Photo: Alex Washburn/WIRED
So there I was, zipping down the highway at 75 mph one morning when I lost power. Just like that, I was coasting. On a motorcycle. An electric motorcycle. In traffic.
This is not good. Losing thrust in a car is a hassle, but not usually fatal. After all, you're on four wheels, in a one-ton cage that's been proven all but uncrushable by the government. But a motorcycle? You might as well be sitting naked in a bull pen.
With no way to get to the right shoulder, I rolled the Zero DS to the left shoulder. I gave the bike a quick check to make sure nothing obvious – like a broken drive belt – was amiss. Everything looked okay. Unsure what else to do, I switched the key off and on. That did the trick. I climbed back on and continued my commute.
Just as I'd convinced myself the problem was a fluke, the bike began to slow again. I pulled over and repeated the off-on trick with the key, then turned around and headed home. Back at the house, I dropped Zero a line to explain the problem. The next day, I tried to start the bike. Nothing. Just an exclamation point inside a red triangle shining on the instrument cluster.
Turns out I'm not the only one to have seen that dire warning.
It turns out Zero's bikes have a problem with its controller software. It's been well-documented by the electric motorcycle community, and it's something Zero has been working to fix. They've finally worked it out, and issued a recall for every 2012 and 2013 Zero model.
This is as ignominious an end to my all-electric life on the Zero DS as I could imagine. It's also surprising. Until now, my six-month experiment in electric mobility has gone better than expected.
It's also ironic, given that one of the great benefits of an EV is the ease of maintenance. With only a battery, a motor, and a black box (i.e. the controller) to keep you moving, electric motorcycles are a breeze to maintain compared to a conventional motorcycle, what with all the lubricating and adjusting and tuning you have to do. You basically just worry about consumables: brake pads, tires, maybe a brake fluid flush. That's about it.
The other benefit is that early adopters buying electric motorcycles tend to be pretty geeky. Including yours truly. To cater to that, Zero offers a companion smartphone app that connects to the bike over bluetooth to display a host of data, from power to range and charging times – it even lets you tweak the motor's output to conserve juice or boost performance. But more importantly, it can retrieve data logs and send them home to Zero, much like you'd upload a bug report to Apple, Google, or Microsoft. That's how Zero knew it had a problem.
Photo: Alex Washburn/WIRED
"We've been working on this particular firmware for several months before we realized how widespread the issue was," says Ryan Biffard, Zero's director of powertrain engineering. He's the guy responsible for the motor design in the 2013 and 2014 models, and his crew has been putting in some long hours chasing down what guys on the electric bike forums have been calling "the glitch."
Essentially, the glitch is a failure to communicate. The motor encoder sends signals back to the controller – the bike's brain – to tell it the position of the magnetic rotor inside the electric motor. It must know, within a few degrees, where that rotor is if the motor is to keep turning. If the encorder "sees" something amiss, it shuts down the motor. That's how I wound up stuck on the side of the freeway.
"We worked extensively with our motor partners at Sevcon for a fix," Biffard tells me. The crew traveled back and forth between Sevcon's headquarters in the U.K. before, according to Zero's letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "it became clear to Zero Motorcycles and Sevcon that these random, infrequent and unrelated signal faults could not be avoided in the lifetime of the motorcycle."
To fix the problem, Zero is upgrading the firmware on all 667 motorcycles it built in 2012 and 2013. The feds issued the recall Monday, not quite a month after Zero raised the issue.
This isn't the first time something like this has come up for Zero. The California company recalled 315 bikes for a similar issue in 2012, and it also has had problems with sticking throttles and the front brake bracket. But this recall is the most widespread, and Zero is doing its best to make the firmware upgrade easy for its owners.
Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED
The first step is sending the logs into Zero, after which the owner can bring it to the nearest dealer or have it flat-bedded in if it's not running. Most of these firmware updates can be handled in a few hours.
"Often a repair can be done while the customer goes for lunch," says Richard Kenton, Zero's director of customer experience. "As most repairs are a simple firmware/software flash update."
And that may be the biggest paradigm shift in this new era of electrified vehicles. Tens of thousands of words have been spilled about the death of the shade tree mechanic. Modern cars, and now bikes, are more like rolling computers than mechanical objects, so more and more "repairs" amount to little more than updating the software. Tesla's even reached the point where it's making updates wirelessly while the car is in your driveway. It's just a matter of time and technology before this is SOP.
Given the same set of circumstances that I experienced with the Zero, it's not hard to imagine calling them up from the safety of a gas station, telling them my problem, and having a fix pushed wirelessly to the bike in minutes. It would've saved days of downtime and salvaged my commute. Not to mention negated the only reliability issue I've had in nearly six months.