ElectricMotorcycleForum.com

Here is a review by Revzilla of the 2023 (?) Ryvid Anthem electric motorcycle, a brand that I have never heard of before - likely because it is a recent startup:  https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/2023-ryvid-anthem-launch-edition-first-ride-review

My local radio news station this morning reported that the Marin County (one of the wealthiest areas in California) police are complaining that parents are buying their children and teenagers "electric motorcycles" instead of bicycles. The children then go zipping around at 30 to 40 mph terrorizing neighborhoods and off-road trails. Needless to say, they don't have a license to ride them because they are not old enough. The cops are begging the county's parents to not buy these vehicles for their kids as they are dangerous and the kids don't have the skills or knowledge to ride them in traffic. (I guess they are making this request because enforcement to control this activity is too difficult for the cops and they don't want to try chasing the kids around neighborhood streets, bike paths and off-road trails.)

My neighbor bought one of these Class 3+ electric bicycles for his pre-teen boy. That thing really zips along and will pull up the hill in front of my home at 35 mph while carrying a passenger. (My Aniioki ebike chugs up the hill at only 8 mph, but it is much heavier.)

There was a kind of long and scary article in my newspaper today written by Kashmir Hill and published by The New York Times, titled "Autos share insurance reports about drivers". It says that new GM cars are collecting information on every movement that you make when driving your car. It is then sent to a NY global data  broker company called LexisNexis who then packages your driving experience into a long report (one report was 258 pages long). That report is then sent to insurance companies that contract with them.

In the article's example, the report for a driver owning a GM Bolt included 130 pages detailing the dates of his 640 vehicle trips, including start and end times, an accounting of any speeding, hard braking or sharp accelerations. The only information that the report didn't contain was where the car was driven. The article mentioned that Honda, Kia and Hyundai also collect driver information, but it was mostly about GM's OnStar Smart Driver system.

One Cadillac owner had his insurance doubled after he was unable to get seven insurance companies to provide him with a policy. An owner of a Corvette was caught speeding on a track day at a race track and apparently ended up with a black mark on his insurance driving record.

I think BMW currently collects this kind of information on their latest motorcycles and I wouldn't put it past them to share it with a data broker sometime in the future - unless the EU puts a stop to this sort of data sharing.

San Francisco just has adopted new lithium battery charging rules. However, they are limited to charging in apartments and batteries for small devices and personal mobility vehicles. Here is a link to the news story. Of course, how they would be enforced is not discussed. I assume that if there ever is a fire caused by someone charging a lithium battery in an apartment, the lawyers and insurance companies will get involved and enforce the rules in civil court after the fact: 

Friday, Saturday and Sunday will be the last three days that Hollywood Electrics will be open. They will be selling everything in their store this weekend and that will be the end of the business. They say that "everything must go". Sale hours are 11 AM to 7 PM each day, according to an email that I received this morning. They say that if your Zero Motorcycle ever needs Service you can contact Tyler Bojarsky, by appointment only, who is now located at MotoWerkz.

Here is interesting news regarding VW's "dieselgate" requirement to install 1000 DC fast chargers throughout California. Apparently they are not working very well. I guess you get what you pay for.  Page 1.

I hadn't ridden my 2018 Zero with Power Tank for the past month. When I turned it on yesterday the SOC indicated 72% (a month ago it was at 90%).  I was also greeted with warning lights. A repeating pattern of two and then five more. Pulling out my Zero manual I found that red triangle warning light pattern is noting that the bike's "Module Variance Too High". The owner's manual says to contact either Zero or my dealer to resolve the problem. Not wanting to do that, I thought about it a bit and decided that "module variance too high" likely meant that the individual battery packs were out of balance. I first checked the Zero battery app and it showed pack voltages being 1-3 mA differences. But I thought that the app might be missing something, like the Power Tank. So I plugged in the bike using the OBC and 40 minutes later the SOC was up to 80% and the warning lights were off and things are looking normal again. That saved me a trip to my Zero dealer. I assume that recharging the battery packs a bit brought them back into a better balance.