[hnav]

With bicycles weight and refinement is a huge issue so to get something nice you do have to use more premium materials and production techniques. If you forego low weight and refinement, there are plenty of Alibaba specials both in kit and kickstarter brand form, but if you want a 40lb middrive with 300-400w of power, 0.3-0.4kwh and a natural feeling torque sensing control, you need to open you wallet to the tune of $4k.

Motorcycles are also interesting because they're at most 1.5-2x as efficient as cars, especially on the highway (poor aerodynamics). They're small so people assume they're gas-sippers, but at 80mph a sportsbike is not giving you much more than 45mpg. A typical bike carries 3-ish gallons for an effective range of 150 miles. To give an ev motorcycle a comparable range, you're looking at close to 20kwh of battery. In China a kwh of NMC battery is said to be $120-ish, so you're looking at $2k in just battery, excluding drive unit, inverter/charger, thermal management. Conversely a motorcycle engine and transmission is typically a single unit, all bathed in the same oil and amortized over huge production runs, for a simple 80hp drivetrain, I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal cost of production is $2k for the whole thing.

[alistairSH]

My Vespa Sprint 150 gets ~100mpg around town. It cost ~$5000, much of which is a brand premium. 150cc scooters from other brands (Genuine, etc) are much less.

[hnav]

right, EV city scooters are arguably already doable, modulo annoying charging, since in places where you'd feel compelled to ride a scooter you'd be less likely to have dedicating parking with charging for it. Motorcycles though require more range to be useful, it's pretty typical to fill up at least once on every ride.

[euroderf]

How realistic timewise is plugging e-bikes into plain old wall power ? Is it any improvement over trying to charge a e-car from wall power (i.e. all-night plus) ?