The Zero FXE can slice and dice freeway traffic, but it’s really a sharper tool in the city.
Zero Motorcycles
I picked up the new Zero FXE electric motorcycle from a dealership less than 20 freeway miles from my home. Both my house and the dealership are located near expressways, so I put the key in the FXE, set it for Sport mode and headed for the onramp.
I hopped on the freeway and, awash in New Review Bike excitement, immediately found myself well over the speed limit due to the FXE’s pretty much vibrationless drivetrain. “Calm yourself before you get a ticket,” I said to myself in my helmet. Not a quarter mile later, I rolled around a bend in the highway and there was a police officer on a BMW gunning his radar for speeders, but I was well blended into the traffic mix and going the same speed as most everyone else by that point. No ticket today!
By the time I got home, the battery, fully charged upon departure, was hovering around 40%. Make no mistake, I was definitely not sparing the whip on the ride home, but to see the battery that low after such a relatively short jaunt on the freeway was… disappointing. Sweet, sweet bike, super cool design, rides like a hot-rod motard with an extremely high fun factor, but literally half the battery capacity of the SR/S and SR/F. What was Zero thinking? It would take me a couple of weeks, a lot of miles and some reflection to figure it out.
Zero FXE Tech and Design
Light, thin and fast, the FXE rides like a dirtbike on street tires and looks like nothing else.
Roberson Photography
The FXE follows a basic technical approach Zero uses on most of its electric motorcycles. The battery powers an air-cooled electric motor that is connected directly to the rear wheel via a carbon-fiber belt, it’s literally twist and go. There are no gears to change and the drivetrain needs minimal (if any) maintenance. Showa suspension is adjustable front and rear. Motive power comes from Zero’s long-running Z-Force 75-5 air-cooled brushless mid-line motor that makes 46 horsepower and a very stout 78 pound feet of torque. Electrons await their calling in a 7.2kWh battery pack – a pack literally half the capacity of Zero’s 14.4kWh block on the larger, more powerful and longer-range SR/F and SR/S “big bikes.” Not that the FXE is somehow “small,” but it does weight in at two pounds shy of 300, and since it’s electric, that’s what it always weighs. The SR/S is nearly 200 pounds heavier – but also more powerful by 50-plus horsepower and almost double the torque.
Zero’s Cypher II UI populates a new 5-inch LCD display that is somewhat app-configurable but oddly lacks an option for showing the time, an oversight hopefully fixable via a software update. Otherwise, the LCD keeps things clean and simple while showing speed, charge level, regen and power output, and that all-important range figure. J.Juan ABS brakes slow the wheels and there are two ride modes, Sport and Eco, which can can be swapped on the fly and tuned and tweaked in the Zero app.
Cypher II LCD display is clean and uncluttered, but could use a clock option. And maybe GPS? Maybe … [+]
Roberson Photography
The visual style of the $11,795 FXE is a bit of a departure for Zero, and is a result of collaboration with Huge Design, thine of the Bay Area. Huge has a dedicated custom moto design group (Huge Moto) and had created a Zero concept exercise called the SM Custom. The FXE is a close facsimile of that bike, and only loses a few cool points for mandatory DOT ugly bits and really, the beaky snout isn’t my cup of tea but it sure helped keep the rain off my visor while riding through Portland’s more damp fall days. Points for practicality.
Front fender/beak/headlight nacelle was the only real styling sore point for me; a little color … [+]
Roberson Photography
Overall, the “tankless” and smoothed industrial design has a bit of anime/manga ring to it, with some Tron swirled in for good measure. You’d look very much at home on the streets of Osaka on the FXE. In EV-aware Portland, it was a head-turner to be sure, and I’m now a nameless rider in many Instagram feeds.
Riding Experience
Styling by S.F.’s Huge Design is sleek and modern, with cool touches and no big ‘gas tank’ bulge. … [+]
Roberson Photography
I can’t begin the riding impression without mention of the charging situation. The FXE does not include a Level II or III (DC Fast) connection, you just plug it into the wall like a floor lamp. There is a “faster charger” option for $600 that chops the dead-to-full time from a rather sobering 9.7 hours to about 4 hours, and apparently more than one of these add-on chargers can be used to cut the charge time even more, but I had none of those perks, just the AC cord that came with the press bike. So after each ride, it got plugged in, which is a habit I’ve already developed, but if you have to charge out on the road, well, that’s a different conversation better explained by the riding experience and the resulting realizations I had while the FXE was in my care.
