Matter Aera 5000+ review – Is this how all electric bikes should be? | @autocarindia1
Today is one of those rare days when we are in a very unusual place and we have a rather unusual motorcycle with us now all of this you see underneath me is salt this is the incredible run of cutch in Gujarat and this is the mattera era
Which conveniently is also a product of Gujarat mattera is an M thead based startup that has spent the last 5 years working towards technologies that you see within this motorcycle they claim to have applied for over 450 patents and design trademarks and much of that is for very complicated base electronic
Level things within this motorcycle but there are two things here on this motorcycle that are of great importance to average Riders like you and me things we’ve never seen before the first of them is that this is India’s first liquid cooled electric vehicle and the second is that it’s the first Eevee in
India that has gears four of them in total so why go down the complication of liquid cooling for a powert Trin and a battery pack that really isn’t that big we’ve seen bigger stuff in our Market that continues to be air cooled Mata says that they’ve done that to make this
Thing run as smoothly as possible in India’s hot climate the motor is liquid cooled and so is the battery pack that’s a fair explanation for the liquid cooling but why give an electric vehicle for conventional gears when pretty much no one else is doing that matters says
That they want to create a product that feels familiar to existing motorcycle riders and to do that they’ve made a motorcycle that looks familiar as well this looks like pretty much any 150c Street sporty commuter out there nothing about this bike looks alien and they’ve really tried hard to make it look
Conventionally it looks like there is an engine down here you don’t really see a big battery pack hanging off the motorcycle and in general when you look at this thing you will not think it’s electric you’ll only realize that once you hear it moving continuing with the theme of familiarity
Is how you sit on the motorcycle from the rider’s point of view this is all quite familiar you’ve got a rather wide fuel tank the seat is not too high just 790 mm and the riding position in general reminds me of something like an Apache or an FZ really quite familiar
And quite comfortable in general but things change significantly once you start riding because this thing is like nothing you’ve ridden before petrol or electric to start it you have a little wireless key fob it starts with a button and you have a kill switch like you get on a
Normal motorcycle activate the kill switch pull in the clutch yes it has a clutch press the kill switch and the bike is ready to go if you’re not on the side stand now to ride the matter error you simply pull in the clutch put it in
First gear and off you go it’s one down three up like most motorcycles out there and in some ways things are familiar but in other ways things are really quite different the one strange thing here is that that even if the bike is in gear like for example it’s now in fourth gear
I can still move it around because there’s no compression from the engine holding it back so it can be in any gear but the bike can still move the second fun thing is that you can be in gear but you don’t really need to use the clutch like you would on a
Petrol motorcycle you don’t need to slip it put it in gear release the clutch and off you go this applies for pretty much any gear taking a U-turn no problem no need to slip the clutch you want to come to a halt in gear no problem it’s in
First gear right now no hands you want to set off off it goes if you want to start in fourth gear let’s do that there it’s in fourth you can still do that that being said trying to start from a stand still in fourth gear will give you very dull acceleration until
The speeds build up but that’s a topic we’ll get back to soon clearly things are quite different when you compare it to a regular petrol vehicle but what about when you compare it to an E now one of my favorite things about electric vehicles and I love commuting
In the city on them is the fact that you have instant effortless stock available whenever you want it here things are a little different yes you do get a good shove of performance matter claims a top speed of 105 acceleration feels quite strong if you’re in sport mode but you
Get that instant effortless talk only if you’re on the right gear at the right speed if say you’re on fourth gear you’re going at about 30 km now you want to accelerate an over take someone whack it open you won’t really get much out of the motor you will have to downshift get
To the right GE and that’s when you get the surge forward now for me this is a little counterintuitive for what I expect from an electric vehicle they’re meant to be effortless and easy to ride but here you do have to put in a little bit of
Work the other strange thing is that when you’re riding a petrol vehicle you know when you need to change gear you can hear it in the engine you can feel it there’s a lot of inertia coming off the crankshaft which is rotating at high speed out here you really have nothing to tell
You it’s time to change so it’s effectively like ride you hit a wall shift up ride again hit a speed wall shift up there’s no sensation about when you need to shift up you do eventually get used to it but it’s quite an unusual [Applause] experience now you got a 10.5 KW motor
Which is quite powerful and again like I said in sport mode this bike feels quick but my favorite mode from riding today is City because it gives you a good amount of performance it also feels easy to use and the top speed in city is still 80 kph which is quite High the
Other mode is Eco Mode which caps top speed to 60 but both City and Eco reduce the speed in each gear so in Eco you will have to shift up quite early from 1 to Second To Third overall I found City to be the nicest mode on the matter era
The final thing I noticed from the powertrain perspective is that this is a pretty noisy Eevee you’ve got the sound from the motor then youve got the sound of the gearbox and finally you’ve got the chain drive Drive sound and in general this is one of the louder EES
