“I could lose my license on this thing!”
After all these years writing about motorcycles, I admit that it’s been a long time since I’ve been preoccupied with that thought. But the Livewire’s seamless thrust is a uniquely addictive motorcycle rush.
One of the many nice touches on this well thought-out motorcycle is that the mirrors provide a crystal-clear view of the traffic behind you – and if you’re riding it at all aggressively, all of the traffic’s behind you. The mirrors make it easy to look for cops back there, who would presumably be provoked by a near-silent motorcycle suddenly disappearing in front of them. Every time I really whacked the throttle open, I recalled the scene from Star Wars when Han Solo finally got the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive to work.
Charge it quickly, or charge it cheaply. Pick one.
This is not a test
When I moved to Milwaukee last summer, Harley-Davidson’s PR boss Paul James welcomed me by offering the loan of a Livewire. I checked to see if Common Tread wanted test, but that site had already covered the bike pretty thoroughly and I think Editor Lance knew that he had a great, in-depth Livewire-vs-Zero SR/S comparo coming from Jake Bright. My only other client these days is the New York Times, and it had recently run an EV-moto story, so there was no appetite there, either. I reported back to Paul James, with the sad news that I couldn’t place a Livewire story.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “You should still ride it.”
Getting something for nothing always feels weird to me, but I’m glad that I accepted a week on the ’wire, because I learned a lot that I hadn’t picked up in short tests of EVs from Zero, Brammo, and indeed the first-gen Livewire that I rode during its carefully managed press intro in Manhattan.
That said, this isn’t a test of the bike. I’m not going to catalog components; I didn’t systematically explore any of its limits; I won’t place it in context of competing models. Rather it’s a compilation of admittedly-conflicting impressions of the most compelling motorcycle I’ve ridden in years.
When I picked it up at H-D’s historic Juneau Avenue headquarters, the parking lot was empty. The brand may be anchored in notions of ’Murica and freedom, but it is taking a decidedly blue-state view of Covid safety; everyone’s working from home. Paul gave me the briefest overview of the starting procedure and ride modes; the UI thankfully proved intuitive enough that I was able to just figure it out later on my own (that’s not always the case!)
He told me that the company wasn’t really worried about sales figures for an admittedly expensive ($30k!) halo model, and that I should expect lots of questions about it. Sure enough, at least once a day someone rolled down their window at a stoplight to ask, “Is that electric?” At that point I was pretty much compelled to leave the line mimicking Ricky Gadsen, .
I’m getting ahead of myself. My very first impression of the Livewire was that it is a terrific piece of styling. It manages to “look like a Harley” despite being absolutely nothing like any previous Harley. It’s modern but that alloy cowling over the motor (if that’s what’s down there) projects a cool steampunk vibe.
My second impression came when I lifted it off the sidestand. It’s heavy, and a lot of that battery weight is carried fairly high up.
Pardon the moto-journalist’s cliché: As soon as you get rolling , those 530 pounds are immaterial. The combination of riding position and steering geometry made me wonder why Harley-Davidson doesn’t offer this riding experience on a gasoline-powered motorcycle. (Of course when they offered something close to it in the form of the Sportster XR1200x, no one bought it!)
Imagine a Harley you’d happily take to track day. The battery-saving 115 mph “governor” notwithstanding, most riders would be faster on the ’wire than on many lighter and nominally more sporting motorcycles. Although I didn’t take it to the track, I did find myself seeking out places where I could really practice fundamental skills. Near my house there’s a very low-traffic cul-de-sac where I sometimes go and turn circles, left and right, at gradually increasing speeds. I practice looking far into the turn and picking up the throttle on my ICE motorcycle. The motor controller on the ’wire is dialed right in, enabling a super-smooth pickup from a closed “throttle” and very smooth inputs when leaned over.
Riding an EV motorcycle is as much about what you give up as what you gain – you give up clutching and shifting, and give up most of the sound. What I realized was that as instinctive as shifting is, and as much as I have grown accustomed to using intake and engine sound as a speed reference, those things still suck away bandwidth that, otherwise, can go towards hitting your marks and managing body position in performance riding, or just monitoring traffic in more mundane situations.
On the topic of sound... When H-D showed those first Livewire prototypes back in 2014, I was critical of the decision to mount the motor longitudinally. That necessitated a 90° bevel drive between the motor and the belt final drive. Few other EV motorcycles use any kind of gearing, so it seemed like unnecessary weight and complexity and a small source of friction that served only to marginally cut battery life. I guessed that it was a concession to some old-school engineers at The Motor Company who just insisted that there be some gears, somewhere on any motorcycle. I have to admit though, that I like the gear whine it produces, especially at higher speeds. (Although the motor itself operates nearly silently, the tires and belt drive also produce noticeable dBs.)
Harley-Davidson loves its potato-potato idle. The Livewire gets a pulse
The Livewire makes no sound at all at “idle”. That’s a bit of a problem because it’s easy to forget that it’s powered up. A reflexive twist of the right grip can shunt it forward. H-D somehow programmed in a barely perceptible “heartbeat” when it’s armed but motionless.
