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[Zelidar]

The lack of or limited support from dealers is a recurrent theme in the world of electric motorcycles. Most of us have been using ICE motorcycles before and can compare how it was before, but doing such direct comparison is not fair.

Out of curiosity and for Switzerland (admittedly a country graced by the heavens for riding motorcycles) I looked up the number of dealers for Zero, Energica, Suzuki and Kawasaki. I also wanted to include HD, BMW, and Honda but they did not give me the overview I needed for the entire country. They most certainly have even more dealers that the other Japanese brands. In short, in Switzerland, Zero is ahead of Energica but still has at least 4 x less dealerships than the competition.

On top of that, due to the prohibitive cost of batteries and a much-reduced maintenance, there are smaller margins to be made. Also, electric motorcycles need considerably more electronics and software to properly operate than their ICE equivalents. I have witnessed one dealer really struggling with understand the meaning of messages displayed by the Zero motorcycles diagnostic application, both English and computers were not his strongest talents.

When buying my Zero three years ago, I perfectly knew about most of that, but I also counted on not needing them all too much. For me luckily that has proven to be true. I get my tires changed just a shy 1 km away from where I live, from an independent workshop who knows about changing tires on HD motorcycles (belt as well).

I am currently reading "Power Play" which describes the growing pains of Tesla. That story goes a long way in explaining how difficult it must be for small companies such a Zero and Energica to stay afloat, and to turn up enough profits to develop new products.

I tremendously enjoy riding and using today what will be the motorcycles of tomorrow. I am ok with the added cost and overhead that comes with that. If there were no electric motorcycles comparable to the one I have, I would not be riding one at all. I no longer can put up with changing gears, the vibrations, the noise, the heat, the oil and grease, the gasoline smell, the polluting emissions.

[Richard230]

One thing I have been hearing more of on ICE brand motorcycle forums are complaints about the length of time it takes to have a bike repaired or serviced. Times of three to four weeks are mentioned. There are likely several factors at play here. Such as the time of year; shortage of parts due to lingering pandemic manufacturing and transportation impacts; more expensive overhead costs (especially labor and utilities); fewer new people wanting to get into jobs where they get their hands dirty; fewer owners wanting to perform their own maintenance and repairs (and not wanting to get their hands dirty); and smaller shops closing, leaving the industry to large multi-brand conglomerates, that bought them out and now need to pay back their investment by cutting costs and providing less personal service than the small shops used to provide.  Dealing with an entirely new technology that most ICE shops don't understand, such as electric propulsion, just complicates the situation.

While I can understand all of these factors, what I don't get is that most dealerships want you to bring your bike that needs repair or servicing to them and just leave it there until they can get around to working on it. Why not allow you to schedule an appointment for a specific day and bring it in there, sort of like when you have a doctor's or dentist appointment? Why does your bike have to be stored at the shop, typically sitting out in the heat of day, rain, wind, or cold, for all that time while the shop gets around to looking at it - and then orders parts that might take another week or two to arrive?

Ideally, what they should do is to let you bring in your bike on a scheduled day for typical servicing, or to allow you to bring it in for the service manager to look at to analyze its problem if it needs repairs, allow you to pay upfront to order any likely needed parts and then make an appointment to work on the bike when the parts finally arrive, while you keep your bike at home, safe and warm, if you don't want to store it at the shop.

Attached is a photo of my multi-brand Zero dealer in San Francisco taken a few years ago. All of these bikes are waiting for parts (and this was before the days of supply-chain issues) to arrive. Every morning they are pushed outside, parked in the adjacent alley for the day (they hire a homeless person to keep an eye on them from their tent across the street) and then pushed back into to the shop at the end of the day. If I had an expensive motorcycle, I wouldn't want it to spend a couple of weeks getting that treatment every day. There must be a better way to run a business. 

[Bodo]

Good research. To be fair, for a landlocked country in the centre of Europe -like Switzerland- it makes sense to also consider dealers across the border. It's not that there's a language barrier 

[Zelidar]

... Ideally, what they should do is to let you bring in your bike on a scheduled day for typical servicing, ...

Luckily for me that has been my experience. In both cases (2 different ZM dealerships) there was a nearby train station so I could bring my bike at the end of a day, get back home by train, return 1 or 2 days later to fetch it back after the scheduled work. On top of that for me it always had to be arranged on a relatively short notice since I didn't want to ride long distance (~> 100 km) under the rain or in the winter.