcycle manufacturer established in 2006 by a former NASA engineer, Neal Saiki. The company prides itself on combining the best of traditional motorcycles with today’s most advanced electric powertrain technologies. With each bike model, Zero tries to optimize it from the ground up to make the most of its Z-Force electric powertrain.
According to its mission statement, Zero is committed to delivering exceptional value, performance, and fun for its customers. One of Zero’s most versatile and capable bikes, able to fulfill this mission, is the DSR/X. The Zero DSR/X is an adventure touring bike that has a lot of qualities, and some minor flaws. One of them is precisely what Zero claims it’s its biggest strength, and that is its range. Advertised as having a 180-mile range, it’s necessary to dig in a little further to realize this is the city range. Riding at highway speeds (55 MPH), that range drops to 107 miles, and if you take it a bit faster, holding it at a steady 70 MPH, you get 85 miles of estimated range.
Range Anxiety On The Highway Is A Reality
Range anxiety can become a problem if the bike is to be used on long trips while carrying two people plus luggage. Also, there is no measurement standard for off-road range, so Zero’s word needs to be taken at face value here since they claimed they’ve done a lot of off-road testing with its professional riders and the total range always seemed to fall somewhere between 155 and 200 miles depending on riding conditions. Gladly, however, Zero has a partnership with Backcountry Discovery Routes (BDR) which create motorcycle adventure maps and fine-tunes these routes to existing charging infrastructure for Zero’s electric motorcycle customers. In addition, Zero suggests the use of certain apps to help riders always find Zero-compatible chargers as close to them as possible.
Other than that, the DSR/X is a pretty solid bike. It weighs 544 pounds, which is in line with other big ICE adventure bikes out there with the advantage of having a lower center of mass, as most Battery Electric Vehicles (BEV) do with the allocation of the heavy battery packs as low as possible in the chassis of the vehicle. This means the 100 horsepower (75kW) motor with a healthy 166 pound-feet of torque gets the DSR/X up and running pretty fast, all the way up to a top speed of 112 MPH, with a sustained top speed of 100 MPH. Perhaps the greatest advantage any BEV has over ICE competitors is the immediate availability of the max torque. Having strong responses on tap in off-road situations is incredibly helpful, and that is something that the Zero permanent magnet AC motor does rather well.
You Can Buy A Fast Charger
The battery has a max capacity of 17.3kWh, and Zero offers through its dealer network an upgrade charging module that can charge the bike up to 95% of its power in approximately 1 hour. If the customer desires to do his charging at home, the DSR/X can be charged in a 110V outlet overnight taking approximately 10 hours. The integrated charger is a 6.6 kW unit.
The transmission is clutchless direct drive unit and uses a reinforced 25 mm wide belt which uses Gate’s mudport technology to help clear debris and make it more reliable in off-road use. The front and rear Showa suspensions offer 7.48 inches of travel and Bosch’s Advance Motorcycle Stability Control technology is fully implemented in the Zero DSR/X. From combined braking to hill hold control to different ride modes, everything available is there to make the bike safer for the rider in all sorts of different situations.
Pricing Might Be The Biggest Problem
Aside from the lower highway range, MSRP is where the wheels start to fall off a bit on the DSR/X. Its starting price is a hefty $24,495. You can get a whole lot of bike in the ICE segment for that kind of money. And with only 3 percent of registered vehicles on the road in the USA today being motorcycles, which means they’re only a small part of the problem in terms of emissions, a full ban on ICE motorcycles might be farther away than expected.
Zero Motorcycles offer a 2-year standard motorcycle warranty and a 5-year power pack warranty, their bikes are well-built, and in the end, the choice between an electric motorcycle or an ICE one will probably come down to two factors. First, if money is not an issue, buying an electric bike might be in order. Second, it will probably come down to how they feel as opposed to riding a traditional ICE motorcycle. Is the immediate torque, low-end performance, and dynamics made possible by the weight distribution that much better than an ICE motorcycle? There’s no doubt it is different. But it is necessarily better overall? And what about the range or how the battery is going to perform under stressful situations such as extreme cold or heat? Considering the motorcycle market in the US, until the price of electric motorcycles comes down, we won't be seeing too many on the road.