Things a rider needs to know about Electric Motorcycles

Almost every major manufacturer, and quite a few upstarts, are beginning to reveal their bikes of the future.  It makes sense. The cost of Petrol will only continue to rise over the years. In crowded, growing cities traffic is already bordering on miserable. And studies have shown that having 25% of road traffic switch to bikes can eliminate congestion altogether! So in the future we need to have more bikes and as many of them as possible running on alternative fuel. Harley has its new Project Livewire which is set to launch in the coming years, Zero motorcycles had a record breaking sales year for 2014, Brammo has the Empulse, Yamaha has the super sexy PES1…clearly electric bikes are coming and will revolutionize the biking world. Except for Singapore. Maybe. Unless we change the infrastructure. Think about it. Where on earth can we charge these things? Sure about 5-10% live in private flats but many of those are still condos. We just don’t have garages like the US. Do they expect us to run an extension cable from the 10^th floor of our flat out to the bike? But there is one project that looks exciting. Retro-futuristic Gogoro - which looks a bit like if EVE from Wall-E had a baby with a Vespa. Scooters work well in Singapore already and this little electric bike start up features swappable batteries. So you could drive to your neighbourhood station and simply swap out the battery or possibly carry it inside for charging! This could work. But we won’t know for sure until the bike officially launches. So while early adopters will already be cruising cities in the US, electric bikes still have a few hurdles to clear in Singapore. But maybe with a bit of innovation we’ll be saving on petrol soon enough. With recent trends for motorcycle COE prices, we can all use all the savings we can find.