As noted up top, the FXE has no trouble pinning the speedo to it’s software-mandated 85mph limit – quickly. Eco mode limits the bike to 70mph, which is still 15 over the local freeway limits. Thin, lithe and light (for a motorcycle) at 298 pounds and with no “gas tank” bulge, the FXE feels more akin to a highly powered mountain bike, albeit with monster brakes and boffo suspension. Riding on the freeway, tipped to Sport Mode, all that torque begs you to misbehave. I gave in far too often. But the penalty always reared its head: heavy-handed, high-speed hijinx quickly eat through the battery. “nine hours to recharge” just rang in my ears, and I backed off the throttle. I was frustrated. What was Zero thinking with this bike? Who is this for?
As I rode the FXE around Portland, the city was coming out of its COVID coma. Parts and Service is a … [+]
Roberson Photography
With a literal garage full of motorcycles both of my own and in for review, I relegated the FXE to in-town, surface street duties – and that’s when the bright light of understanding shone upon me. The folks at Zero aren’t dumb – their SR/S, SR/F and Black Forest machines are cool, capable, comfortable, and eyeball-flattening fast. But tourers they are not. I tried it. Possible, but really not quite there yet. The FXE is actually the opposite of those larger, heavy, more expensive machines.
Zero claims the FXE gets 100 miles of city range on a charge, so I popped it into Eco (default settings), grabbed my well-worn messenger bag and let the car keys gather dust for a while. I tried to run as many errands and take as many trips to my day job and elsewhere within the Portland metro area on the FXE as possible, and lo and behold, that range number on the LCD just kept creeping up and up and up as the regen system filled the battery with juice on every red light, downhill, decel and descent during my travels.
Meanwhile, Eco mode in the city is brilliant. Plenty fast, especially off the line, it also maximizes regeneration. As I got used to the bike’s behaviours in town, I started to see Zero’s thinking on the FXE much more clearly. It’s light. Fast. Agile. Simple. And while lane splitting isn’t legal in Oregon (sadly), land changing by riding close to the center line in heavy traffic and using signals absolutely is, and soon I was cutting through the gridlock on the FXE like a seasoned S.F. messenger rider. And if I needed to hop over to Washington on 5 miles of freeway? No problem.
Now I Get It
After a few weeks of riding, I had it down: Charge all night, ride all day, repeat. No expensive special chargers needed. And statistically, most people don’t drive (or ride) more than 40 miles a day, let alone 90 or 100. Clearly, some do, and this is not the bike for them. But I found that on a typical day, I was riding 20, maybe 30 miles max. The FXE does ride two-up (barely), so I even popped my son over to soccer practice several times, much to his delight. My car sat unused for days on end.
Shortly before I had to get the FXE back to Zero, I rode across town to visit my parents, normally a 14-mile highway journey. But instead, I took the FXE on surface streets, hitting the bank, the hardware store, library and my favorite taco truck on the way. Summer was turning to fall and the leaves were beginning to swirl down from the maple trees across the city, and salivatory fragrances wafted from newly revived restaurants and the city’s justly famous food carts.
Portlanders were coming out of COVID isolation and returning to restaurants, Powell’s Books, the waterfront esplanade, and the city’s many bike lanes. The FXE, in its element, nimbly picked through traffic on the way, and while it took a bit longer than taking the highway, it was a much more joyous, colorful and energizing ride. Pedestrians, kids and drivers gave me a thumbs up or a smile. P-Town folks know their electric transportation, and the Zero FXE is an absolute urban pleasure machine. A Traffic Terminator. The ultimate electric city bike. And when I got to my folks’ place, the battery meter read 83%.
Plenty left over for the freeway that I wasn’t about to get on.
Special thanks to Zero Motorcycles for their long-term loan of the FXE for this evaluation. Want to comment? I post my articles on Twitter, my Facebook page and LinkedIn posts page. I’m always interested in your feedback. Thanks for reading and please click “Follow” below to see new articles when they are posted on Forbes.com.
