First Ride: Zero DSR/X Electrifies the Adventure Bike

The monikers for motorcycle genres are charmingly descriptive. A bagger has bags, a naked bike is scant on bodywork, and an adventure bike is for riding to the sort of places where you have to bribe a local official to buy three gallons of gas siphoned out of a crop-duster. To that end, adventure bikes are tall, with leggy suspension travel, big fuel tanks and tires that can tolerate some dirt. The Zero DSR/X offers all of that, except the big gas tank, because it's powered by this newfangled electricity everyone's talking about. Fortunately, this bike can tote quite a lot of juice.

In its standard specification, the DSR/X packs 15.2 kilowatt-hours of usable capacity into the rectangular lithium-ion battery slung low in its trellis frame. Another 3.0 kilowatt-hours or so can be added via the optional $3200 Power Tank, which replaces the storage cubby in front of the rider with another battery. A 6.6-kW onboard Level 2 charger can charge the battery from zero to 95 percent in about two hours, with the optional $3000 dual charger cutting that time in half (but being incompatible with the Power Tank).

Range is 180 miles in city riding—scenarios with plenty of regenerative braking and not much high-speed aero drag, which could also mean picking your way along a trail. At a steady 70 mph, though, claimed range drops to 85 miles. During a ride weighted toward fast back-road travel, we managed about 100 miles. Is 100 miles a long way to ride a motorcycle? Sure. But adventure bikes aren't supposed to be about blasting a canyon loop and ending up back at your front door an hour and a half later. They're about going somewhere, which means that in this case you'll need to do some planning ahead of your rides. Out in the boonies with friends riding a Royal Enfield and a Honda Gold Wing, our turnaround point was dictated by the Zero's state of charge—when the battery's at 50 percent, you either head for home or calculate the mileage to a known working Level 2 charger.

This can be surprisingly tricky. I considered trying to ride the Zero to the North Carolina coast, but from my house 140 miles away, there was no good way to do it with only one charge break, since the area around the halfway point is a charger desert. Zero probably chose Level 2 charging for the DSR/X because of its ubiquity, but along highways Level 3 chargers are now almost easier to find than Level 2, and plenty of DC fast-charging has sprung up around the corridors to the coast. If the Zero could accommodate both Level 2 and DC fast-charging—as any fully electric car does—then a wider range of destinations would be possible. But motorcycles, so sensitive to weight and packaging, tend to go with one charge style or the other. The Harley-Davidson LiveWire One accommodates DC fast-charging but not Level 2 (due to limitations in the onboard charger), while Harley's S2 Del Mar is the opposite.