Actually, it's not really "getting" old. I'm pretty tired of it.
Three weeks ago tomorrow, Friday 1/26/2018, I was enjoying a nice ride home from work, thinking pleasant thoughts about the weekend ahead, when my bike lost power. I was in the fast lane of the freeway, on a long overpass with virtually no left shoulder and a 90-foot drop to the San Diego riverbed below, when the power cut out in an instant and the dashboard went dead. Long story short, I managed to coast to the end of the overpass where there was a shoulder, got off the freeway safely and succeeded in not dying.
The bike is still in the shop, at the San Diego Zero retailer who I'm not going to name. They replaced the MBB (twice, actually, since Zero seemed to ship the first one unprogrammed). They replaced the DC-DC converter. They replaced the PCB in the battery module (I believe that's the BMS?). As of yesterday (Wednesday, 2/14/2018), the dashboard lights up but still no power (motor doesn't run).
Mostly I'm just venting. Yes, we're still early adopters, and that can get expensive. Yes, it's still an immature technology -- sure, EVs have been around for 100 years, but the advanced electronics to control them are quite young. But this is ridiculous. I haven't gotten the bill yet, but I'm going to have to pay for the new MBB, the new DC-DC converter, probably not the BMS (it's under warranty since Zero rebuilt the monolith not too long ago), and of course, the labor to replace all the high-dollar hardware. Nobody has any idea how much it's going to cost me or, more importantly, how long I'm going to be without my bike before I even have the privilege of paying the bill.
But I'm also just searching for ideas to improve the situation. We lost Patrick Truchon because he got fed up. I know others have bailed without saying so in public. I never thought I'd say it, but I'm getting close, too. I toy with just springing for a new 2018 SR, but I haven't seen all that much to think the hardware has improved significantly in terms of reliability, and the service from Zero would be the same thing all over again. (Plus, I'd still have to get the old bike running anyhow, since a bike that isn't running has virtually no value.) The local dealers don't have any idea what to do with the bikes, and Zero doesn't seem to care much. Although we have a very diligent, energetic and bright community full of engineers and talented people, there really isn't much any of us can do about it, either. We had to rely on Burton to even create a wiring diagram, there's no way we'd be able to do anything about shoddy PCB design or crappy firmware.
I keep having visions of an open-source electric motorcycle, a repository-based sort of thing. Let the community design the bike to fit OUR needs, and improve the bike as problems come to light in the real world. We have resources and a lot of knowledge and enthusiasm -- I'd donate my PCB and firmware design skills, and I bet a lot of other people would too. But then again, every open-source project I've come into contact with sux pretty bad. Just the other day SourceTree "upgraded", I lost access to all my repositories and had to do everything from the website, then they "upgraded" again to fix the problem. On my Android phone, VLC recently "upgraded", I lost all my playlists, then they "upgraded" again and (sorta) recovered my playlists. There's no way I'd tolerate that sort of behavior in a motorcycle.
Like I said, mostly I'm just venting. I don't think there's any solution except for time...Zero's got to evolve, get bigger, and develop a customer service department with some real horsepower. They need to bring the dealers up to speed, and continue developing more reliable, easy-to-service hardware.
But if anybody has any thoughts?
?
