Kawasaki
Honda,
Suzuki
Yamaha
But not
Aprilia
Benelli
Ducati
Husqvarna
KTM
BMW
Royal Enfield
Moto Guzzi
Moto Morini
MV Agusta
Piaggio
Derbi
Triumph
Harley-Davidson
Indian
There are probably dozens of more smaller companies around the world, all of whom will probably create their own standard.
Those four Japanese manufacturers represent 48.5% of all bikes registered in the U.K. Together could very easily set up a network of widely available battery exchange points.
No other single manufacturer has the scale to do that. Triumph are the other manufacturer in the top five (ahead of Kawasaki) and their market share is 8.83%.
Honda are the biggest motorcycle brand in the world. In the U.K. they produced 20.03% of all bikes on the road, almost as many as the next two companies combined; Yamaha and Suzuki with 21.64%
If anyone could do their own thing, Honda could. But instead they are cooperating with their biggest rivals for the same reason they did not develop their own custom combustable fuel.
I’d honestly love to see something like this over here. Even when I saw that originally I thought it was an outstanding idea.
Lets hope it comes here… They want to go green, what better way. I bet the uber/eats/deliveroo boys/girls would even buy into it.
if the big four (or any large part of the market) set one standard, the others will follow.
A large selling point is that you can change the batteries quickly, but that will only happen to those on that standard. if the other manufactures choose not to follow it then they loose a selling point, and it becomes harder to sell their bikes.
I would buy a HYDROGEN bike, as the problem with battery alone is Range
I would buy one like these
I’ve been following The Long Way Up on AppleTV and it’s totally put me off electric bikes 
I waiting for the special edition dvd/bluray to be released, but how is the series so far?
I feared this would happen. I’ve watched the first three episodes and whilst entertaining it is complete fiction, it is nothing like the true Electric Vehicle experience you get with a production vehicle.
Those Harleys are prototypes and are incomplete in their R&D cycle, they were not charging when they should do. This is not how production vehicles work. The way they were plugging them in to normal wall outlets and then finding out they weren’t charging - that’s a problem with the prototype Harleys, not the grid and not EVs as a general experience.
Any production EV will be able to charge on a normal electrical outlet. It’ll be fine for overnight charging but obviously is not as good a choice as using a fast-charger. It’s a perfectly good option though. We used it last week in Cornwall on our car when we rented an apartment and plugged the extension cable into a normal three-pin socket to charge it. Zero problems.
With a normal, working EV, it would actually be the better choice for many adventure scenarios as there’s always a plug socket available, but petrol supply is not always guaranteed as they even showed in the episode where a whole town was queuing and waiting for the petrol tanker to deliver the often-delayed and in short supply petrol.
Fiction and highly laboured and transparently scripted. I don’t know if I can bear to watch further episodes.
Itchy Boots does a much better biker’s travelogue.
I’ve not seen the program, but apparently HD started shipping Livewire’s in September 2019, the same month Ewan & Charlie started their trip. HD then put sales & production on hold due to the charging problem & told existing owners to only charge them at dealers until they were given the all clear in October 2019.
So sounds like they were either on production bikes & or at least suffering the same or similar problems that owners were experiencing with their production bikes.
No. I’m used to pulling into a petrol garage and refueling in about a minute. I’m not prepared to plug in a charger and have to wait more than 2 or 3 minutes to get another 120 miles of range.
Problem Solved if this come to fruition:
It’s progress. I’ll wait until there’s better battery life enough to do a day’s touring, prices come down and there’s more choice. A few years to go.
I hope so, but I fear that BMW, KTM, Triumph, Ducati, et all, will not use it as they didn’t come up with it, and will design their own system that they claim will be superior. We’ll end up with several systems.
I hope that they all come together to use a common system, but I fear they won’t as history has taught us that this rarely happens.
Does it?
I cannot think of a single example of any situation where a large number of manufacturers with their own competing systems have not been forced by market pressure to reduce it to two or three alternatives, if any.
The closest I can come up with is 8-bit home computing, where there were a dozen different systems. But that dropped to two with the move to 16-bits.
I do not see any vehicles that are powered by FordFuel or PiaggioPower, they all use the same petrol or diesel that every other manufacturer uses and it widely available. Because they know no one will buy their vehicles otherwise.
History shows everyone does their own thing in the early days until the cheapest and/or most widely available options become dominant that everyone else then has to be compatible else become a minor niche interest.
And we are already at the stage where those representing half of the motorcycle market are uniting around a single system, so anyone attempting to do their own thing will be squeezed out.
Only the most brand loyal will buy a car from Ford if they suddenly said you need our special fuel only available from our dealers, because the convenience of a wide network of petrol stations is more important.
The exact same will apply to bikers and electric vehicles. Why buy a Triumph you need to visit a dealer, else spend an hour waiting around a fast charger, when with a Japanese bike you would never be more than a few miles from a full charge?
And it is not as though adopting standard system for motorcycle batteries does not allow different manufacturers to still claim their particular ones are superior. Just like Esso and Shell will tell you their petrols are better than any other on the market.
Cordless tools, each has their own proprietary battery and charger. Why have I got a different PSU for each laptop? Mobile phone charging until around 2012. And, I’m still looking at you crApple. There’s 3 for you. The electricity is the same, but not the rest.
This is improving however, most are now going with USB-C - Apple included.
Only up to 60W though as far as I can find.
All comes down to greed at the end of the day really. If they don’t have proprietary tech how they going to pay those bonuses.
It frustrates me also and until legislation comes into force, making suppliers use some sort of standard going to be a long slog.