I’m guessing, but the heartbeat feels like a super-short positive and negative power pulse to the motor, just enough to bump it 1° forward and back at about 1 herz. It’s subtle but definitely there; the first time I took Lisa on it as a passenger she asked, “Are you doing that?” Much cooler, IMO, than potato-potato, and the kind of class touch that might make some people think the ’wire’s worth $10k more than a top-of-the-line Zero.
Sorry, I could not resist taking a picture with this sign.
Charging and range anxiety
I’ll flatter myself and claim that I was one of the very first journalists to really cover electric motorcycles. I talked Bike magazine (UK) into reviewing Zero as a real motorcycle back in about 2008, and covered both Brammo and Mission extensively in print and online, long before most motojournos took them seriously. That said, I’ve rarely ridden one for longer than a single charge; range anxiety and charging hassles were not a thing for me until I lived with the Livewire for a week.
Around town, I never experienced anything resembling range anxiety. For a while, just to see about extending battery range, I switched out of ‘Sport’ mode, but riding a Livewire in range mode is like having a platonic relationship with a porn star; it might be fun just to take her out and be seen with her, but it misses the point.
However, on the weekend, Lisa suggested a ride out to Holy Hill, the site of a Catholic basilica in, as the name suggests, a hilly area where there are some nice curvy (albeit often crowded) roads. Holy Hill’s about 30 freeway miles from where we live, and I was quite aware of the battery gauge’s noticeable drop on the way out there. I was careful to turn back for home while it showed half remaining.
The Livewire has an onboard charger, in the sense that there’s a small charger under the seat that you can plug in to a regular 110v socket. As I understand it, this system works at Level 1 only; you can plug a Livewire into a Level 2 (220v) charger but it won’t charge any faster. That seems like a flaw. My garage has one outlet, but it’s not grounded. The ’wire’s charger would light up when plugged into that outlet, but it runs some kind of diagnostic check as soon as it's plugged in, and it refused to charge on that circuit. I had to charge it by running a super-duty extension cord from my house.
LiveWire owners get 500 kWh of free charging on the Electrify America network, and 2-years free charging at many H-D dealerships that have installed ChargePoint fast chargers. But for the sake of simulating “ownership” I decided to try DC fast-charging, the way you would if you were partway through a long trip and needed juice wherever you could get it.
I spotted an EVgo network charger at a local supermarket. I downloaded an app, and signed up for a simple pay-as-you-go plan. That was easy enough, but the ’wire’s dash told me that it would take 39 minutes to top up the battery from about half-charge. In the end, EVgo dinged me almost $15 for about $1 worth of kWh at Milwaukee’s going rate.
That means that using EVgo electricity was much faster but exponentially more expensive than slow-charging at home. Fast-charging per-mile costs are far higher than the cost of fuel for a conventional motorcycle. And of course, a fill of gasoline’s faster still, and far more convenient for everyone but Mother Nature.
Last but not least, H-D recommends limiting DC fast charging to about ¼ of all charging, in order to maximize the lifespan of the battery. All of this relates to the common rejoinder one hears, after praising an electric motorcycle: “I’m waiting a few years until batteries are smaller/lighter/last twice as long.” The truth is, in all the conversations I’ve had with engineers and scientists working on EV batteries, no one I’ve interviewed has predicted a date by which energy density will double.
We’ve made big improvements in power density – the rate at which you can extract power, and put it back in – but as fast charging infrastructure seems to have standardized on <500V and <125 amps I will go out on a limb and say that for the foreseeable future, electric motorcycles will hit a ceiling of about 100 mile range, at which point you’ll need about an hour to fully recharge.
Even “fast” charging takes long enough that you’re always going to need to kill some time. Adding chips and coffee to this “fill” brought the total to close to $20, for which I got about $1 worth of electricity.
Negatives
I realize that I’m literally half the size of many Harley-Davidson riders, but the Livewire came much too stiffly sprung for the combination of my bony ass and Wisconsin’s roads. Even after I took all the preload out of the shock spring, and took a couple of clicks of compression damping out, and put Lisa on the back, there was no detectable compliance from the shock.
The sidestand has some special Harleyesque locking mechanism. You kick it out but then as the bike settles onto it, it shifts in a way that always made me think I hadn’t fully extended the stand, and it was about to flop over on its side. It never did, of course, and I don’t doubt that unique pivot’s actually better than regular sidestands; I’m just sayin’ that I never got used to it and don’t like it.
Last but not least… Another thing that I never got used to was the effort required to push that sucker around in the garage. Not only is it heavy, there’s a lot of rolling resistance when it’s turned off. I assume that’s because it’s basically a direct drive; there’s no clutch or “neutral” so any time the rear wheel is turning, it’s turning that bevel drive and the motor, too.
Giving motorcycles back is not usually that hard
In the end I felt that I’d need a secure garage with better charging capability to make an EV work for me. I’d also have to live in a place where there are nice roads right outside my garage. (To be fair, if I could afford a $30k motorcycle, I probably would be living in better riding country.)
That said, giving the Livewire back was hard. With a (much) softer shock it would be a fantastic city bike. It was super-fun to ride, very resolved as a design and engineering exercise, and the stares, questions, and thumbs-ups made me feel like a rock star.