Cycle News

VOL. 50 ISSUE 27 JULY 9, 2013 P65 >>The new model gets a beefier swingarm, but the rear brake could be better. >>The rear shock is adjustable and offers up 7.6 inches of rear-wheel travel. >>Final drive is via a Poly Chain Carbon belt. when I grabbed a handful from a light. I wanted to feel safe on the freeway that I could zip past the make-up applying supermodel before she sent her next text. Basically I wanted to go farther. Faster. Damn it, I wanted to beat a Prius in a straight fight. Well, get in line. In the world of electric motorcycles that's what everyone wants (okay, not the part about the Prius). More speed and more mileage… the Holy Grail of electric motorcycles. But in the two years since I sampled the 2011 DS, Zero has taken massive steps toward exactly that. They've made the Zero go farther and they've made it go faster. They've basically given me what I asked for. And, yes, it will smoke the rear tire. To be honest, I had my doubts when Zero dropped off the DS for our test. Then I rode the bike. And, voila… no more doubts – at least in terms of its performance prowess. But I still had more questions than answers. The newest incarnation of the Zero does take your breath away and it does accelerate hard enough that you do feel it in your chest – even if you don't hear it. And it's fun to ride… it was before and it is even more so now. But what about the mileage? That's the part that still made me squirm. That's the part that chapped my hide the last time I tested the Zero. I'd read the press kit, saw that it was capable of traveling up to 126 miles. At what speed? It meant nothing to me. I'd seen this movie before and the last time it resulted in me and the 2011 DS getting picked up by a friend with a pick-up truck about .46 of a mile from home. Claims are claims… and I didn't care about 126 miles at whatever non-hooligan speeds that would come at. I wanted 60 miles at normal speeds, normal traffic, normal roads. Normal dude riding it. So what does a guy do when he wants to find out if the new DS will do just that? He gives it to his associate Kit Palmer to ride home from Irvine to Redlands. He sends him on his merry way and then he prays. And waits. Then the text arrives. "Made it. 62 miles. No problem and this thing is a lot of fun." That's all I needed to know. Later that night, Kit charged it up and the next day he rode it back to work, this time he got it down to just a few bars on the meter as his speeds where higher than on the way home when he was lane splitting, etc. Again, he was smiling. And, again, he'd made it 62 miles. To me that's a game changer. The bike was already fun, but now it was faster and it was capable of going over 60 miles while ridden fairly hard. Now it really could be thought of as an option to the other bikes that fill our shop. So how did Zero get it to this point? Well, the DS is based on the 2013 Zero S. That means it comes with the new Z-Force motor and with Zero's claims of being 93 percent more powerful with 62 percent more torque (a claimed 54 horsepower and 68 foot pounds of torque) and 13 percent greater range in the city.

• Cover