I’ve made much of late of the fact that electric motorcycles don’t work very well for serious motorcyclists. Oh, electric scooters are most assuredly a good idea, especially if they’re built with the exchangeable batteries that Honda and others have proposed. 

Ditto battery-powered motocrossers. Full-on, race-oriented berm-busters like Stark’s Varg with minimal cycle time — 20-minute motos — combined with prodigious torque and instantaneous throttle response are manna from heaven for berm-busters. 

But that’s about it. Electric enduro bikes won’t work because they need to aimlessly wander the woods. Ditto race bikes — unless there’s a high-powered DC fast charger at your local track. On-road, anything battery-powered meant to be ridden further than a scooter will be severely hampered by their paltry range and slow charging. Despite what optimistic public relations mavens claim, the most you can reliably get out of a battery-powered motorcycle is about 160 kilometres, which means every hour or so of riding needs to be followed by almost as much time charging. There are literally no exceptions to this rule.

Worse yet, there is not likely to be a solution anytime soon. Taking the automotive route — simply building in bigger batteries — won’t work, ’cause all bikes would start weighing as much as Bagger Harleys. Swapping batteries on the highway won’t work simply because we don’t have the numbers to warrant the number of battery-swapping stations that would be needed to serve all our wanderlust. But we’ve already discussed all that in The Last Word. Indeed, this is a dead horse already well flogged. 

So, why bring it up again, you ask?

Well, as it turns out, amidst all the turmoil that has been Donald Trump’s second regime so far — tariffs on China; tariffs on us; actually, tariffs on pretty much everyone — nobody noticed California’s notorious Air Resources Board (CARB) trying to sneak an electric motorcycle mandate under the radar. Along with tighter emissions controls for ICE-powered bikes, it basically states that 10 per cent of all road bikes have to be ZEMs (Zero Emission Motorcycles) by 2028, and 50 per cent by 2035.

The problem, if you’re a keen observer of the bikes you see on the road, is that seeing an actual ZEM out on the open road is a little like spotting a snow leopard. Reporters are called, pictures are taken and you just have to stop and ask questions, right? 

The fact remains that full-sized electric motorcycles — not the various electric scooters being peddled and certainly not those infernal electric bicycles that are the scourge of sidewalks — are as rare as hen’s teeth. By California’s own reckoning, only 90 ZEMs were sold in the whole state in 2019 — the last year their 2023 report studied. That’s just a little more than 0.2 per cent of road motorcycles sold in the Golden State that year and the numbers were actually declining for the three years before the study’s research. 

Nor is there likely to be any massive surge in ZEM sales. Livewire can’t sell electric despite the massive investment from Harley-Davidson (it sold but 99 motorcycles worldwide in the 3rd quarter of 2024), BMW’s CE-02 are neither plentiful or nor full-sized motorcycles and, well, apart from Zero, there really isn’t even a semi-successful electric motorcycle company extent. 

Cake is gone. So is Alta. Even more telling is that Energica — who gained a world of publicity with their monopoly of Moto E — is now bankrupt. And don’t even get me started on Damon; months of constant boasts that the electric superbike was soon upon us has turned into silence now that they’re already supposed to be in production. In fact, of the almost 40 electric motorcycles listed for sale in CARB’s 2023 study, only about 10 are still for sale today. The only successful ZEM maker is, again, Zero and it’s doubtful even they sell 5,000 units a year worldwide. Electric motorcycle manufacturers are notorious for not divulging actual sales numbers, mostly, one presumes, out of embarrassment.

The point is that full-sized electric motorcycles of the cruiser, adventure, touring and even sportbike variety are just not ready for prime time and, considering how long they have been under development — Zero got its start just two years after Musk took over Tesla — there doesn’t seem for much hope the industry will hit its 2028 or 2035 quota. Actually, considering that aforementioned battery-weight-versus-range bugaboo, the jury’s out whether we’ll ever see battery-powered motorcycles with the same range-versus-weight ratio that pretty much anything gas-powered now enjoys. 

The Last Word once did a calculation that found for a Formula E bike to enjoy the same power, weight and ability to do the same number of laps as a MotoGP bike, batteries would need to see nearly an eight-fold increase in energy density. None of us rides MotoGP, but the same principle would hold if you compared, for instance, Energica’s once-much-vaunted Experia adventure tourer to a BMW R1300 GS Adventure with a 30-litre tank.

What makes the recent introduction of these rules even more surprising is that California’s right to have its own state-controlled emissions standards is under threat from you-know-who, Donald Trump. The 47th president has made EV mandates legislation non grata in his second term and, while I won’t bore you with legalese like the “major questions” doctrine or “state sovereignty,” understand that the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to grant California its famed “waiver” is under threat like no other time since the late ‘60s. In other words, CARB’s ZEM mandate might disappear as suddenly as was it was released. 

Even electric motorcycles are caught in today’s left-versus-right political polemics. We’ll let you know where this mess ends up.