ElectricMotorcycleForum.com

In April of last year, on my 4th or 5th ride after finally moving close enough to my job to ride my Zero to work, the BMS board failed. It took 8 months and ~$1000 to get that fixed; mostly due to waiting on Zero to ship a replacement. (It would have been $1600, but Zero misquoted the price to my dealer, and to the dealer's credit they stood their ground when Zero tried to backtrack.)

While unloading the bike after that episode, the bike had an unplanned dismount that caused what appeared to be cosmetic damage to the bars, mirrors, a few lights, etc. Around $500 to fix but can't complain because it was my fault.

After retrieving it from the dealer for getting that mishap fixed, I got it home and it didn't feel quite right on my initial ride, sort of hesitant it seemed. A later ride confirmed problems; I had no throttle response at all at a few stops. No error lights on the dash, but either pushing the bike forward or turning the key off and back on would get it going again (until the next stop). Got it back home, loaded it on the truck again and took it back to the dealer.

The latest word from Zero, via the dealer, is that the motor is bad, and they can't time it. They want $1600 for the part, and I'm sure it will take another 8 months or more to get here.

So I now have a bike with <3000 miles on it, which I've been able to ride once in the last year (only to find out it was still broken). It does not run, and I don't want to put any more significant money into it. I've thought of the following options:

1. Find a used motor. It would have to be pretty cheap and available in a month or two; I don't really have the patience with this thing anymore to pay a lot or wait a long time.

2. Sell it for scrap, or as a project bike. I'd have to find someone who was interested, and I suspect I wouldn't get much for it (though enough to cover the last one or two repairs would be enough, as I've already written this thing off as my worst purchase ever).

3. Part it out. This would probably be the most lucrative thing to do, but I'd have to disassemble it (I have the skills, but not really the time or work area), and I'd have to worry about hazmat shipping and all that for the batteries if it wasn't local**.

Any thoughts/ideas/other options? I'll take sympathy too 

(** Variant that kinda intrigues me: keep the batteries and charger, toss the Zero BMS and build my own, and buy a big-a$$ inverter so I'd have a semi-portable power source to run A/C tools anywhere for hours. At least I would be using the one part that Zero had enough confidence in to make claims about; i.e., the "300,000-mile" batteries. Ha!)

The Carotron excerpt implies that closed-loop vector control of externally-commutated motors can't be done without an encoder. But I've worked with several industrial drives that do exactly that. I'm not sure why sensorless vector is not used more often in EVs; maybe the demands of that application are too great. But they do just fine in a variety of industrial applications (though all the ones I've seen can accept encoder inputs as well).

Another thing that the industrial drives often do, that might be useful to hobbyist EVers at least, is self-tune. They will run the motor up and down for a few minutes and build an internal mathematical model of your motor. Not sure whether they use it for some sort of model-predictive control, or just for accurate sensorless position inference, but it's cool nonetheless.

Like you, I wonder what support is going to be like for my 2012, especially now that it's out of warranty. Two dealers I've worked with were able to perform recall updates on the electronics (with Zero's help possibly), but for a persistent front fork issue I had to get involved more than I would have liked (it ultimately was fixed however).

If you have a competent dealer close by that is bullish on electric motorcycles, then you are probably OK. But since there is no dealer near me any longer (and I live in Houston, 4th largest city in the US), I find Zeros hard to recommend to Joe average motorcyclist unless that person is also an EV geek.

It's too bad, too, because I generally feel Zero has a good product (especially in the 2015 models where the components have been upgraded). But they have to get more of their dealers knowledgeable and comfortable with the tech, and work out whatever communication and other issues exist between them and those dealers, before they will become mainstream.

My 2012 forks were breaking apart, only internally. The metal shavings that were created from the damage got into the seals and caused them to leak.

Damn. Guess I'm going to have to schedule a vacation to LA

Seriously, one of the things the electric motorcycle industry needs most is more Harlans.

Benswing, have you had any cooling issues while taking advantage of your newfound acceleration? I have a 2012 DS, and because there's no DSR, and because my nearest dealer is probably dropping Zero, I'm considering hanging on to mine for awhile and maybe doing this upgrade.

I had the fork seal leak on my 2012 DS, and it was covered under warranty. However, it took 4 trips to 2 different dealers to get it finally fixed. The problem wasn't the seals, but rather the fork internals disintegrating causing metal shavings to get into the fork seals. One of the replacement forks was also defective. But it works now.