Electric motorcycles are here – but motorcyclists say 'no thank you'

MEREDITH — Scott and Diana Carlisle, of Attleboro, Massachusetts, climbed astride their 2024 Indian Chief motorcycle after having lunch at Twin Barns Brewery on June 19. Though their bike is pretty new, it’s not the newest in their stable — they also own a 2025 Chief they left at home.

The Carlisles are, in many ways, typical American motorcycle owners, in that they chose a large machine adept at chewing up highway miles. Did they consider any electric models before making their choice?

“Absolutely not,” said Scott.

While electric motorcycles have been on the market for many years — Harley-Davidson owns a sub-brand, LiveWire, which it has sold since 2019 — they haven’t found the same kind of market traction in the United States their four-wheeled counterparts have.

Motorcyclists and those in the business say there are various reasons why. Some say riders won’t be tempted until there are more charging locations, others say the motorcycles currently offered don’t suit American riders’ needs, and some feel there’s an intrinsic experience with an internal-combustion engine that an electric motorcycle couldn’t match.

“I don’t like the idea of electric motorcycles — the range, the charging,” said Scott. He said the sound of a gas motorcycle engine, and the experience of shifting through the gears, are important parts of the ride for him. As is the ability to stay on the road for as long as possible. “We do a lot of long-distance,” he said, and if recharging, even with a fast charger, takes an hour, what would be an eight-hour ride could take hours longer. “That’s unacceptable.”

Market demands

“There’s hundreds of thousands coming in for the rally,” Nicki Snyder, chief marketing officer for Laconia Harley-Davidson, told a cluster of sales employees under a large tent crowded with motorcycles available for sale. It’s no understatement to call Motorcycle Week a huge opportunity for the dealership, which capitalizes on the event by creating a destination of its own, with food, music, massages and a celebrity tattoo artist among the means to attract potential buyers to their lot.

“We’re excited about the motorcycle experience, about seeing people excited about motorcycling,” Snyder said.

Should people want a new bike to ride at the rally, Laconia Harley-Davidson brings in scores of bikes — Snyder declined to say how many — but nary a LiveWire among them.

In addition to more product, Laconia Harley-Davidson also brought in extra staff to help serve a surge in customers. One such person was Jayson Bennett, general manager of Mad River Harley-Davidson in Sandusky, Ohio. In his view, the proposition of electric motorcycles hasn’t yet been a winning one for a couple of factors. The first is the challenge of range — LiveWire motorcycles have a range of around 100 miles in mixed riding — coupled with the challenge of finding a charging point when that range is exhausted.

“There’s just not the charging network for them yet,” Bennett said.

And, even if there were more chargers available, he doesn’t see an electric motorcycle that fits what people are looking for when they go into a Harley dealership.

Bennett said the typical motorcyclist he sees is looking for a heavy cruiser, such as the Road King, made for comfort on long highway tours. Yet, most electric motorcycles are smaller and aimed at urban commuting, where regenerative braking can help extend range.

“It’s a new market for them, they’re still trying to find the market,” Bennett said. With cars, consumers are more likely to see them as solving a specific problem, such as how to get to work or to run errands, and for many drivers an electric car can do those jobs as well as one that runs on gasoline. “An electric motorcycle is vastly different than an electric car,” Bennett said, “People have a motorcycle for a very specific need.”

By the numbers

The U.S. market is an outlier in terms of its appetite, or lack thereof, for electric motorcycles. Globally, electric vehicles would account for 26% of all passenger car sales and 45% of all two- and three-wheeled vehicle sales, according to predictions in a report published by Bloomberg NEF, which provides insights into new energy futures.

But that’s just the global average; the picture is much more complicated when considered by geography. MotorCyclesData.com, a market intelligence and consulting firm, says more than 80% of the world’s electric motorcycles are sold in China, followed by India, then several other Asian countries.

Sam Evans-Brown, executive director of Clean Energy NH, is charged with pushing the state to adopt renewable energy sources. He also walks the walk, as a member of a household with exclusively eclectic vehicles. His social circle and professional contacts are similarly electrified; he estimates he knows about 2,000 people who own an electric vehicle.

How many of those contacts own an electric motorcycle?

“Zero,” Evans-Brown answered.

Electric cars are, Evans-Brown said, on the verge of mass adoption. About 8% of new cars purchased in the U.S. are electric, and the tipping point, after which one would see widespread adoption, is 5%, a point where most people know one person who has one and can tell them about it.

“The reason we have mass adoption of electric vehicles as cars is because they’re awesome, they’re just rad,” Evans-Brown said. “They work for a lot of people’s lives. Once you have one, you realize they’re great cars, they have basically no maintenance, and range anxiety falls away quickly.”

Motorcycle are a different story though, he said. Cars are used everyday, typically for short trips, he said. In the U.S. at least, people don’t tend to use their motorcycles in the same way.

“Motorcycle Week is the perfect example,” Evans-Brown said. That motorcycle likely sat in a garage all winter, then got pulled out for the Laconia rally, where it was ridden for hundreds, if not thousands, of miles, then parked again until the next adventure.

Will their time come?

If a manufacturer could make a heavy cruiser, of the kind Bennett described, would the motorcycling culture embrace it? It seems people would still have their reservations.

Charlie St. Clair, the executive director of Laconia Motorcycle Week, said it would take more than a better design for him.

“I think they’ll catch on if we get to the point where we can’t get gasoline,” said St. Clair, who rides his motorcycle across the country to promote the country’s oldest motorcycle rally.

“The charging is a big thing. When I ride out to South Dakota, I don’t want to spend a couple of hours for it to charge,” St. Clair said. “If they can solve that problem, I’d be thrilled to have that, because I wouldn’t be spending my money on gasoline.”

There might be other reasons why bikers would want to keep their engines, Evans-Brown said.

“I suspect that for most Americans, this is not a tool for daily transportation, it’s something that they ride for fun,” Evans-Brown said. “There might be a mis-match of the use case, in which case the technology needs to get better. Then, I think motorcyclists are often motorheads, they love the internal combustion engine and the beauty inherent in this incredibly complicated machine. They love the noise, they love the mystique of the contained explosions in the cylinder, driving the pistons.”

Though it’s his job to promote sales of things like photovoltaic panels and electric cars, Evans-Brown said he doesn’t mind if Motorcycle Week continues to rumble with the roar of gas-powered machinery. He figures the amount of emissions attributable to motorcycles is negligible compared to those from other sources.

In any case, he said he hopes motorcyclists, even if they never consider an electric vehicle, won’t oppose them.

“I don’t understand why they’d want to slag off on EVs,” Evans-Brown said, invoking the effects of supply and demand. “What we’re doing is making your gas cheaper. We can all win.”