Battery Bike / "Etherweight" Electric Motos: An Easier Dirtbike?

Aug 04, 2023

Way back in 2020, in the early days of the First Year Of Our COVID, I was at the Toronto Motorcycle Show and noted a newish exhibitor called Surron. Just another Chinese manufacturer of sub-par electric motos, I figured, but I took a second look and thought it definitely had more promise than the usual knockoffs and bodge jobs you see on display at these events. I talked to the booth staff, and found they seemed pretty serious about their job, and they were keen to have me ride their bike. Interesting. But before we could attempt to sort out such an arrangement, the whole world shut down and we were confined to quarters for months.

Fast-forward to the 2023 Toronto Motorcycle Show, and it was obvious Surron had been busy in the years between. Instead of some MTBish-looking machines, they had the new Ultra Bee and Storm Bee along with the older Light Bee models. And now, everyone’s favorite physics student is here to discuss the bike on the FortNine YouTube channel above.

Ryan F9 puts the Surron Ultra Bee in a new “etherweight” category. I guess that is as good a classification as any. In the past few years, there has definitely been a new class of electric motorcycles that don’t have battery range equivalent to the fuel tank range of a gasoline bike, and with their electric motors governed to off-road friendly speeds. In some ways, a gasoline bike appears to offer advantages—but the “etherweight” bike will have much lower weight than a lot of dual sports, and will have much snappier response. And in the Surron’s case, it also has very competitive pricing.

Watching the F9 crew above, I think most readers will read between the lines and see the Surron is a great play bike, but if you want serious capability, battery power just isn’t capable of replacing gasoline at this point. A quick and silly game of moto-HORSE isn’t enough to convince me to trade in my WR250R (which I rode around Labrador) for a Surron (which would barely make it to the next city on a battery charge). But as Ryan points out at the end, the new etherweight class does offer a lot of easy-to-manage, easy-to-tune dirtbike. Is it better than your DR-Z400? Not at every task, not by a long shot. The Dizzer is a serious, real-world motorcycle and at this point, the Surron is still just a toy that some jurisdictions might not even register for the road. But the Surron does some things better than the Suzuki, and the skills you learn on the battery bike might also make you a much better rider on the dual sport, if that’s the goal of buying a dirt bike in the first place.