I’ve ridden in India so far now if Mata was positioning this as a sporty bike that would be okay but their idea with this is to compare it against some of the commuter 150cc bikes out there and you can see that in the decisions taken with the chassis you have a trellis
Frame up front and that frame neatly surrounds the battery pack so the battery pack is well protected even in case of an accident even in case the bike gets impacted it’s well hidden inside there further back though you’ve got dual shock absorbers and Mata says
The idea here is to make this a rugged comfortable bike for any conditions in our country on the road this thing is actually quite comfortable small to medium bumps are soaked in well but if you hit something really hard it feels like the suspension is underdamped especially on the rebound stroke and it
Wants to throw you out of the seat if you hit a big bump or you go over a speed breaker a little too quickly that is something that could improve a little bit something else that could improve is the braking now this motorcycle has disc brakes at both ends
You get single Channel ABS but the braking needs a little more effort than I’d like the initial bite isn’t very strong and you really have to grab the front brake quite hard to get this thing to slow down in a hurry the reason behind that is that
This is a pretty heavy motorcycle it weighs almost 170 kilos which is significantly more than Rivals like the Revolt or the torque katos and it’s about 50 kilos more than electric scooters like the ather or the Ola that weight comes across as a contradiction to the philosophy of this motorcycle you
See Matter’s idea behind giving it liquid cooling and a four-speed gearbox was to help keep the power train in The Sweet Spot of efficiency leave it in that efficient zone for the maximum amount of time possible and be as efficient as possible with a thermals as
Well but when you’ve got extra weight to contend with that affects things like performance and range for example this has a 5 kilow battery pack which is bigger than its Rivals but the claim range on paper is pretty much on power with what else is out there the same
Goes for the performance 10.5 Kow motor you would expect more than 105 kph top speed but that’s what this bike has to offer so it’s giving you some things to try and be as efficient as possible but those things come with the compromise of weight it’s interesting to see matter
Trying something different but this platform still has some ways to go while the matter era doesn’t offer anything game-changing in terms of performance or handling or range what I will say this bike does really well is this display this is a 7in TFT which is bigger than most 5-in screens out there
And it’s a really nice layout very intelligently designed neat layout lots of information good to look at and it really gives the bike a premium expensive feeling there’s also some clever thought gone into how matter has packaged the charging cable it lives in here there’s a nice compartment you can
Keep a phone in there other small things there’s a USB port in there a small light and the charging cable comes comes in this bag not a particularly long cable it’s about 1.5 M long but you connect it in here and the other end goes into a power supply quite a neat
Solution on the other hand some things do need to improve there are large panel gaps all over this piece of plastic feels quite flimsy some of the castings are a little rough to the bike’s credit this is a pre-production prototype we will have to see how the final
Production bikes are but improvements do need to be made now speaking of Improv ments I think some things need to improve in terms of the overall quality experience as well my motorcycle shut down on me today in the middle of the ride and it could only be revived when
Someone came with a laptop connect it in and brought it back to life don’t know why that happened there was also a loud squeaking sound coming from the bike for most of the day the company does need to sort these things out before bikes start reaching customers Mata says that it
Will start production at his facility in aabad quite soon and the deliveries will start by around the end of this quarter or the early second quarter of 2020 24 the bik is priced a little on the highend the base model which doesn’t have a few connectivity features but
Effectively gets all of the stuff you see here including the 7-in TFT display that bike is 1.74 lakh rupes X showroom while the top era 5000 plus with a few more features is 1.84 lakh rupees that price puts it on par with bikes like the Charisma 210 the Yamaha R15 and you
Could even get Honda’s CV 300f for similar money and that means that it is quite an expensive machine all the to be fair it costs similar amounts to the to rosr so what do we make of the matter era because this is a really unusual motorcycle to be fair we have not ridden
It in the environment that it was designed for the company says that this is an intra City Machine meant to be ridden within the city and we haven’t done that today we’ve only done about 50 km around this beautiful landscape we also need to see what the final
Production machine is like in terms of quality mostly though I find myself a little conflicted by that gearbox my expectations of an e we are an easy effortless low maintenance machine and this bike is a little against that remember that that gearbox has gear oil
In it gear oil is something you need to replace at a periodic interval so that is one more thing that adds to the maintenance that you wouldn’t get with a conventional EV nevertheless Mata says that they have data that suggests that there’s a big crowd of people who want
An electric vehicle in a conventional familiar motorcycle form factor and they want that geared experience so I suppose we’re just going to have to wait and see as to how this translates over the next year in terms of sales figures but for now this is a bold and different step in
The world of EES
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