In the last ten years, the electric car market has skyrocketed into the atmosphere. With Tesla's becoming more common, and the Nissan Leaf being available for under $8,000 MSRP, it is by far more affordable to purchase an electric vehicle, and the prices have dropped enough to where you can start saving money on fuel from day 1. With that being written, it begs the question of motorcycles. Is it cheaper to own a electric motorcycle or still buy a normal fuel injecting one?
We are here to find out. There is a couple of factors we will look at for this experiment. We will assume that the person who is purchasing this motorcycle is driving 30 miles per day, with the average cost of gas in America currently being $2.60 a gallon, we will use that price as a reference point. We also scanned the internet for the least expensive electric motorcycles, and what we found is that the Zero models all were the lowest price at a great performance. The first Zero bike we will compare is the FX model, which is the least expensive model, and if we find a gas model to compare it to, we will go with the Honda Rebel 300. (You can compare it to a CBR300 if you like also, same stats)
The base price of the least expensive Zero motorcycle is $9295, and you can get a Honda Rebel brand new for $4700, which is half of the cost. The other initial stat to watch is that the Rebel gets 78 MPG, which is nothing to scoff at. Let's look at the cost of ownership over years of time.
As you can see, it would take almost 12 years to start saving any money. It's also worth noting that we didn't factor in electricity into this equation. When you figure the cost of charging your electric Zero motorcycle every day, it could very well take 15 years to see a profit. This is lightyears different from electric cars, since you can get an electric car for under 8 grand, and start saving from day one. Let's try another model. Let's go with the most expensive Zero model, which is the SR model. The bike that compares to this one will be the CBR600, which only gets 44 MPG, is this the savings we are looking for?
No it is not. As you can see, it still takes the same amount of time to start saving any money. With again, no factoring in electricity. You could even afford to buy a more premium model of motorcycle or add a ton of accessory packages and still come out under what an electric bike would cost.
There are cheaper motorcycle options that go under 45 MPH, but we just don't think that really fits the majority of the motorcycle market. Which means that, at the moment, it is not cheaper to buy an electric motorcycle over a fuel injected one. We also even looked at trade value, and both bikes maintained about roughly 50% value over a five year span.
It's an incredibly weird phenomena that electric motorcycle are more expensive than electric cars. Hopefully they catch up soon though, because it could become a cost efficient means of transportation for millions of people.