Took my test ride this morning. I think I should qualify my opinions first. Have ridden maybe 30,000 miles over a period of around 37 years, never on a bike with an engine larger than 350cc. My current motorcycle is a 1984 Honda XL350.
The 2 big disappointments:
1) The components in my demo bike had been set so that the bike could only take off smoothly/gradually from a stop. It therefore didn't have nearly the pop that my 350 has, which I depend on to guarantee getting a jump on the cars on either side of me after I have split lanes and moved on up to the head of the line at a stop light. The rep said that there was a mechanism in the the throttle that could be adjusted to get the bike to pop forward faster from the start. He said, and I agreed, that there actually is much higher acceleration going on when the bike reaches 30 mph as it speeds up to 60 mph. But there was no relation between my demo bike and the bike that Neal Saiki told Jay Leno needed to be fun and able to do "wheelies".
2) Started the test ride with the power gauge showing one bar more than half-way charged. Finished with a lot of low-charge warning beeps from the bike and diminished power capacity from the motor and no bars showing for the charge. Problem is, probably rode the bike less than 10 miles, on supposedly more than a half-charged battery. Can't verify this from the mileage gauge because the speedometer on the demo bike was not functional. Riding style, to be fair, was basically to twist the throttle to the max as soon as leaving a driveway or a stoplight -- probably not an optimal way to save power.
Thought the suspension was great going over bumps in the road at max speed. The brakes felt quite adequate as well. The seat seems to be a couple of inches higher than my 350, and it made me a little chicken about leaning it too far on turns, so I never really tested it in that way. And the seat was, as others have remarked, probably a little too hard and narrow. The rep warned me that he had been hearing a little extra clicking from the chain, but I never really heard the chain while riding (the primary sound is the wind gusting into your helmet).
In conclusion I'm not sure the disappointments are deal-breakers for me. The other night I ran out of gas in my wife's BMW when the gas gauge was showing there were 60 miles' worth of gas in the tank. So maybe the power gauge wasn't right when it showed one bar better than half-charged. Or, we keep hearing about battery problems, and maybe that demo bike was an example of the same battery problems which are currently being addressed. And one more thing, I noticed that when I got the bike up to max speed, even at the very start of the test ride, the charge gauge would kind of go nuts and primarily show zero charge even as the bike was moving at top speed. Then when I slowed to a stop it seemed ot settle down to a more accurate reading.
Also, there was no way this bike was getting up to 75 mph. Maybe 60 mph, though hard to say for sure without a speedometer. But a person knows when they are going 75 mph on a motorcycle of that size. So this tells me that the demo I was riding might have been a tad earlier/inferior to the one that Green Caledonian was testing.
Bottom line, the rep says he is getting a second bike in August that will allow him to ride along with customers (he's not fully comfortable with setting prospective customers loose by themselves with these bikes). I am hoping to take a second test ride with him then to check out the power issues on the newer motorcycle, and perhaps see if there has been any changes to the initial acceleration ability of the newer motorcyle...
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Topic: Zero S Test Ride 7-10-09, $1500 CARB rebate, and new features (Read 1605 times)