Erin Baker – Electric Bike? No Thanks

I learned to ride on a Harley, so I know all about heavy bikes. I went to the Rider’s Edge school in Wales to do a one-week crash course in 2006… and it did what it says on the tin – I crashed every day for a week, but passed in the end, with no incidents to report.

Along the way, we were taught how to pick up a heavy bike. You know the YouTube clips, showing an elfin woman, slight as a twig, picking up a massive tourer by bending down with her back to the bike, grabbing a handlebar and then simply levering herself up from the knees, bike following suit.

I did it once, at the school, then never again, despite two opportunities to try, when bike and I lay prostrate on the road and speed was of the essence.

So an electric bike that weighs 258kg is extremely off-putting. That’s like trying to pick up a sports bike with pillion.

Then there’s the price: the Energica Ego, which went on sale last year, costs £23,000. Its sister bike, the Eva, a street fighter version, will be only slightly less pricey when it goes on sale this year.

The noise, weirdly, is apparently less of an issue – GRR’s motorcycling correspondent, Roland Brown, rode the Ego and quite liked the high-pitched whine, likening it to the sound of a jet fighter. They certainly look the part, and all that low-rev torque makes for more acceleration than I’m happy with, but I’m a lily-livered girl when it comes to riding and am happy with about 50bhp.

But bikes are at a much earlier phase of adopting this technology than cars, and have much further to go before they are considered viable, mass-market, alternative rides.

Still, GRR's Roland Brown is broadly a fan. “Electric bikes have definitely improved over the years,” he told me the other day. “To the point where the latest ones (KTM Freeride E, Zeros and Victory impulse TT) are really fun to ride. But, yes, the ones that have better performance tend to be heavy or have very short range and they’re all very expensive, with virtually no financial incentives in the UK.”

While Zero pulled out of the UK a couple of years ago, and Victory doesn’t bother importing the Empulse, Italian firm Energica is a new arrival on UK shores and, like Tesla, has gone public, on the Italian Stock Exchange. Someone clearly thinks there’s a future here. It’s helped, of course, by the fact that Energica is owned by the CRP Group, which supplies components to Formula One teams… where there’s pedigree, there’s profit.

Time will tell; meanwhile, I’m not quite brave enough to be an electric two-wheeled early adopter.