All photos by Alex Washburn
You have no idea how fast traffic moves on an interstate until you’re trundling along at 65 mph. At that speed, everyone is whizzing past, including what looks like someone’s grandmother out for a drive in her Buick LeSabre.
I am creeping along, relatively speaking, to conserve energy because I’m on an electric Zero DS motorcycle and I’m a long way from home. I’d gotten ambitious — riding to Napa seemed like a good idea when I’d set off — and the 70-mile trip home will require every last bit of energy in the battery.
I watch the needle on the speedo dip below 60 as I start up another hill and decide to get on the throttle. I figure it’s better to risk running out of juice than risk getting run down by a semi. As I ponder this, something Ben Rich told me goes through my mind.
“We don’t have a range issue,” the high school physics teacher told me after riding across the country on an electric Zero S. “We have a charging issue.”
Rich knows this first-hand. He made a 3,500-mile trek from Charleston, South Carolina to Santa Monica, California, in 44 days — nearly 10 times longer than someone straddling a Harley burning dino juice. His lackadaisical pace had less to do with the range offered by the bike’s 11.4 kilowatt-hour battery and more to do with the speed with which we can “fill” a battery and find a place to do so.
“The tack people are taking is to throw a bigger battery at the problem,” Rich says. “I think they should throw a bigger charger.”
He has a point. There may be no bigger impediment to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles — be it a motorcycle like the DS or a car like the Nissan Leaf — than range. It’s more than an Achilles heel for the technology. It’s a pox on freedom, limiting our ability to go anywhere and do anything on a moment’s notice.
I’ve been using the Zero as my primary transportation for two months now, and the reality is, I can’t just throw a leg over the seat and head out for the day. I have to plan everything. I have a strict route. I have to keep tabs on how far I’m going and how fast I’m going and how much juice I’ve got and where the next charging station is. It’s a bit of a buzzkill, one that was driven home last weekend when I rolled into my driveway with a scant three percent of juice left on the DS’ battery.
Range anxiety sucks. But not as bad as a slow charge.
“I would gladly reduce a bit of battery life for a bigger charger,” Rich tells me a few days after his trip. I’m starting to agree… to an extent.
Rich was one participant in a four-vehicle team organized as part of the Ride the Future Tour, a traveling troupe of electric vehicle proponents crossing the country in an attempt to boost EV awareness. Rich and his Zero were accompanied by a smattering of support staff, along with a Nissan Leaf, a Xenon electric scooter, and — most daft — an A2B e-bike. They were crossing the country to make a point, and in the process snag a few Guinness World Records.
His insights about range and charging stuck with me.
So far, most of my trips have been commuting to work. If I’m riding the bike like I stole it, the 41-mile highway trip zaps about half to two-thirds of the juice from the 11.4 kWh battery pack. Zero says you’ll get about 61 miles if you’re humming along at a constant 70 mph, so I consider that my ceiling. If a trip starts knocking on the 60-mile mark, I get nervous.
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aWashburn / WIRED</p> <p><img src="https://more-deals.info/images_blogs/autopia/2013/08/ZeroSide2.jpg%22%3E%3C/p%3E <p class="caption">The Zero app lets you keep track of charge status and other inf
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u.wired.com/images_blogs/autopia/2013/07/current-affai
arpng"> <p class="pull-quotes padding-top margin-top-small">Range anxiety sucks. But not as bad as a slow charge.</p> <p>To keep anxiety in check, the Zero app on my phone provides more granular data on the state of charge than the 10 bars delineated on the bike’s “fuel” gauge. Combined with Google Maps and the Chargepoint app that lets me find the closest charging station or a pl
tdestination, I always know exactly how much energy I’ve got and where to go when the charge needle heads south.</p> <p>My pangs of range anxiety could be nearly eliminated if charging the pack took less than an hour. Unfortunately, the Zero DS that I’m riding needs more than seven hours to fully charge. The DS uses a standard 110-volt cord that looks like the one plugged into your desktop computer. That makes it easy to plug your bike in alongside your phone, but it
ns you can’t draw nearly as much juice as the dedicated
-t lines cars like the Leaf or Chevrolet Volt use.</p> <p>And that means short day trips turn into long weekends.</p> <p>Zero could alleviate this by using a stouter onboard charger or wiring the bike for 220, but the engineers and execs behind the bike say the 1.3 kW charger under the seat is sufficient. They argue that most riders use their bikes for short trips and commuting. They also note that everyone has access to a 110-volt outlet and giving the bike a bigger charger or a 220-volt, charging st
niendly J1772 adapter would add weight and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to the already hefty price tag.<
<alid points, one and all, but it means the DS — even in its top-spec, $15,995 form — is hobbled out of the gate.</p> <p>Yes, you can buy a CHAdeMO adapter from Zero to bring the charge time down to an hour, but that system, which can deliver up to 62.5 kW of high-voltage direct current into the pack, is so new that finding a station that supports it is next to impossible. And at $1,799, it is more than cost prohibitive. And yes, you can daisy-chain two of Zero’s $600 Quick Chargers together to drop the recharge time to a more re
atwo hours (four hours if you’re using only one), but do you want to lug all that extra weight in your backpack?</p> <p>Zero isn’t alone with this issue. Every automaker producing an EV is attempting to balance battery capacity with weight and charge times. And because of the lithium ion chemistry that makes up the batteries, you can only throw so much juice into the pack before the cells begin to degrade. Even Tesla, with its ability to top up the Model S’ 85 kWh pack in an hour with
poke Supercharger stations, warns against using it too frequently and damaging the hyper-expensive battery pack.</p> <p>No one in the auto or battery biz that I’ve spoken too thinks we’ll see a massive revolution in energy storage for at least another decade. So for now, that leaves us with a handful of EVs that average around 80 miles to a charge. Something has to
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app at the ready.</p>
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