Review: LiveWire S2 Del Mar

An electric Harley-Davidson still sounds like something that shouldn’t exist—a self-negating proposition, like vegan meat, virtual sex, or dry-slope skiing. This puts me, as a biker, in something of a bind when I come face-to-face with the Del Mar. I’ve never quite been able to see myself as a Harley person, cruising around with all that excess mass and obnoxious noise in some aging pretense of rebellion. But when you strip the bike down to less than 500 pounds and replace the engine roar with a barely discernible whine, doesn’t slapping a Harley label on it feel somehow even more desperate?

That may be exactly what Harley’s electric division would like you to think. Not for nothing has it (somewhat belatedly) branded itself as a separate company, LiveWire, that is gradually building out an almost entirely independent operation, from the engineering to the customer relationship management. The Del Mar is its second bike. The first, the LiveWire One, finally released in 2019 after first being shown as a prototype way back in 2014, is the production version of the bike that Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman rode for 13,000 miles through the Americas in the TV series Long Way Up. And the Del Mar goes even further than its elder and pricier sibling in trying to carve out an entirely new segment of customers who, like me, would never have dreamed of buying a Harley.

Whether it can convince us … well, that will depend a lot on what we want it for.

S2 Del Mar in Nightfall Blue

Photograph: LiveWire

I meet the Del Mar on an August day in New York City. It’s warm and cloudless, but the oppressive, soggy heat of the past few weeks has just broken and there are licks of cool in the breeze—a perfect riding day. 

On first acquaintance, the bike’s lines impress: It looks nimble and elegant, but not flimsy. Its most Harley-ish feature, other than the name discreetly stamped on what might in other circumstances be the gearbox, is a fuel tank-shaped protrusion with a distinctive tear-drop profile. Radiator-like ribs encase the true heart of the thing—an integrated electric motor, battery pack, and other systems that also form a structural part of the frame, lending it stiffness and making the bike quicker to assemble. This all-new Arrow architecture, LiveWire says, will be the basis for future bikes.

Despite throwback touches like the faux fuel tank, it doesn’t look like an electric bike pretending to be a gas-powered classic (I’m looking at you, Maeving), but like its own thing, a modern street bike with a touch of futurism. You could hear either a chainsaw buzz or a smooth electric hum coming from it and not be surprised either way.

The machine I’m going to try is a preproduction model—I’m the first outside the company to ride it, I’m told—and as I walk up to it the seat is off, showing a mess of internal wiring. “That won’t come apart with the vibration?” I ask, trying to sound casual, as an engineer fiddles to reattach a pair of rather loose-looking connectors. He cheerfully assures me it’ll all be fine, before explaining that since this is a preproduction model, the ABS braking works but the traction control and the anti-wheelie control do not. 

Photograph: Jeremy White

“You are the wheelie control,” he grins. Mindful of my editor’s pleas to be careful—he is terrified of being held responsible for the grisly death of WIRED’s editor in chief—I promise to go very light on the throttle. This is not a hard promise to make anyway: I have never ridden an electric motorbike before, so all I know is that they have a reputation for the kind of acceleration that can make you do backflips.

I climb on, and embarrassment ensues: The throttle appears to be jammed. After a moment, the embarrassment proves to be mine; I am twisting it the wrong way, clockwise instead of counterclockwise. The only explanation I can come up with is that my brain finds the idea of an electric bike so alien that it’s forgotten what to do. 

With that confusion cleared up, I gingerly twist the handle, uncomfortably conscious of the fact that I don’t have a clutch with which to ease it into gear. My caution proves unwarranted. An electric throttle, after all, is not a gas delivery valve; it can be directly mapped to produce whatever acceleration you want. At a standstill or low speeds, the Del Mar requires a lot of twist to deliver a small increase in torque, so instead of jumping off the starting line it glides away smoothly. 

As we drift through the parking apron outside Manhattan’s Classic Car Club, I immediately appreciate two other great things about an electric bike. First, I don’t need to concentrate on that delicate dance of clutch and throttle that keeps an internal combustion engine (ICE) bike from either stalling or zooming away. I don’t even have to do that thing of squeezing the throttle by fractions of a millimeter to avoid giving too much gas; it delivers a steady pace without the need for fine control. The other notable thing is just how stable the bike feels. Even at a relaxed walking pace, there’s almost no sense of being about to lose balance. 

Vance Strader, LiveWire’s chief of engineering, explains to me later that these are inherent features that an electric platform makes possible. A battery of inertial sensors on the Del Mar detect how the bike is accelerating or decelerating, leaning, pitching, rolling and yawing, data that can be fed back in so the engine delivers the right amount of juice to keep the bike stable. And whereas an ICE bike has a multiplicity of rotating parts—gears, crankshaft, flywheel—that all produce moments of inertia pointing in different directions, an electric is just “a rotor within the motor,” Strader says, so you’re not fighting against those gyroscopic forces. The bike just does what you tell it to.

