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[mooomeee]

I was considering getting a street legal electric motorcycle, but wondering, what all specs would one need if they want to make sure the bike will still hit 60 or 65mph with a battery that's half dead?  I'm like 5'7" 175lb

[TheRan]

I can't tell you what the minimum requirement would be, however one of the 7.2kW/h Zeros would easily do that and still get you there at a reasonable rate. I think I've had mine down to sub 20% and still been able to get up to 60mph.

[Grauteufel]

Looking at most of the sub-motorcycle scooters - 11kw minimum to get over 100km/h. I recall someone doing some testing on their energica, at 50% SOC I think they were down to 75-80% power output. Continuing this assumption I'd look at least something that delivers a nominal 15kw continuous power

[TheRan]

You're in the right ballpark, considering an 11kW gas bike (the legal limit for A1 class 125s in Europe) will do 70-75mph and they have less efficient transmissions you could manage 60mph with less. The difficulty with this question is how does that power vary over the charge of the battery. You could in theory have a bike that can manage 11kW right up until the battery is dead if it's not using the battery to the full potential at a higher state of charge, but most aren't configured that way. And also the power output is generally only listed for a full charge.

If we do a little bit of rough math then a 33kW Zero is pulling roughly 285A from a freshly charged battery, if it can manage the same at 10% then it's down to about 27kW. If we multiply 11kW by that same 1.2x then we get just over 13kW at 100% and 11kW down at 10%. I don't know how realistic that is though, if it scales that way or if more voltage sag at a lower state of charge needs to be taken into account.