ElectricMotorcycleForum.com
Makes And Models => Zero Motorcycles Forum | 2013+ => Topic started by: ZeroPointZero on April 25, 2017, 10:11:09 AM
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Im curious if theres a way to quantify Zeros budget in terms of total bikes sold. The facebook page just surpassed 2000k members. Only uber nerds like myself bother to sign up for EMF and the number of members on this forum potentially overlap with FB. Im imagine Zero isnt struggling financially considering they have at least $32 Million worth of bikes sold to the FB Zero page members alone (2000k x $16k per unit)
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$32,000,000 is nothing for a company budget over,say, 4 years.
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Do not confuse the sale price with profit. Just because you personally spent a lot of money doesn't mean it's lining some billionaire's pocket.
Let's say this article is about right: http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-electric-motorcycle-20150307-story.html (http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-electric-motorcycle-20150307-story.html)
With 1300 produced for 2014, and 1800 for 2015, a crudely geometric growth rate means 1000 for 2013, 2340 for 2016, and 3000 for 2017. That would yield ~9000 bikes sold since the start of the 2013 model year, at $10-15k per bike, maybe making $100M total for those years.
That's not a lot of money to run a business making road-legal vehicles with a warranty. I imagine it's always resulted in zero profit as they put all the money they can into growth and trying to improve everything.
I've been in a software startup that made much more money than that (and many that made basically nothing), and the demand from investors to turn a profit instead of fuel growth after years building up revenue is an existential threat.
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Don't forget that most Zero employees are getting a pretty good salary, along with decent, but expensive, benefits, due to their technical expertise and the high cost of living in Scotts Valley, CA. Keeping that company going every year has got to be pretty expensive due to labor, much less the cost of running the factory, its equipment, buying the Zero parts, paying back loans, etc. It is amazing to me how they manage to keep the doors open selling just a few thousand bikes a year. ??? No wonder they seem to watch every penny that they spend. (I just wish they didn't save so many pennies on the lack of after-sales customer service.)
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(I just wish they didn't save so many pennies on the lack of after-sales customer service)
So much of this! Their fleet sales has to be thousands of bikes a year, no? They've made a major push to sell via new dealerships lately, it went from one dealer in the DC area when I bought (whom dropped Zero soon after selling me the bike), to about 6 within riding range, in the last year.
They're all selling incredibly well is what I'm hearing. Their repair and service side, things aren't going quite as well. Between slow response and shipping times with Zero for parts, and the tech's being new to eBikes, it's slow going doing even the most routine work.
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I wish the unofficial manual could somehow help with the dealership relationship, or at least to speed up troubleshooting, but I'm somewhat confident that more owners are figuring out issues on their own ahead of a dealership visit to reduce dealership overhead on the Zero.
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Now that we can easily view the E-mail logs, I think you're right. I saw my voltage drop to 92v at 68% SOC in January and called Zero out on it. Before that, I was told the logs looked fine and my bike would get a firmware update and be returned to me once the new plastics arrived. I want to go through the older logs and see what else I can find that they either missed, or hoped would go away with a firmware update.
I know they're a small company, but they can't ignore serious issues with two wheels transportation. People are getting hurt out there already because of this.
Can common log errors be a section in the unofficial manual? It can be difficult figuring out what's a "normal" error and what are serious errors we can do a simple find text search for.
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...I know they're a small company, but they can't ignore serious issues with two wheels transportation. People are getting hurt out there already because of this....
Hurt financially? Bodily injury? I don't know any reports of a crash because of a manufacturing defect software or otherwise. Some people have said they are frightened with a loss of drivetrain power while riding on the highway, and a couple of mentions of errors in judgement (i.e. Sport mode cornering on muddy surface) leading to an off and subsequent bodily injury. Also I don't get this idea that people are hurting financially - there are many more reliable vehicles that are less costly to purchase than a $9k-$20k+ EV motorbike, just none that are also EV motorbikes from a manufacturer that is still in business.
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Some people have said they are frightened with a loss of drivetrain power while riding on the highway,
You mean, sudden intense braking on the highway...
I too, have not heard of injuries caused by these issues so far.
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Who knows what the heck their profits are. Parts made in China are inexpensive, so quite possibly there is some profit.
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Who knows what the heck their profits are. Parts made in China are inexpensive, so quite possibly there is some profit.
I think it's very reasonable to expect that all revenue beyond payroll and materials is getting re-invested, and that we need that to happen for now for the reliability/satisfaction situation to improve.
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About 100 Zeros here in Australia mostly 2014-2016 models.
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...I know they're a small company, but they can't ignore serious issues with two wheels transportation. People are getting hurt out there already because of this....
Hurt financially? Bodily injury? I don't know any reports of a crash because of a manufacturing defect software or otherwise. Some people have said they are frightened with a loss of drivetrain power while riding on the highway, and a couple of mentions of errors in judgement (i.e. Sport mode cornering on muddy surface) leading to an off and subsequent bodily injury. Also I don't get this idea that people are hurting financially - there are many more reliable vehicles that are less costly to purchase than a $9k-$20k+ EV motorbike, just none that are also EV motorbikes from a manufacturer that is still in business.
A guy on FaceBook says he lost power while riding and ended up on crutches for two weeks. He's afraid to ride his Zero now, too scared it will shut down on him again, says he walks everywhere now. He had it in the show for the shutdowns and was told it's fine, just like mine. I encouraged him to make more noise online about it.
