Honda Electric Motorcycles: The Beginning Of The Electric Bike Boom?
But actually I think in terms of like where the Market’s going and what’s going to be import important in the next few years this is massive so it’s a press release from Honda and it’s the 2023 briefing on Honda electric motorcycle business and these bullet points make for quite interesting
Reading I reckon so number one their Global sales Target of electric bikes in 2030 they originally set it at three and a half million bikes but they’ve upped it for some reason thinking that that wasn’t difficult enough to 4 million they’re going to aim to sell 4 million electric bikes a year by
2030 also by 2030 they’re going to introduce 30 electric models globally that’s a lot mate hell yeah impressive yeah they’re going to further accelerate cost reduction initiatives to reduce the current cost of electric bikes by 50% which I think that’s one of the big look there’s two big problems people have
With electrics three so sorry number one no kind of Soul compared to a petrol bike you’re never really going to get around that any synthetic attempt to create that like the way that the Harley Livewire throbs at a standstill it’s not the same and I think we just have to
Accept that number two is infrastructure like it’s hard to charge that easily and you have to plan ahead a lot but the more electric bikes on the road and electric cars the easier that’s probably going to get so their goals to um sell 4 million units by 2030 is probably going
To help with that and then number three is the cost like zeros are like or they used to be about 20 grand and a lot of them still are the Harley S2 delmare that we’re going to review in a week or two that’s not far off 20 and so
Comparatively versus an electric bike like a 10 grand for an mto9 that’s an absolute hoot it doesn’t look great and so this initiative to reduce cost by 50% definitely seems like an important one and then they invest in 100 billion yen over the next five over the five years
From 21 to 25 and another 400 billion yen over the 5-year period up to 2030 for a total investment of 500 billion yen over 10 years I did the currency translation for that conversion rather and it’s uh nearly £3 billion I believe that’s a sort of money I can’t even get
My head around as to whether that’s a lot or not it sounds you might yeah you might as well have made up a word for the amount that makes sense to me um there’s a few things there so in terms of like getting numbers out they I’d be
Interested to see how that sort of factors into their um current figures of selling bikes bearing in mind that a lot of their Market would be the smaller um things like their cub and stuff right so I think in a year they sell something like 20 or 30 million bikes globally
It’s like the second place manufacturer is one of the Japanese big four as well I think think and they more like 5 million it might be Yamaha or someone like that and it’s all those little 125 bikes and scooters that they make that really make up the bulk of
That um but still and if they’re doing electric bikes it’s easy to do you know the smaller capacity ones or you know the equivalent of a 125 so when they talk about numbers I guess my my initial thought was oh big bikes that’ be like
The um like the zeros and stuff but it’s probably not if they’re talking 4 million a huge percentage of that will probably be the little tiny ones so a good example of probably what they mean is in China you can buy the electric version of the Cub it’s called the Cub e
And there’s also a Dax E I believe uh so there’s the Cub e the Dax e and then that Zuma looks like a Grom not a Grom what’s that one called a Ruckus in the US like a more utilitarian looking thing thoughts on these that looks like what I was
Expecting to be honest and you know what they’re good fun but that is a city commuter Town commuter short trip like a good alternative to if you can’t cycle or if you just don’t want to and you want something a bit smaller but yeah I think like looking at these bikes as
Well I agree they are sort of city biased in fact if you look at them have they all got actual bicycle pedals so they’re more like an ebike yeah I mean look at the also if you if you’re trying to gauge the horsepower levels of a given vehicle
Without um necessarily knowing the full specs they’re probably in here but like just glancing at it from the girth of that chain I’m thinking it’s not a lot that’s a bicycle chain yeah it Ain it ain’t going to be panagar levels is it so the two ways you
Normally do that at a glance are rare wheel size like tire tread and then the the train is another one right um so for that that looks like a 50 cc to me that’s pretty small but then if you have to use the pedals at some point if that
Add some big whopping great Tire on it in a fat chain then you’d need thighs like Chris Hoy to get that thing moving so backup cycle it looks like a an ebike but with all the added weight of a motorcycle but I can’t quite figure out
If they actually are pedals or not they do look like it don’t they but I don’t know if yeah yeah that one in the red one that’s that’s got a little yeah you can spin that around look it’s got room in there to actually pedal it the other thing
That uh I was noticing on here though is that they say that they targets for operating profit for 2030 a 10% for all their motorcycle business and more than 5% for electric motorcycles specifically so is a subdivision of that and again I think that’s an interesting Target because well look it’s different isn’t
It because they’re obviously doing all the urban Mobility stuff these smaller kind of bikes but if you look at something like zero I don’t think they’ve turned a profit in their entire existence it’s one of those kind of startup Vibes where they just get loads of investment and
Hope that eventually at some point in the future they might be profitable or worth something and so I think it’s difficult because obviously like this is you know it’s not stamping out another CB 650 or something like that where they’ve used the same engine for ages and they’re just checking another
Bike out with a different headlight on it this is where you’re having to put loads and loads of investment into developing something completely new and so naturally the costs are going to be super high um and so if they can make it profitable then it just becomes part of their core
Business and that’s when we’ll probably see like a huge change um but it’s probably only Honda who can afford to do that because of that huge amount of bikes sold every year the just sheer size of their business they can actually afford to go
For it and push hard and so look I think this is a big moment where we’re going to see the big change if the biggest manufacturing the market is about to make a big push then that’s probably it’s time mate time’s up yeah that sounds about right time’s up yeah
That sounds about right I’d agree and I think it could I mean it has to have been Honda to do that it sort of feels like it’s right up their street anyway
Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFpvv8ghAq0
Rob https://www.youtube.com/@motobob and Tim https://www.youtube.com/@RarefiedRoad discuss whether Honda’s electric bike targets mark the beginning of the E bike boom.
