General Category > Industry - Electric Powered Two Wheelers

ADVRider's "Baldy" Interviews ZERO Motorcycles CEO Sam Paschel

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BrianTRice@gmail.com:
This was livestreamed this afternoon. I noticed about 15 minutes in and watched it fully:
-


The audience questions were all typical (and good, just easy for me to predict having been in this space for a few years), and I think his answers were mostly helpful.
- He did dance around battery research, aside from sensibly downplaying supercapacitors and graphite engineering changes, since they aren't production ready. I wonder what he was avoiding saying, although he did admit they're lagging a bit in their regular density updates.
- He highlighted the change in Zero marketing from being a purely budgetary/rational decision to an emotion-first message, which sounds pretty sensible to me (use the budgetary analysis to justify buying the bike you like, rather than expecting you to like a bike with a specific spreadsheet outcome).
- He definitely stuck with a line I've heard before and used, which is that to get the bike price down, the battery price and scale are the key factors; he later discussed how production scaling in the last year has been a nice problem to have, but sort of hinted that it's scary not being able to get the bikes out fast enough once the market comes to your door (so to speak).


I'm an adventure-ish rider but I don't find the Black Forest as compelling as some, apparently. I want to solve range/aerodynamics before trying to get out there fully.


Anyway, that's what I got out of an hour's discussion.

valnar:
I was there the whole time.  I think he answered the battery question in the best way he could, which means we aren't getting anything better anytime soon.  If the current Zero lineup meets your range demand, then great.  If it doesn't, next year ain't gonna be much better.

heroto:
Just curious: was the competition from HD and Energica discussed?

valnar:
Nope, he never mentioned them by name.  But he did say he was happy about more players coming into the space.

princec:
"The cost of building our motorcycles is roughly 50% on the battery"

This doesn't add up.. it doesn't explain the £5000 difference between an SR/F and an SR, for example, with the same batteries in them.

Cas :)

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