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[Crissa]

Zeros are not unfriendly to beginners.

There isn't a more friendly bike.  It has exactly the torque you want it to have.  It has exactly the top speed you want it to have.  It never stalls.  It doesn't jitter.  It doesn't make distracting noises or have complex starting or fueling processes.  It moves exactly as you tell it to, so the learning curve is easier.

And a beginner on an electric would never do the stupid things a confident ICE rider would do like cranking on the throttle in a corner.

-Crissa

[TheRan]

I agree, they're far more intuitive and precise. The one thing gas bikes have going for them is they're more forgiving to mistakes, in the sense that they won't send you flying as easily if you're sloppy with the throttle input. Their vagueness and delayed reaction to inputs end up being a good thing (at least in terms of saving newbies). It would be kind of nice if Zero added an adjustable throttle delay or ramp up so the torque builds more gradually to the desired level. My little 1kW dirt bike has a pot to adjust it (although with so little power it's not really needed).

Just like how poor-man's traction control would limit the wheel acceleration to the physical maximum rate (because any faster means the tyre has lost traction) there's also no real reason why you'd want to go from 10% to 100% torque in under a second.

[Crissa]

Why add the delay and teach people to be sloppy when they can just choose to ride with low torque and slowly add what they need as they learn?

-Crissa

[princec]

Because of the same problem that people have with video games: you cannot choose your "difficulty" in advance because you do not have any idea of what "difficulty" means in the context of the game. In videogames you choose "normal" difficulty, you start off just fine and then get to a boss and get killed over and over, and like as not ragequit. In motorbikes you select "street", start off just fine, then discover that the difference between 23 degrees of throttle and 23.2 degrees of throttle is a highside on the first wet corner where you discover this limit, smash the bike to bits and break your tibia in 3 places. Not a fun game at all. By comparison ICE bikes have varying degrees of friendliness depending on their engine configuration (if you want something you just can't highside ride a single) and people would routinely crash multis spectacularly as they started making insane power until electronics has come along to tame it all down again.

All of this is just as pertinent to ABS. You can brake >this< hard! ... until you can't, because you don't actually know where that limit is until you cross it, and even if you did know where the limit was, it changes drastically all the time according to many different factors, so you lose the front, and kill yourself. Great fun I'm sure.

Cas

[valnar]

It would be kind of nice if Zero added an adjustable throttle delay or ramp up so the torque builds more gradually to the desired level. My little 1kW dirt bike has a pot to adjust it (although with so little power it's not really needed).

Just like how poor-man's traction control would limit the wheel acceleration to the physical maximum rate (because any faster means the tyre has lost traction) there's also no real reason why you'd want to go from 10% to 100% torque in under a second.

I agree with this, and came to write the same thing.

Zero motorcycles are half computers anyway so it would nice if Zero could add this, if possible.  There is no frictionless road where a rear tire would suddenly need to jump to 100%.

[Richard230]

All bikes are death traps of course but the Zeros are particularly unfriendly to beginners (and even experienced riders... and it's not about "instant torque" either, it's about torque pulses, or the lack thereof). Because of the unique traction characteristics of electric motors they really need TC to prevent even the most very experienced rider from instantly binning it on just tiny patches of reduced grip.

Cas

My thought is that the flywheel effect of power train inertia of ICE motorcycles helps a lot when encountering a loose surface. The tire will not spin up as rapidly as on a vehicle like the Zero, which has no flywheel, or all of the other parts between the piston and the rear wheel that creates inertia and would slow down an instant response to traction loss. I notice that when riding my 390 KTM Duke, which has almost no power train inertial (and fortunately little low speed torque, too) vs my Royal Enfield single that has pretty decent torque, but a lot of flywheel effect. The hard skinny tires on that bike never seem to spin up unexpectedly when they hit a slippery patch of roadway.

But I certainly will agree that if you have a lot of experience riding ICE, you definitely need to be careful when riding a model like the Zero SR versions that can pump out a lot of torque to the rear wheel instantly. It might be a good idea to keep the bike in eco mode unless the pavement is dry and you have your wits about you and really need the extra torque.

[caza]

Motorcycles lack of 4 wheels make them all death traps! They don't have seatbelts or rollcages either!

