If I remember the original announcement, the bike was designed with the thought in mind that it will have limited dealer support. It is entirely modular and parts can be swapped out with minimal effort on the owner's part. I'm guessing some kind of shipping arrangements are being worked on for shipping back defective or damaged parts and receiving new ones.
That makes the bike a total joke, regardless of design or specs.
The people who need/want suburban commuters (so, equiv. to 125cc scooters, not urban 50cc) are exactly the ones who have no interest whatsoever in working on the bikes themselves. They want a transportation appliance that has near-zero down time; they're not hobbyists with a garageful of bikes they could use instead (it's telling that pretty much none of EMF's members own less than 3-4 bikes...)
In most of the world, and in the US as well for apartment dwellers, those commuters also have no facilities they could work on a bike themselves.
Yes the BEV drivetrain is
might be reliable and need little maintenance most fo the time, although this far from the case for BEV 2-wheelers: ~10% of Zero owners have bike-won't-run-failures that takes months to resolve, even in the US, and over here, the 125cc/250cc electric scooter owners have the same, precisely because parts/dealer networks aren't up to par (Domino's Pizza, who operate the largest BEV delivery fleet here in Israel, have 450 electric scooters & 50 e-bikes. To make it work, they keep 10 unused units or so as backup, to be called on when others fail).
Routine drivetrain maintenance aside, there are lots of other regular maintenance/replacement items, as well as accidents; sure, in theory, any ICE MC service shop could handle those, but in practice, they don't: I've heard shop owners say they're wary of this , since they don't have the proper training w.r.t. how to handle the high-voltage system even just to disconnect it temporarily (and in some countries, it would actually be illegal for them to do any work on a BEV bike, aside from tire repair/replacement).
So a dense, large parts/dealer network is an absolute requirement for any EV 2-wheeler to become popular, another of the major reasons why it's no area for startups to be in.
And I don't wish any of those startups well. They're harming adoption because most will fail and give the rest a bad rep.
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Topic: FINALLY! News on the Fuell Flllow!! (Read 1435 times)