ElectricMotorcycleForum.com

Since the symptoms were pointing to a faulty throttle, I decided to replace it. The 2011 DS throttle has only two wires, making it easy to test. Testing the old throttle with an ohmmeter showed ~0 ohms at rest and ~5k ohms at full throttle. That seemed correct to me, but I ordered a Domino throttle to replace it anyway. Wiring up the Domino was pretty easy and I was able to take the bike for a test ride this morning. I rode about 6 miles of suburban streets with plenty of stop lights and had no problems at all. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this was the only problem.

One thing I did notice on my ride was that the cooling fan came on after a little while and stayed on for most of my ride. It was 65 degrees F outside, so not really all that warm. In the past I would usually only notice the fan coming on when it was really hot out - 100+. Could this be a symptom of something wrong with the motor?

I haven't been riding much since I last posted (vacation, travel and bad weather), but the bike was working properly whenever I needed it until this week. On my ride home on Tuesday I suddenly lost power for a few seconds twice in a short ride. In both cases I was accelerating when suddenly the bike lost power and was coasting for a few seconds then abruptly started accelerating again. This morning the throttle was back to being completely unresponsive so I left the bike at home. Does this still sound like a faulty throttle? If so, I think I'll try to replace it.

One other tidbit - another minor problem I've had for over a year now is that my kickstand switch sometimes thinks the kickstand is still down after I've pushed it up. No throttle response but there's a flashing red light on the display. Kicking it down and up again once or twice has always resolved the issue, but I'm worried that it will fail completely sometime.

My 2011 DS has been completely reliable until one day a couple of months ago when I stopped at a traffic light and it wouldn't respond when the light went green - no error lights, but twisting the throttle had no response. Powering off and on had no effect. I pushed it the rest of the way to my destination and left it parked for the day. Later that day it was back to working normally. All was well until two days ago - it's back in the same state, but this time leaving it parked didn't "fix" it. Everything seems normal - kickstand is up, kill switch is set to "run", there are no red lights on the dash, but twisting the throttle has no effect.

The newer bikes have access to diagnostics through bluetooth - is there anything equivalent for the 2011 models? The last time it happened, I had posted to the Zero Motorcycles Owners Facebook page and someone suggested the throttle potentiometer - is there an easy way to test that?

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them, otherwise my only option is to tow it to the nearest Zero dealer.

 -Rob