Review: Zero DS

When the light turns green and the two-lane road begins an ess turn, it's clear the Zero DS is a true motorcycle, not just a scooter with sport bike pretensions. This is an electric hoon machine that will put you ahead of almost anything on four wheels. Going from a standstill to 60 mph takes a tick over five seconds, and high-end torque slings the bike through on-ramps with aplomb. The Zero has the power to inspire that smirk of speed euphoria I crave from a bike – something that hasn't been lost with the removal of a traditional internal combustion engine.

This is a new sensation for an experienced rider. But that doesn't mean you have to have experience to ride it.

Zero provided me with one of the first available test bikes from its 2013 lineup, a group of two-wheelers with performance nearly double their predecessors in the most important fields: range and horsepower.

The motor's capabilities are akin to a 600cc sport bike, with 54 horsepower and 68 pound-feet of torque motivating the 400-pound Zero DS. In Sport mode, speed maxes out at 95 mph. Eco mode reduces torque to 70 percent of capacity and limits the top speed to 70 mph, but both numbers are adjustable. For range, you've got two options: 95 miles of city driving on the base model ($14,000) with an 8.5 kWh battery, or 126 miles on model with the 11.4 kWh battery, an option which adds $2,000 to the price. Riding at an average of 55 mph on the freeway knocks those numbers down to 57 and 76 miles of travel, respectively.

Zero's Scot Harden tells me this leap forward from last year's model is unlikely to be replicated anytime soon. From now on, improvements to the range and power will be incremental. Holding out for the latest and greatest (from Zero, at least), won't yield much anytime soon.

The company's motorcycles are Bluetooth-equipped, allowing the bike to link with Zero's app on your smartphone. From there, you can control almost everything except the throttle and brake. When the bike is on and paired, the app gives you a display with every metric you'll need, from charge status to speed, all displayed on my iPhone 5 sheathed in an Otterbox Armor case.

Within the app, Zero allows you to tinker with the drive setup, specifically, the regeneration settings. You pick a percentage that changes the motor's resistance while coasting. Pick how much engine braking you want and if it's cranked up you'll slow more quickly when you let off the throttle as the batteries suck power from your momentum. But you won't get much back by driving conservatively, so keep tabs on local charging stations because you can't rely on regeneration alone to extend your ride.

The day after the Zero arrived, I planned a ride from Golden Gate Park down Highway 1, along the coast, then inland – a bit under 50 miles out and 40 miles back. Ninety miles of driving, including the highway driving, was pushing the limits of the battery, so I budgeted a few hours for charging at Alice's Restaurant, a landmark for California motorcycle riders.

In planning the ride with an overnight charge, I learned that the battery system is exceptionally forgiving. Zero told me that the bike can handle irregular charging without hurting the battery's lifespan – shallow cycling, or recharging without fully draining the battery, is actually good for it. The whole bike is stunning relief from the pains of owning a traditional motorcycle. The DS's simple mechanics mean it requires almost no maintenance – new tires every now and then, and maybe some brake fluid or new pads. With electric vehicles, we tend to focus on the limitations of an electric engine and forget such niceties, but the the fact that bikes this simple to own exist was enough to make me sell my fickle Triumph right in the middle of my time with the DS.

The morning of the trip, I fired up the bike (and the app) and headed south. After just 20 minutes, despite all my Google Maps measurements and readings for the battery's range of charge, the numbers on the app started falling fast.

Here begins the contingency planning. RV parks have outlets, right? How do I ask to borrow an outlet for four hours? After knocking on the 25 percent charge mark around Half Moon Bay, I stopped at a Shell station, where an attendant let me plug in. After half an hour, I had both the comfort and, more importantly, the impatience to keep riding.

From there, after forgetting the range worries, the Zero DS revealed itself to be an uncanny blend of brawn and civility. Without the sensory static from the noise and vibrations of firing pistons, you can consider the passing redwoods and fog, all while really feeling your speed while floating over the asphalt. In the twisties of a desolate two-lane road, it's clear that Zero has nailed the mechanics. The bike's suspension provided just the right damping through turns and over potholes. The steering always gave a precise line through turns, and, even after hours in the saddle, the riding position was painless. The bike can stop as quickly as any new motorcycle I've ridden, even relying on just the front brake.

