One of my favourite quotes springs to mind:
“There are two kinds of fools. One says, “This is old, and therefore good.” And one says, "This is new, and therefore better.”
― John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
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That’s a great story.
I think Jay is correct that we will adapt from a transportation point of view but I lament the soon to be passed petrol age.
I wonder if the personal transport that we’ve enjoyed and the ability to travel overseas will wane leading to a less mobile workforce and fewer travel opportunities.
Maybe this is the golden age before our horizons are closed in?
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I hope not, I’ve just bought a bloody GS.
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You’ve bought 3bikes in last year… Safe to say by 2035, you’ll have had a few more GSes
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But I remember watching knight rider. He would call the car on his watch and it drove itself to him. That was years ago don’t tell me it wasn’t real!
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It is great when the Knight Rider theme comes on the shuffle while riding on an open road. Although Pop Goes Bach (the theme from Ski Sunday) is even better.
Heh. Maybe they should be the last three petrol bikes! Keep the BMW until it needs to be converted to hydrogen or something, heh.
I’m so for EV bikes and I’m itching to get one, the biggest hurdle for me has been and still is the range.
As a few have mentioned they need to get one that can cover off motorway mileage that for me puts most bike I’d look at our of range (no pun intended).
For me being able to fuel at home would save me alot of time over a year of not having to keep stopping at petrol stations.
Think the DRS from zero had an impressive range until you looked at motorway mileage it then just became borderline for me, I’d need one which would give me a guaranteed 150 miles, that would cover any diversions on the occasion I might need to. At 120 which is roughly best for me at the moment there is no wiggle room at all.
Interesting fact, electric vehicles were actually being used before combustion! Wonder how things would have turned out if they’d carried on with development…
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The chances are the powers that be will legislate against the private motorist. That’ll be the day when the whole public transport system is electrified including taxis, buses, trains, boats and planes.
This. And more.
It’s only a small step from everyone today ‘buying’ vehicles on PCP or HP deals, swapping them every couple of years, to a full scale transition to rental car schemes like ZipCar etc. where you only pay to use a car when you need to. Once fully autonomous vehicles arrive, you’re not even buying a car to drive, you’ll essentially just renting an autonomous taxi to get you from A to B.
With the higher costs of electric and self driving vehicles, private ownership will be less feasible, so a PAYG/rental scheme makes far more sense. Lifespan of batteries, any maintenance, city parking and insurance on high value vehicles suddenly becomes a non-issue, as you won’t own the vehicle. It’ll just be a pod you call up on your mobile to take you to your destination.
Give it 50 years and the ownership of private vehicles you actually drive yourself and fill with flamable fluid will be a confined to a niche pastime of rich collectors and sentimental oldies who wheel out their classics for odd ralleys, track days and shows. In the same way we view those who today drive steam traction engines…
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I live in a block of flats, the underground parking isn’t safe enough for me to park a petrol motorbike in, let alone park a charging station that would be vandalised.
Think cat convertor theft is bad now? If we electrify everything the pikies will just steal all the charging cables.
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So, everyone seems to be rushing down the electricity track! Whilst it is great at powering vehicles, electicity is very poor at transmission, storage and infrastructure and it’s widespread use for vehicles will require every household to have a vehicle charging point, as outlined in this thread, pretty difficult for apartment dwellers. Electricity seems to be being pushed because big-noise Elon Musk is promoting it, guess what, he wants to make money out of electric vehicles!
A viable alternative is hydrogen. This can be generated anywhere there is plentiful electricity, e.g where there is lots of sunshine, and shipped around the world by existing tried and tested distribution systems, perhaps themselves hydrogen-powered. In vehicles, hydrogen is consumed in a fuel-cell to produce electricity which powers the vehicle. There are no emissions except water. There are already fuel-cell vehicles on the road - the MET had a couple of fuel-cell Suzuki Burgmans on trial a few years ago and Toyota have fuel-cell cars here as well. By adopting hydrogen all the range and ‘refuelling time’ problems disappear and, instead of rocking up to a Shell station for unleaded we could be taking on a tankful of hydrogen. I think the politicians and others are fixated on electricity which will prove to be a dead-end. For one thing, the UK does not have enough generating capacity to meet anticipated demand.
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I guess we are just going to have the same discussion every few months. Swappable batteries, hydrogen, it is at least the third time I remember these all coming up.
Hydrogen power has been under development since the 1960s and still nowhere near ready for mainstream use.
And the current methods for producing hydrogen release more CO2 than the production of electricity. Over 90% of hydrogen production comes from fossil fuels. So as one of the main arguments for switching to electric vehicles, hydrogen fails on that point.
