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[MostlyBonkers]

Chances are I wouldn't have thought too much about the weight if it hadn't conked out, but as it is, the bike doing the exact one thing that everyone is paranoid about electric vehicles doing on its test ride was enough to make me decide "no". The SR/F was far easier to haul about, but if that had broken down in the same manner it would also be getting a "no". As it is I'm just far too poor to afford the SR/F anyway Still saving pennies, searching down back of sofa, etc

Cas

Have you got your eye on any of the older Zero models? They're all a lot of fun and there may be some deals to be had.

Providing the battery pack is healthy, I've had no trouble with getting caught out on my 2014DS.  Things have improved considerably with regards to reliability since 2013 when it was manufactured. 

[princec]

The FX has my close attention for its simplicity. It's got just enough range to get me to work too. I'm looking out for a secondhand one though, not going to splash £10k on a toy/commuter.

Cas

[valnar]

The FX has my close attention for its simplicity. It's got just enough range to get me to work too. I'm looking out for a secondhand one though, not going to splash £10k on a toy/commuter.

Cas

I saw this on ADVRider today, but shipping may be exorbitant.
https://advrider.com/f/threads/ca-2018-zero-fx-7-2-7500.1436337/

[princec]

Yeah, I'm just going to have to wait until one turns up in Somerset.
Might be a few for sale soon now we're not allowed out to ride them any more...

Cas

[Crissa]

I gotta say, they make a really good vehicle during disasters and quarantines.  Being able to charge at home is very convenient.

-Crissa

[princec]

That has been going through my mind a lot in the last couple of weeks.

Cas

[MostlyBonkers]

Going back to the original topic, we had some warmer weather the other day and I didn't start my ride until the afternoon.  The battery temp was reporting 17C and voltage was 115.






My mission was to ride to a local brewery and pick up some nice fresh ale.  That meant I had an extra 11kg onboard for the return journey.  I delivered 12 pints of beer to my neighbours and drank the rest myself.

The journey was mostly back roads. I took it steady, but didn't dawdle either.  I was rather impressed with the results:






I definitely took it easy on the way home, which is reflected in the final battery temperature.  Covering 45 miles and using only 44% of the charge suggests I could have done the trip twice with plenty to spare!  On that day, with a similar riding style...  I don't recall ever having such good range from my bike.

[MostlyBonkers]

Fast forward to yesterday and the weather was very different. Close to freezing most of the day and a strong wind.  I plotted a 71 mile route, feeling confident the bike would manage.  Oops...

Ambient temperature was around 7C.  The bike had been charged to full a couple of days before.  I didn't record the starting temp of the battery pack, but it was probably below ambient because ambient had been a lot lower until the afternoon.  I'd guess around 5C.

My outward journey was a lot quicker than the return...








This is by far the lowest I've ever taken my new ZF14.4 battery pack and it behaved impeccably.  The last 2-3 miles were ridden at 0% SoC.

For the last 30 miles I was constantly comparing SoC to the number of miles left to run on my Satnav. Not helped by missing a couple of turns and adding a few extra miles to the journey...  When I got down to 5% SoC I switched the bike's display to show range.  It's a feature I seldom use, but gave me some hope.

I may have been a bit blasé with my application of the throttle on the outward bound portion of my journey, but I sure as shit wasn't on the way home!  It got to the point where I didn't dare go over 50mph, then 40 and the last three miles were more like 30mph.  I was grateful to see the 30mph speed limit signs as I approached my home town!

I was really surprised that throughout all of this the bike didn't go into crawl mode.  It's something I became all too familiar with as my old ZF11.4 battery was on its last legs.  Power gets limited to something tiny (I forget, could be 2kW or less), which results in a top speed of 30mph on the flat.  It takes a long time to get to 30 too.  None of that with the new battery pack!  :-)

I hope this is a good example of how much ambient temperature (on a windy day) can kill your range.  I made the mistake of thinking I had at least 80 miles of range for a nice pootle in the countryside...

[talon]

Nice! I've noticed similarly-scaled results on my ZF13.0 with 220lb self, no windscreen. However, I start to enter "extreme" current limiting earlier than you (~15%; perhaps this isn't crawl mode but just limiting) and get 60-something miles in the cold at 70mph. On a warmer day I get 80 miles mixed speeds, or strictly follow the 70mi@70mph spec Zero had for my bike.

Since getting the cheap windscreen I get almost 100 miles at mixed speeds for Washington D.C. (40-70mph), with almost 80 miles at 70mph constant.

You ended the beer run at a fairly good temperature for range, especially with those cells. My current limiting doesn't start happening until around 5% when my cells are very hot, but again my 5% can "move" sometimes. I think the range and SoC are fairly accurate when you act predictably for the entire charge, but below 10% when temperature is changing and you are using a lot of regen it can randomly recalculate or change estimation modes and drop to 0% unexpectedly on higher IR batteries like mine, to include cutting out entirely. Watch that voltage!

[Crissa]

Man, I wish I could crawl home, the last mile to my house is a steep hill and low battery does not like it.

-Crissa

[MostlyBonkers]

Nice! I've noticed similarly-scaled results on my ZF13.0 with 220lb self, no windscreen. However, I start to enter "extreme" current limiting earlier than you (~15%; perhaps this isn't crawl mode but just limiting) and get 60-something miles in the cold at 70mph. On a warmer day I get 80 miles mixed speeds, or strictly follow the 70mi@70mph spec Zero had for my bike.

Since getting the cheap windscreen I get almost 100 miles at mixed speeds for Washington D.C. (40-70mph), with almost 80 miles at 70mph constant.

You ended the beer run at a fairly good temperature for range, especially with those cells. My current limiting doesn't start happening until around 5% when my cells are very hot, but again my 5% can "move" sometimes. I think the range and SoC are fairly accurate when you act predictably for the entire charge, but below 10% when temperature is changing and you are using a lot of regen it can randomly recalculate or change estimation modes and drop to 0% unexpectedly on higher IR batteries like mine, to include cutting out entirely. Watch that voltage!

Good points. What do you mean by "IR"? Internal Resistance?  Do the cells in a ZF13 pack have higher internal resistance than those in a ZF14.4? It would certainly explain a lot of the behaviour you just mentioned. Interesting, thanks! [emoji4]

[MostlyBonkers]

Man, I wish I could crawl home, the last mile to my house is a steep hill and low battery does not like it.

-Crissa

What battery do you have again Crissa? I guess the crawl function doesn't give the motor enough juice to move your bike up the hill.  It should help if you're pushing aswell?

[Crissa]

Maybe if I got off the bike before it panic shutdown, I dunno.

-Crissa

[MostlyBonkers]

Just to let you all know, I finally got round to processing the logs from my bike. Unfortunately they all failed with the Zero Log Parser utility. That's with three different batches of them.  I've had success in the past, so maybe that was before a firmware update to my bike, or perhaps the utility itself has been updated.

I've kept the logs, just in case it starts working again.  If anybody has the time, could you try parsing your own logs and let me know if it works for you please?


https://home.hasslers.net/zerologparser/log_parser.php

[TheRan]

It's been down for a while now, this alternative should work though:

https://zero-motorcycle-community.github.io/browser-parse/zero-log-parser.html