ElectricMotorcycleForum.com

I live in Chattanooga TN, bought mine in Nashville, they've dropped them, now 2 in Atlanta, gotten a few trade in offers out of curiosity, two local dealers here both offered $2500 for my 23' DSR 14.4, Knoxville dealer a few months back offered 8k, maybe I should have taken it.  I bought it to ride but admit I have a short attention span, wondering about parting it out.

Did they step on your shoe and spit in your face while they were at it? If it were out of warranty with a bad battery, it would maybe be a fair price. If there’s no market where you live, you can ship it somewhere. Even sight unseen and with shipping costs, someone will give you more than that.

It's a shame to hear that, but Roseville was probably never the right place to sell EM's. Just count the number of Harleys, pickup trucks, and big SUV's on the road in that town. Somewhere near Midtown Sacramento might have been more successful.

We shouldn't get too doom and gloomy, though. Energica has pre-sold every Experia they've produced to date AFAIK. They can't keep up with demand, even priced above $20k. The recent news reports of EV cars sitting on lots ignored the fact that sales were still up year-over-year, just not as much as forecasted so manufacturers over-produced them and it took longer to clear the inventory. EM's and EV's in general are still a fast-growing segment, even if the charging network is rotting and there haven't been any exciting new advances for several years.

In the premium EM market, I think growth isn't faster because of range concerns. To most of us, the Experia's 130 mile highway range is a big leap forward, but the average EV-curious motorcyclist wants to hear something more like 180 before they start to become interested. Enough to visit someone in a nearby city and come back without having to worry about a charging stop. And once you get those people, that's still only a small segment of the market, because now you have to get the price-conscious buyers, which is another ~5 years away after that. So EM's aren't going to replace ICE motos anytime soon, but I still expect strong growth in sales and capabilities over the decade.

I only saw high charging speeds across multiple charges on cold winter days. The rest of the time it was more like 12-14, dipping down to 9 on 100+ deg days, and as low as 6 on a particularly miserable crawl across the central valley in summer.

I do understand that AC can also slow down due to heat. My Zero SR 13.0 only ever gave me ~5.2 kW out of 7.1 kW between the OBC, 2.5 kW charge tank, and 3.3 kW ElCon charger. It would dip down to 4.4 on hot days and I couldn't touch the ElCon with my bare hands for quite a while after it was done.

Liquid cooled cells might be a bridge too far right now, but I still feel that Energica could implement better cooling if they made it a priority, even if it's just additional fans and airflow, or using additional metal mass as a heatsink. The motor and AC charger on the Experia are both liquid cooled, why not have them absorb heat from the battery during charging and shed the heat when underway?

12 kW AC might be similar or a little better than Energica’s DC in miles-per-minute of charging since my SS9 usually charged somewhere in the 9-18 kW range due to overheating and Zero’s are quite a bit more efficient in Wh/mi on the highway in my experience. Energica really needs to implement better battery cooling if they want DC charging to be a decisive advantage, IMO.

I’ve been on both sides of the AC/DC debate. When I had my SS9 13.4, I would only stop at an L2 long enough to get to a DC charger, since 3 vs 6 kW makes little difference compared to 23 kW DC. On the other hand, it would have been nice to get more range while stopping at a cafe or restaurant, and I might have taken scenic routes with AC chargers if I didn’t have to wait so long. It would also have been nice to have 6 kW on routes where there’s no DC, like the PCH from Monterey to Santa Barbara which only had a single AC charging location at a hospitality site in-between last time I checked.

One generation’s freedom is another’s prison. The Greatest and Silent Generations grew up riding trains, buses, and trolleys in cramped cities or being stuck on farms, and longed to go anywhere without being shoulder-to-shoulder with the masses of humanity. They begat the Boomers who grew up in starter homes in brand-new suburbs and could escape their coddled spaces with muscle cars and UJM’s running on cheap gas. By the time it was Gen X’s turn, the cars were not as fun but the motorbikes were awesome, and they longed to get away from their boring neighborhood lives. To all of these generations, cars and motorbikes represented freedom.

When I was growing up as an older Millenial, things had started to change. A car was still the ticket to get places on our own, but there was a lot of traffic, the price of gas was going up, and it all started to seem like a hassle. We saw cities and people start to re-think the car-only mentality of transportation and paint a few bike lanes here and restore a modicum of transit service there. By the time younger Millenials and Gen Z could drive, the whole thing seemed like a scam, and they had no idea why the older people talked about freedom when all they saw was wall-to-wall traffic, sky-high prices, and an ever-present sense of the dangers of the road that they didn’t internalize and rationalize the same way the older generations did. There were a plethora of other options now, from bikes and scooters to buses and trains that weren’t crowded and didn’t lurch and squeal like the ones their grandparents rode.

I used these modes instead of owning a car for years in San Francisco, and I wouldn’t have moved somewhere where I had to rely on a car even if you paid me double or triple. When I got into motorbikes, suddenly I realized that I could have all the mobility of a car minus being stuck in traffic or looking for parking and for less money, less environmental impact, and have a lot more fun. But if I had been born a little later and socialized into an environment where none of my friends wanted to take part-time retail jobs to afford a car, I might have just been happy with the non-motorized options. Give it another few decades and it will all come around again, I’m sure.

Alas the "saving money" part is pure fiction at this point (and has been even with ICE bikes for many years now).

Cas

I was talking about small-displacement gas scooters in that post, but I would argue that most motorcycles (gas or electric) are cheaper to own than most cars over a 10 year period, even if the purchase price is higher. My FJR’s main expense is tires, everything else is dirt cheap. When I owned a car, it cost me almost $600 per month when you added everything up and it was a Honda Fit, about the most economical car you can own. Might be different in the UK, but in California there’s no comparison. If you’re on 2 wheels and not 4, you’re saving a lot of money.

I think there’s a big gap in the market on the buy side. You have a few enthusiasts who are willing and able to buy new, and you have lots of the curious people on the sidelines who might take the plunge if they see a true steal, but not a lot of people willing to take a good solid deal on a used EM that don’t already have one.

If I were in the market right now, $12k would make me jump at the chance for a 21.5 kWh bike with an EMCE motor, so I think the OP just needs a serious buyer to come along and see the deal and it will sell at this price.