CES, as its critics are wont to complain, is getting harder and harder to distinguish from a car show. And this year was no exception. In the Las Vegas Convention Center’s West Hall, where mobility was the theme, the spectacular collection of vehicles on display made it clear that the revolutions in electricity, autonomy, or both, have spread beyond passenger cars to include tractors, construction vehicles, fire trucks, garbage trucks, mail trucks, airport-ground vehicles, and even long-haul semitrucks.
And yet one huge category still seems stuck in first gear: motorcycles. Sure, CES 2025 had its share of e-cycles, but the two-wheel stunner of the show was, in the words of one automotive news site, a “big dumb bike.” But what a bike. Imagine sitting on top of a 2-liter, 154-horsepower, 8-cylinder engine mated to an 8-speed dual-clutch transmission. The Souo S2000 is from Great Wall Motor (GWM), the eighth largest carmaker in China, the same country on a trajectory to dominate electric and autonomous vehicles of the four-wheel variety.
To be sure, electric motorcycles are an impressively diverse and exuberant market. Fans rave about their quiet, rocketlike acceleration and ethereal handling. “Riding a totally silent off-road motorcycle is a genuine joy, because you regain the solitude you’re looking for in nature,” says Michael Frank, who writes about cars and motorcycles and has extensive experience riding both electric and internal-combustion motorcycles. He adds that the silence has a practical benefit on the road, too: The engine noise from a combustion motorcycle “is a hazard at lower speeds, and takes away an important sensory input where you can hear an approaching car.”
But electric motorcycles meant for highway cruising are a category thrashed mercilessly by the laws of physics. Even a large motorcycle can’t hold enough batteries to get the kind of range now common even in entry-level EVs. The problem is compounded by poor aerodynamics: Motorcycles have high coefficients of drag in comparison with those of cars, so at highway speeds the battery drain is grisly. On the highway, a high-end US $25,000 electric motorcycle, such as Harley Davidson’s Livewire One or Zero Motorcycles’ DSR/X, has a range of about 160 kilometers (100 miles). It the kind of range that not even an eVTOL maker could get excited about. Evoke Motorcycles’ 6061-GT claims 500 km (300 miles) of range, but that’s for mixed city–highway riding, and the bike looks like a refrigerator with wheels and a seat.
The US $23,000 Zero Motorcycles DSR/X electric motorcycle has a range of 288 kilometers in city riding, but that drops to about 160 km (100 miles) on the highway.Zero Motorcycles
Another problem with big electric cruisers is that relatively few of them can fast-charge, Frank notes. So their owners “might be stuck recharging only overnight or, often, for a few hours. That’s fine for a commuter, but it’s really problematic if the goal is to take a tour with your buddies,” Frank points out.
Are you feeling the passion yet?
Against that backdrop, a gasoline-burning beast of a motorcycle seems to make sense, even coming from the country doing more than any other to electrify mobility. “We wanted to make the most powerful, the best motorcycle in the world,” declares Weixing Niu, an engineer at GWM who worked on the Souo S2000. “In our opinion, motorcycling is a culture,” he adds. “Motorcycle riders love the sound of the engine. It makes them excited. You can feel the passion. With an electric motorcycle, you cannot feel the passion,” he insists.
An initial manufacturing run, last October, of 288 motorcycles sold out in 15 minutes, Niu reports, at an average cost of RMB 238,000 (about US $32,500). The S2000 burns about 6 liters per 100 km (roughly 39 miles per gallon), Niu says, which is about the same fuel efficiency as a Honda Goldwing, the bike against which the S2000 seems designed to compete.
On a Wednesday afternoon, a CES attendee from the San Francisco area, Patrick Rossi, happened by the crowded GWM booth in West Hall. Asked if he was a motorcyclist, he responded, while gazing longingly at the bike, “No, but this could make me become one.” Sitting on the big red machine, Rossi, who works for Dolby Laboratories, says, “It’s pretty amazing. It makes me think we have to bring Dolby Atmos to motorcycles. Wow!” (Atmos is Dolby’s spatial audio technology, first used in cars in 2021.)
So what’s the way forward for electric motorcycles? Will we ever get a truly long-range (at highway speeds) electric motorcycle? Or will big, two-wheel highway cruisers remain a bastion of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future?
The next big thing in automotive traction batteries will undoubtedly be solid-state batteries, which will store more energy per unit volume than today’s lithium batteries. ProLogium Technology Co., which has already begun manufacturing lithium ceramic batteries, is reporting a volumetric energy density of 811 watt-hours per liter.
It’s not bad, but it won’t let motorcyclists head for the hills. Tesla’s 4680 cells, for example, are already in the range of 622 to 650 watt-hours per liter.
Maybe the “big dumb bike” isn’t so dumb after all.
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