Riding into the future
HARLEY’S ELECTRIC LIVEWIRE IS WINNER
A DUCATI Desmosedici is waiting for the lights to go green and I pull up alongside it.
The Desmosedici is essentially a MotoGP bike made road legal. Ducati only made the bike for a short period and it’s very fast, very valuable and very sexy.
The rider is in full leathers and with knee sliders acceptably worn. It’s a very noisy machine – made extra loud by the sports exhaust its owner has fitted.
My bike is silent but is gently rocking underneath me. Throbbing is a better description. It’s a new Harley-Davidson.
Harleys can usually out-shout even a Ducati, but this one can’t. It’s electric. Welcome to the future: the HarleyDavidson LiveWire.
This is not the first electric bike that I’ve ridden; a couple of years ago I had a quick squirt on a Californian-made machine called a Zero, but this is the first by a mainstream manufacturer.
The lights turned green and I crank the twistgrip as far as it will go. As the Harley whirrs its way down the dual carriageway I hear the Ducati stutter – it has a very long first gear and a tricky clutch action – then pick up and scream as the V4 engine shoots to the red line.
By which time we were 100 metres up the road. That’s what maximum torque from zero revs and not having to change gear does for you.
Here’s the technical lowdown for you: the bike is powered by a 104bhp motor that gets its power from a 15.5kWh lithium-ion battery. That’s a few kWh larger than the battery you will find in most PHEV cars.
Top speed is 115mph and 0-60mph takes 3.0sec. More impressive is the overtaking sprint between 60-80mph, which takes just 1.9sec. Our test bike arrived with a nearly full battery and 102 miles of range showing. Word is that you’ll get nearly 150 miles if you ride the bike in town, but why would you do that?
Harley-Davidson says that you can expect around 95 miles on mixed motorway and country road riding.
That’s generous enough in my view. I’ve ridden superbikes where if you’re pressing on you can’t manage much more than that from a tank of petrol. There’s a fake filler cap on the fake fuel tank that when opened reveals the charging socket. Harley supplies a threepin plug charging cable under the seat, which will charge it from flat to full in just over 12 hours.
The bike can also be charged using a CCS 50kw DC charger, and that’s what I used to take the battery from 50% to 90% in the time it took me to drink a coffee.
The LiveWire is the best-built Harley I have ever ridden. Looks good too with its finned battery cover and electric drive unit slung low beneath it like a missile.
Hopeless mudguards, though – I got a stripe of crap both up my front and back when it started raining.
The ride feels a bit like a Triumph Speed Triple but less nimble. Certainly no Harley-Davidson has handled this well. It’s stable in straight lines but doesn’t like fast changes of direction.
Purists will hate the lack of engine noise and the experience of changing gear and blending in the clutch.
There’s a bevel gear that turns the drive right angles to a belt final drive to the rear wheel, adding a bit of mechanical noise, but it’s no substitute for the throb of a Harley V-Twin.
That dice with the Ducati was on the way back from a popular bikers’ café, where the LiveWire attracted a lot of attention. The lack of noise was mentioned as a negative and so was the £29,245 price – a lot for a motorcycle.
There were probably about 75 bikers; if five were under 50 I’d be surprised.
Here’s the thing about the Harley LiveWire – Harley took the plunge to build this bike because it realised its customer base is literally dying off.
Future generations are less likely to miss the sound of a high-revving internal combustion engine if they have been brought up with electric cars. I’ve ridden the future and I quite like it.