Accompanied by a couple of company staff on LiveWire Ones, I cruise out onto the West Side Highway and start negotiating the series of traffic lights on the way up toward the George Washington Bridge. I’ve started in Rain mode, the most forgiving of the four riding modes on this model. Each mode has different levels of throttle mapping, traction control, and regenerative braking—which is when you ease off the throttle and the bike slows, converting its momentum back into battery charge. In Rain, both the throttle and the braking are gentler, and even as we climb into moderate speeds there isn’t the lightning-quick electric acceleration you might have been expecting. It feels … reassuring. I quickly find myself not missing the clutch and gears and enjoying being able to focus on the ride.

S2 Del Mar in Nimbus Grey

Photograph: LiveWire

Once across the bridge, we find our way to the Palisades Parkway, a series of sweeping curves bordered by forest running alongside the Hudson River that’s a favorite of test drivers. Here I get to switch between the other ride modes—Sport, which dials up the power and dials down the traction and slip controls; Eco, which maximizes smoothness and efficiency; and Road, a balance somewhere in the middle. Switching modes while riding is simple—just press a button within easy reach of your right thumb—and seamless. The Del Mar will also be the first bike to offer over-the-air software updates, which could include new ride modes or ways to customize them.

Wheelie control operates when in Road mode, but since it’s not installed here, I open up the throttle just as much as I dare. This proves to be not very much. At 50 or 60 miles an hour, the bike assumes that if you’re giving it some “gas,” you mean it. A quarter turn is enough to make me feel quite nervous, despite getting nowhere near the full 184 foot-pounds of torque available. Interestingly, at this speed, the difference in acceleration between the different ride modes doesn’t feel all that big; even in Rain, the Del Mar will be plenty responsive if you need to give it a sudden kick to get past an erratic driver. I don’t come anywhere near its top speed (as yet unstated), but I can leave any of the cars careening down the Palisades at a standstill. For the brave, or foolhardy, LiveWire is stating a 0 to 60 sprint time of 3.1 seconds.

After we come back over the George Washington Bridge, I swap over to the LiveWire One for comparison. It’s more than 100 pounds heavier than the Del Mar's 431 pounds, and it feels a tad more solid going over the appallingly rutted paving of FDR Drive. Its electric whine is also distinctly louder. The company designed the LiveWire One’s engine sound to be noticeable, which may be a safety feature, but I could imagine it getting irritating on a longer ride; not so with the Del Mar, whose sound practically vanishes behind the wind noise once you’re up to moderate speeds.

Back in city traffic, the Del Mar has a noticeable edge over the One. It’s nippier when slaloming in and out of lanes and around obstacles, and the more upright riding position feels more relaxed, more comfortable, and safer—I feel more aware of my surroundings. And once again, it’s a lot calmer to handle in stop-start traffic on potholed roads than an ICE bike.

All this is by design. The Del Mar is aimed squarely at the urban biker. It offers a maximum range of 110 miles in town, and while LiveWire hasn’t yet said what its highway range will be, an apples-to-apples comparison with the One (146 miles urban, 95 highway) suggests it could be about 70 miles. Moreover, unlike the One, which can go from zero to full charge in about an hour, the Del Mar surprisingly doesn’t offer DC fast charging, but only Level 1 and Level 2, meaning it could take several hours. The company claims the Del Mar can manage a 20 to 80 percent Level 2 charge in 75 minutes, but this is not good enough for extending your day range in most settings. The Zero SR/S, in comparison, has a 187-mile city range and can rapid charge from 0 to 95 percent in 60 minutes. Yes, it's a similar price to the fast-charging LiveWire One, but it also beats that bike's range.

Whether this is the bike for you, then, depends on where you live and where you want to ride. I split my time between New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. Within Manhattan, public transport or a bicycle is almost always faster and more convenient than a car or motorbike. For out-of-town riding, 70 miles gets me only part way up the Hudson Valley and not as far as the Catskills or the Hamptons—the kinds of places that those people who would shell out just under $17,000 on an electric motorbike might want to spend their weekends. For a day trip without a few hours to charge, I’m limited to 35 miles each way, which doesn't get me very far out of the city. 

In the Bay Area, meanwhile, the Del Mar would be fine for getting around San Francisco and the East Bay, but if you lived in one of those places and needed to spend the day in Silicon Valley, or vice versa, you’d run out of range—unless, again, you could leave it parked somewhere for several hours to charge. Almost any day trip north of the city or down the peninsula would be out of the question, too. 

So the Del Mar is not for me. Which is a shame, because it’s a lovely bike. It manages to be powerful and nimble, exciting and forgiving all at once, and it has a distinctive identity and great style. If you live in the kind of city where getting around on a motorbike makes sense and don’t care about longer trips, it could be the one. The rest of us will have to wait for battery tech to get up to speed.