A Zero engineer quoted 7.4 hours to bring a dead battery back to full from a standard 120-volt outlet, which is the three-prong grounded outlet you likely have around your living room. I was knocking on empty when I arrived at Alice's. I plugged in, ate, drank some coffee and waited.

Having your travel governed by time and patience rather than cash at the pump requires you to change your perspective of transportation.Having your travel governed by time and patience rather than cash at the pump requires you to change your perspective of transportation. It's better to consider an electric vehicle like the Zero DS as a singular device, not a substitute for a gasoline-powered equivalent. Rather thinking of an electric motorcycle as tofu with fake grill marks pretending to be a steak, think of the DS as an entirely different vehicle – a tilapia or halibut, if that helps.

If you travel on electricity right now, you drive with absolute deliberateness, planning the route and, if you're going far, making every inch of the drive count. This is, I think, a beautiful idea. It'd be a benefit to our planet and our infrastructure to treat every trip as a circumstantial necessity rather than as a convenience. We'd walk more, be outside more, alleviate traffic. But by hour three at Alice's, I stopped thinking of Al Gore and saving the world. I wanted to go, and I wanted to go now. That's the freedom unique to motorcycles, right?

I was, on this ride, unequipped for this unjustified impatience, but Zero has options. For $1,800, you can get the CHAdeMO kit, which allows the Zero to take a special plug that can get the bike from zero to 95 percent in an hour (the last five percent takes an additional half hour, an idiosyncrasy typical of EV batteries). Unfortunately, the infrastructure hasn't yet arrived.

According to the PlugShare app and CHAdeMO's map, the nearest charging station to my home in San Francisco proper is 25 miles south of the city. Auspicious estimates say that over 2,000 CHAdeMO chargers will be in the country by 2014. But right now, as a San Francisco resident, they're too sparse to be an option.

You can also get the $400 SAE J1772 charger which lets the bike plug in at the charging stations used by Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts. The big bummer here: because it still has to convert from alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC), the bike charges no more quickly than if it were plugged into a three-prong wall outlet.

The last option is the Quick Charge Kit, a $500 milk-crate-size bundle which halves the charging time. You can connect up to three of these chargers together to keep shrinking the charge time. One charger takes 4.1 hours to bring you from zero to full. Two of them will fill you up in 2.8 hours, and three of them do the job in 2.2 hours. For now, my takeaway is that you'll be dependent on the 120-volt plug most of the time. The Quick Charge Kit is big and heavy and probably too difficult to travel with, and CHAdeMO hasn't hit practical numbers yet. That 7.4 hours to full is the number by which you live.

After nearing San Francisco's city limits, the DS puttered to 40 mph on the highway. As I waved traffic past me, I cursed the very idea of an electric motorcycle, but knew that the true problem was my illusion of self-entitled urgency. I got off at the next exit and beseeched an attendant at another gas station to let me borrow an outlet for about 45 minutes. That was enough, according to the app, to get me home to my orange extension cord, where I could finally rest my head. An hour later, I arrived.

That trip of pastoral roads and fried nerves made me skeptical I could fit an electric motorcycle into my life. But for the days after, I found that riding around the city was bliss. Cutting through traffic, parking anywhere and swiftly humming past gawking pedestrians feels rebellious, and even more so as you consider that each move across town was so clean and inconsequential, independent of reliance on fuel.

As a two-wheeled electric vehicle, the Zero DS is perfect. The engineering has accounted for everything important in a transportation vehicle. Riding the Zero, you think, this is how a civilized society should move about. This is a lithe and efficient vehicle, and an exemplar of what motorized travel should be: four-hundred pounds of weight moving between destinations silently, parking unobtrusively, and most of all, forcing the rider to be deliberate and unwasteful. Take only what can fit in the storage space and travel knowing that you have a finite range and must act resourcefully. Those restrictions, again, keep the Zero from being a true all-around motorcycle, but I like the idea of noble asceticism so long as the thrill of speed remains.

WIRED Enough speed to please seasoned riders. Dual-sport suspension keeps control on gravel and dirt roads while giving lighthouse visibility in traffic. No maintenance.

TIRED Requires better infrastructure to be truly feasible. Brake cable slightly obscures dashboard. Running the app drains an iPhone 5 battery quickly. Plastic shell on the front of the seat looks cheap next to the rest of the clean metal.