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A guy on FaceBook says he lost power while riding and ended up on crutches for two weeks. He's afraid to ride his Zero now, too scared it will shut down on him again, says he walks everywhere now. He had it in the show for the shutdowns and was told it's fine, just like mine. I encouraged him to make more noise online about it.
It would be nice if he's got MBB logs from the incident covering the make and model of his vehicle, the firmware version present, logs covering the time of the incident, any modifications that have been done (alarm / tracker / 12vdc tap), and logs of any previous history of the problematic behavior either noticed or unnoticed. These are technical problems and having more insight into the problems is needed.
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I wish the unofficial manual could somehow help with the dealership relationship, or at least to speed up troubleshooting, but I'm somewhat confident that more owners are figuring out issues on their own ahead of a dealership visit to reduce dealership overhead on the Zero.
I think you're probably right there Brian. All that work you've done on it is of great service to the community.
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You would think that if somebody actually got hurt they would be documenting and screaming bloody murder.
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Don't forget that most Zero employees are getting a pretty good salary, along with decent, but expensive, benefits, due to their technical expertise and the high cost of living in Scotts Valley, CA. Keeping that company going every year has got to be pretty expensive due to labor, much less the cost of running the factory, its equipment, buying the Zero parts, paying back loans, etc. It is amazing to me how they manage to keep the doors open selling just a few thousand bikes a year. ??? No wonder they seem to watch every penny that they spend. (I just wish they didn't save so many pennies on the lack of after-sales customer service.)
Since a good CA man like Richard breached the subject I won't be a total CA hater.
I have felt for a while now the customer service issues have been a result of CA culture. "Don't bother me dude I'm having fun in the sun" seems like a shop slogan. Zero is paying too high rent too high labor and too high shipping.
They could keep R&D there but the factory and parts warehouse and call center needs to come east. South east for the best rates but look at their dealer map, most are on the east coast and their expansion into Europe makes shipping faster and cheaper.
It has to be cheaper to ship China parts by sea to the east coast than to ship bikes over the road cross country.
Don't get me wrong I think CA is a great place for a vacation or to retire but for pure business operation the cost of living is crushing.
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Don't forget that most Zero employees are getting a pretty good salary, along with decent, but expensive, benefits, due to their technical expertise and the high cost of living in Scotts Valley, CA. Keeping that company going every year has got to be pretty expensive due to labor, much less the cost of running the factory, its equipment, buying the Zero parts, paying back loans, etc. It is amazing to me how they manage to keep the doors open selling just a few thousand bikes a year. ??? No wonder they seem to watch every penny that they spend. (I just wish they didn't save so many pennies on the lack of after-sales customer service.)
Since a good CA man like Richard breached the subject I won't be a total CA hater.
I have felt for a while now the customer service issues have been a result of CA culture. "Don't bother me dude I'm having fun in the sun" seems like a shop slogan. Zero is paying too high rent too high labor and too high shipping.
They could keep R&D there but the factory and parts warehouse and call center needs to come east. South east for the best rates but look at their dealer map, most are on the east coast and their expansion into Europe makes shipping faster and cheaper.
It has to be cheaper to ship China parts by sea to the east coast than to ship bikes over the road cross country.
Don't get me wrong I think CA is a great place for a vacation or to retire but for pure business operation the cost of living is crushing.
I agree that would make a lot of business sense, as many other manufacturing firms have followed that path. But I think Zero's problem is that the vast majority of their staff are engineering design professionals - that are well paid of course because of their education and experience. Moving the factory to some other location would not do much to defer their expenses. That would leave the engineers thousands of miles away from the factory assembly line where they can respond immediately to any issues. Finding the numbers of EV engineers anywhere else in the country that are needed would likely to be almost impossible. Plus, all of their staff now have a lot of technical expertise and experience that is needed to keep the company running and most of them wouldn't want to move away from their established homes and families. Plus the Santa Cruz area is a really nice place to live, work and play. That plan would likely work if the company was making metal hardware, but I don't think it would be viable for a high-tech company making a very unique product.
One other thing to consider is that the assembly staff seems to consist of just a few part-time workers who are hired seasonally during the production run and then are let go after the last bike of the model year is assembled. So the manufacturing end of the company is run very efficiently. Of course, this system may also be the reason for some of the after-sales problems customers are experiencing. ???
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Well, do they make everything on site? Or do they have plastics coming in on a slow boat from China, and that's why no one's getting their new plastics for a while? Probably put in 2 or 3 large orders a year to keep prices down?
I'm sure they considered moving production to a cheaper area. They may be so small still that it's not worth the effort, especially if they're just bringing in part time work for a few months out of the year to pump them all out at once. I didn't think they only made them for a few months, then let them sit in their warehouse until a dealer requests one.
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Well, do they make everything on site? Or do they have plastics coming in on a slow boat from China, and that's why no one's getting their new plastics for a while? Probably put in 2 or 3 large orders a year to keep prices down?
I'm sure they considered moving production to a cheaper area. They may be so small still that it's not worth the effort, especially if they're just bringing in part time work for a few months out of the year to pump them all out at once. I didn't think they only made them for a few months, then let them sit in their warehouse until a dealer requests one.
From what I have seen just about everything on a Zero is sourced from somewhere in Asia (mostly China). However, Zero does assemble and test the battery packs in-house.