My zero was my first bike and I never had a loss of traction. You have a throttle that controls torque. If you do literally any motorcycle training or even just reading on the subject, you should know how important throttle control is. If you did even the bare minimum of research on a zero before riding it than you understand that there's no gears and the throttle controls power all the way up to the top end, and there's no clutch to disengage that power.

Traction control is a nice safety feature, to cover for user error or unanticipated conditions.  But to say the zero is unsafe for not having it, to me, demonstrates a lack of understanding of the bike, and lack of control as a rider.

Sorry you fell and got injured, glad you're OK now. But by your own description you pinned your brand new, high torque, no TC bike in sport mode while you still had very little experience with it. I'm sorry, but that's not an example of a dangerous bike, that's an example of someone who doesn't have respect for the bike they are riding.

[princec]

How would he know to have that respect though when the other 99 times he did it, it just whooshed forward? It's the one time where there's a tiny greasy spot. And when he says pinned I bet he didn't even get over half throttle either - most people who think they're giving it full throttle turn out to barely manage 50% (datalogged on a racetrack). The difference between instantly losing 100% traction and having perfect traction with electric motors is a hair's breadth of throttle and there's some amusing footage of professional Moto E riders on Energicas discovering what happens when they open the throttle just too fast.

There's no fun in second guessing traction when the result is instant crashing. With ICE we get controlled slides. With EVs we get instant total loss of traction.

It might not be very manly or alpha male to say I want a safety net but tbh I give no craps. If my daughter were to announce she was going to buy her first bike tomorrow, I would not want her on an older Zero, in the same way I wouldn't want her on a bike without ABS. I'm alive after 30 years riding mostly through luck so far, as the times I've lost traction on the bigger bikes I used to ride I saved it, but not through skill or knowing what to do, just through luck and the reasonably forgiving nature of the engines. Nowadays I've got TC and ABS on my bikes and it's just a great relief to know I don't have to treat the throttle as a device that can kill me without warning if you turn it round to read the warning label underneat, but a device that makes the bike go faster, just as the lever now makes the bike stop these days instead of occasionally simply throwing you off like they used to.

Cas

[caza]

How would he know to have that respect though when the other 99 times he did it, it just whooshed forward?

If it's a 2021 model, which wasn't even revealed until mid-OCT this year, and they've already crashed it, had it repaired, and are back on the bike, they didn't have 99 other times to compare it to. This isn't "I rode this bike for a year of being predictable and it suddenly betrayed me" this is "I bought a brand new bike I don't understand and tried to immediately take it to the limit, and it bit me!" We don't even know if their tires were broken in!
My point is they pinned a bike they did not understand the dynamics of and was basically unfamiliar with.

I don't disagree with any of your points about how traction control is good. It is! More safety features are good! But buying a bike with an entirely different drivetrain than the bikes your used to, with a throttle that behaves differently than an ICE bike, with lots of torque, and no traction control, and then yanking on the throttle like you're trying to reach a redline is a recipe for disaster and a showing of complete lack of respect of the bike and its power.

Comparing street riding habits to professional moto-e riders who are by definition riding to the limits of the bike, in full gear, on a track, is irrelevant.

Fact of the matter is that the SR has a lot of torque and no TC. If you know that, and understand how traction works, you should be extremely careful with your throttle and learning the limits of the bike. In the simplest terms you have to retrain your brain to transfer all the nuance you had with your clutch + throttle + shifter into just throttle control.

If that's too much responsibility for you, yeah you probably shouldn't be buying a bike without TC. Good news, the SR/S and SR/F have it, so if it's important to you Zero has options for you. Energicas have TC as well.

I don't think its controversial to say you should understand the bike you're buying before you buy it. If TC is important to you, get a bike with it. If it isn't, and you get a bike without TC, you need to both have the skill to ride without TC and be prepared for the risk in the moments where your skill isn't enough. It's all managing knowledge, skill, and risk, like anything in motorcycling. You don't get onto two wheels without doing that, and you have to own the choices you make in that space.

[Crissa]

By comparison ICE bikes have varying degrees of friendliness ...

This is inane and untrue.  Zeros do exactly what you tell them to do.  The ICE bike doesn't have a friendliness - you don't know where that torque curve is until you've ridden it.  You don't know until you pull the throttle while going 60 on the freeway that the weight of your buddy on the back is going to push it to lift the front off the ground, either.