Sure, hydrogen can be produced more sustainably and in the future that will become more cost effective, but so will battery technology improve. Audi scrapped development of hydrogen cars because they say it will take decades for the world to be able to produce sufficient quantities of hydrogen cleanly for use in vehicles.
Also green production of hydrogen tends to require electricity too, so the limits of power generation apply just as much to providing hydrogen as it does to powering cars.
Hydrogen fuel stations are also more expensive to provide compared to petrol, diesel, and charging points. And the cost of hydrogen is about four times that than electricity per mile. And it is not something that will simply go down with greater demand because the U.K. (and the rest of the world) does not have enough generating capacity to meet that demand.
Both hydrogen and batteries have problems to which the answer is simply “technology will improve.” And both are included by governments, including our own, as part of their zero emission strategies. Including the availability of grants to support new production facilities and fuel stations.
They are even supporting hydrogen powered trains.
Hydrogen-electric is viable for road-vehicles, for sure, but that doesn’t mean Hydrogen-electric is a better fit than battery-electric. If you tally up some pros and cons, battery-electric seems to come out on top quite often - and industry has bet billions on it too.
Battery:
+ No standing around fuelling the vehicle, you leave it charging whilst you do something else, i.e. sleep, work, eat, shop, relieve yourself 
+ Ability to charge it literally anywhere. Electricity is everywhere already. Fast chargers are just a convenience.
+ Essentially no servicing required
- Batteries are heavy, affects handling (will improve with development)
- Batteries do lose a little capacity over time (will improve with development)
- Batteries are not well recycled atm (will improve with development/adoption)
Hydrogen:
+ Er, I’m struggling here, someone help me out?
- Fuel cells are complicated, need periodic servicing
- Require fuelling, with all the petrol station negatives we currently have to live with
- Hydrogen is extremely flammable. I wouldn’t want to crash a hydrogen bike
- Hydrogen is inefficient, you need to generate electricity, then split atoms, then transport it, then consume it in a fuel cell, which isn’t totally efficient. This all results in a lot of extra infrastructure, vehicles on roads, boats on seas, etc. and loss of energy through this supply chain.
Hydrogen-electric for other applications, such as power storage/generation, ships, planes, sure, maybe, but it’s not an especially good candidate for road vehicles imo. There’s far more R&D legs in battery-electric IMO, especially when you think what batteries could look like in the future, i.e. solid state, capacitive, quantum-energy sinks, etc.
Come on Jay, that’s a bit biased. On a trip somewhere you don’t want to do something else all the time. Plenty of times I’ve wanted a 5min stop and to do that have to fuel quickly. Not plug and wait half hour.
As for electricity being anywhere, not according to this review in the Guardian. Especially in picturesque places he mentions queueing half an hour or more to charge for half hour or more…
I’m not saying EVs are bad or worse than hydrogen (on balance they probably are better), but it’s not all rosy and fine on the EV side.
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Honestly, that’s not my experience and we have a three year old EV. The new ones charge much faster. Really, really quickly and before long they’ll no doubt charge quicker than you can fill up your fuel tank, queue, pay and get back on your bike.
We’ve driven all round the UK and some of Europe and not had any issues, and that’s today, it’s only going to get easier as more fast-charge spots appear (there’s already more chargers than petrol pumps) and charging times reduce.
The absolute worst case we’ve had to wait is one hour, for a full charge when we drove in one slog to Newcastle. At that point I needed a break, so no big deal. Current cars it might be 30 mins, before long it’ll be sod-all mins
The vast majority of the time I’m not waiting for the vehicle. I park, plug in, do whatever it is, like grab a coffee, sandwich, go to the loo and by the time I’m back at the car, it’s got enough charge to get to the destination. This convenience factor is what does it for me. Standing around, fuelling a vehicle? Come on!
I think we need to keep an eye on where things are going, not where they are right now.
Fore sure though, at the moment, electric bikes are a far harder sell. The battery/charger tech needs to improve before I would consider replacing my GS with an electric bike.
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I’m going to shut up now. I don’t want to be accused of being a zealot
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I’m all for electric bikes
I looked at the Energica before I brought the BMW
its just the range that kills it for me, but t
when you look at the advances in the last few years electric bikes will catch up soon
Nah not that’s just an EV fanboy 
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I could write a long point-by-point post (many of which would be “why do B.E.V.s get a ‘will improve with development’ caveat but not F.C.E.V.s?”) but will instead just say “good old lithium.”
Good old inflammable lithium without special engineering requirements on how it is stored, that does not cause long-term health impacts if exposed, and when it burns can be easily extinguished by firefighters.