Here is day 2
Thursday April 5, 2018
Rode in the desert south of Boise. I don’t have a GPS track of this route as my son didn’t go on my DRZ with the GPS. I did include a screen print from my Spot Tracker. Not as good as the GPS track, but better than nothing. It is a pretty flat area with small hills, probably less than 200-300 feet in elevation change and any one time. For this ride it was a total of 43 miles through pretty flat terrain. Not a lot of sand or lose dirt, but I did end up running through some fairly thick piles of tumble weeds that went on for 10-500 feet. Awesome ride, see some of the pics. There is picture in there of a hill I climbed and that is where the bike really shined. It is so easy to climb a hill with electric. No worries of gear selection, being in the power band, no running start, just slowly pick a line and start up. The bike just pulls and pulls. Incredibly easy. On this ride the suspension did seem a little soft. A couple of times going over goffer holes it seemed to bottom out so tuning would be needed if it was my bike. When I returned home the battery gauge was empty, and I mean empty. It was past flashing at me and no hash marks showed on the gauge. I didn’t notice any performance drop with the dead battery indication, but I was just riding it to the barn to charge it so I didn’t get on it. The kilowatt metter showed it took 5.57kw, but part of that went to running the system and charger inefficiencies. These would be small relative to the battery so I figure around 5.5kw which calculates out to be about 130w per mile. Substantially better than yesterday’s ride in the soft sand.
Summation:
The good:
1. Bike easy to ride. It is a blast from beginner to expert. Everyone can have fun on this bike.
2. Good suspension and handling, although I think the demo I had needed some suspension tuning. It had over 1000 miles and they were probably pretty hard miles being an MX version.
3. Awesome power. Bike just keeps pulling and pulling to about 60 mph then it seem to slow a little.
4. High quality bike
5. Lack of noise. I was able to put ear buds in with slightly higher than normal volume and listen to tunes the entire ride.
The bad:
1. The range. At a max range of about 40 miles it is barely acceptable and will require me changing how I ride. Where I could just ride from my house on my DRZ and do 60 to 80 miles with 40 of that off road, with the Alta I will have to truck it.
2. Rear brake seemed sensitive, but that could just be me getting used to the bike. I did only have 2 rides and a total of about 65 miles.
Wishes
3. More range. I understand the battery weight tradeoffs concept, but a 7-8kw pack would be awesome. That would give a solid 50-60 miles of trail riding. Hopefully in the future, as battery technology advances, Alta will develop a replacement battery that will bolt in with more power.
4. It would be nice to be able to increase the amount of regen braking on the fly. A switch similar the map switch where you could increase or decrease the amount of regen on the fly would be awesome. You could even use the same switch with one additional switch to determine what the switch was controlling. Several times when going down steep hills I had to use the rear brake to slow me down. It would be nice to be able to increase the amount of regen to capture that energy. Probably wouldn’t make much difference in over all range, but it would hurt.
5. Key location and size. Probably not a problem for the MX version, as the key probably never leaves the bike on a MX, but on the EX it is small and the location makes it hard for a key chain. The key is located on the side of what would be the gas tank on most internal combustion motorcycles. It is a small key set in a small indentation so when you slide around you don’t hit it. It is well protected which is good for a MX bike. On the EX, because the key is so small, if you are going to ride it in town you might want to park it and take the key with you so you need a key chain, or at least I think I do. The indentation for the key is only slightly larger than the key, so with a normal key chain, it difficult to turn. I did find a key chain with a small ring so it is acceptable, but moving the key up by the bars or integrating it with the display would be better in my opinion. Small thing, but an area that could be improved on an already great bike.
Overall, a great bike and a great couple of days of riding. What turned out to be a free demo of the motorcycle ended up costing me a new Alta Redshift EX that I picked up Saturday (4/7). I think that is what would be called a win for everyone.