The Zero does exactly what you tell it to.  And you're used to a bike that doesn't do what you tell it... So you're okay with hitting that power band in the middle of a corner and sliding out?  Or stalling out with a slight misapplication of the clutch... But not okay with your misapplication of throttle doing exactly what the throttle should do?

With a Zero you can always set the torque where you want it.  You can raise it slightly for your skill, lower it for the terrain, and you don't have to ever worry about it catching unevenly.

-Crissa

...And I have slid out the back of my bike, lots of times.  Never when it wasn't my fault, or some roadway hazard.  It does what I tell it.  There's a reason I don't ride my spouse's Ducati outside of parking lot practice:  Because I know it will break loose and have uneven power bands and is way above my skill level.  It's no different than cranking the torque on my bike to full, or jumping on an SR.  Experienced riders forget to respect their bikes.

[caza]

By comparison ICE bikes have varying degrees of friendliness ...

The Zero does exactly what you tell it to.  And you're used to a bike that doesn't do what you tell it... So you're okay with hitting that power band in the middle of a corner and sliding out?  Or stalling out with a slight misapplication of the clutch... But not okay with your misapplication of throttle doing exactly what the throttle should do?

This is exactly it! The throttle does exactly to tell it to do, if you gave it a bad input, that is nobodies fault but your own.

[staples]

There is no frictionless road where a rear tire would suddenly need to jump to 100%.

But there can be jumps!

[Crilly]

You cannot teach 70 million people not to be stupid.  So why blame Zero for people who cannot ride?

[princec]

By comparison ICE bikes have varying degrees of friendliness ...

The Zero does exactly what you tell it to.  And you're used to a bike that doesn't do what you tell it... So you're okay with hitting that power band in the middle of a corner and sliding out?  Or stalling out with a slight misapplication of the clutch... But not okay with your misapplication of throttle doing exactly what the throttle should do?

This is exactly it! The throttle does exactly to tell it to do, if you gave it a bad input, that is nobodies fault but your own.

No, this is a useless fallacy of an argument. The problem is not what the throttle does, it is what the tyres do in reaction to the throttle. The throttle appears to do the same thing on the 70bhp Zero DSR and the 70bhp Duke 690 but the wheels are doing something very, very different.

I imagine most of the time when people are opening the throttle they are expecting the tyres to do what they did last time, that is, grip the road, and accelerate. They do not always do this. There are a huge number of variables, some of which will be in your perception, some of which won't, some of which may be in your perception but "just this one time you under/overestimated it".

Different engine torque characteristics will give different results over different grip situations and different margins for error. The very best configuration is a single cylinder ICE engine, which has a margin of error and controllability so wide that almost anyone can act like a tit and enjoy themselves, as it loses traction for only some small percentage of the rolling distance of the tyre on each bang (despite making hugely more instantaneous torque than the EV - something like 800lb-ft), and with as such has such a degree of controllability you can entertain yourself for hours experimenting with how much you want it to slide.

The very worst configuration is the electric motor, which loses traction totally, completely, and instantly, on a knife edge, and can lose it at any point with equal probability on the circumference of the tyre as it rolls, and then will spin up instantly so as to not regain it until the rider is on their ear or possibly worse, snaps it shut causing it to similarly instantly regain traction and introduce the hapless rider to the high side. You can actually apply considerably greater acceleration on the 690 round a corner than the DSR because it maintains grip despite accelerating harder, and because you just don't have to worry about suddenly losing it. It really isn't fun trying to guess where the limit is when it's 0.1 degree of throttle and you're off.

Rather than glossing over this minor detail I am a bit surprised you're not strongly advocating for TC to be mandatory on EV bikes, in the same way that ABS is.

Cas

[dittoalex]

After 12,000 miles of an 81.1 mile loop on my Zero SR I stopped riding it due to it wanting to highside the rider when the rear is unweighted due to a hard bump or pothole, traction is lessened due to surface change like gravel, bike is transitioned from side to side, and throttle roll-on occurs.  To mitigate this I weigh the outer peg too and squeeze the tank to ride it 100% grip, in Eco mode, which makes for an overly tense ride.  The poor ergos mean when the rear is bucking around there's not a tank to reassuringly squeeze to reduce bar input and stabilize the bike.