Adios!

So, as the saying goes all good things must come to an end, and after 9 years and 2576 blog entries, this is it for me. That may come as a shocker for some (and maybe a relief for others), but it’s time. I’ve mentioned it before and I’ll say it again…in all that time and over all those blog posts, not once did Steve or Maureen tell me what to say, what to cover, or what to do. My orders back in December 2009 were to write about the things I thought were interesting, and to not just be another form of advertising for CSC.

And that’s what I did.

I retired from Cal Poly as an engineering professor a little more than a year ago, and I got to thinking that maybe it was time to fully retire from everything I was doing. After thinking long and hard about it, I realized I didn’t want to work forever (hey, I’m 67), but I also realized I didn’t want to just slam on the brakes and do nothing. I’m going to start a motorcycle-themed website, I want to do more writing, and I want to travel more. In fact, I just got off the phone with my good buddy John Welker (you know him as Baja John) and we’re already setting up our next Baja ride.

I’m leaving CSC at what I think is a good time. Revzilla published a great article on the City Slicker yesterday morning, the San Gabriels are inbound, TT250 sales are strong, and CSC still has the world’s best adventure touring motorcycle, the RX3. The Revzilla article called CSC a disruptor in the moto world, and although I had not seized on that word previously, I think that’s exactly what CSC is (and I’m very proud to have had a part in that). CSC is in a very good place thanks to your faith in the company, and the blog will continue.

Wowee, this has been a great ride. I’ve had a lot of fun with the blog, and the things I’ve been able to do as a result of my association with CSC have been stupendous…four moto books, the ride through the Colombian Andes (thanks Enrique, Juan, and Carlos), the Western America Adventure Ride (the adventure ride that really put the RX3 on the map), the ride across China (featured this month in RoadRUNNER magazine; thanks Fan, Ma, Sean, Tracy, Sergeant Zuo, and crew), and, of course, our CSC Baja runs. They’ve all been amazing adventures, and none of it would have happened had it not been for my CSC involvement.

My friends…ride safe, ride often, and I’ll see you on the road!

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Always dapper?

Yep, that’s what the man said…you gotta love Spurgeon Dunbar’s talented tappings in his latest Revzilla article!

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Keeping up with Indiana Jones…

…and that’s the title of our latest RX3 adventure story, appearing in the current issue of RoadRUNNER magazine.   Here’s the title page photo…

It was an awesome adventure ride, one of the absolute best ever, and you can get to it here or on the newsstands.

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I gotta get an external mike…

It takes a long time to make a good video.   I can tell you it also takes a long time to make a bad video.  One thing about our CSC videos…folks either love them or they don’t.   Every time I post a video, somebody will comment that I need to do this or I need to that.   The last one I posted made a guy tell me I needed to get an external microphone.   He went on to say a bunch of other less-than-flattering things (it’s that online disinhibition thing again, I suppose), but he might have been right on the external microphone.

Anyway, take a look at this…

On the other hand, we also get a lot of comments from folks who love the unpolished nature of our videos, and the fact that we don’t hire models or professional speakers. All you get is me.  Eh, please some folks, annoy others, who knows?

I shot a ton of video yesterday on a long City Slicker ride.  I was battery-powered to the max (an electric motorcycle, a battery-powered Go Pro camera, and a battery-powered cell phone to control my Go Pro).   Guess what happened?  The Go Pro ran out of juice before the motorcycle did.  That’s kind of funny.

The City Slicker video challenge is going to be sound.  Comments I received on my other videos (the TT250, the RX3, and my CSC 150 Mustang) sometimes centered on folks telling me to shut up and to kill the background music.   They wanted to hear the motor.

You can guess where this is going.

When you ride the City Slicker, one of the very coolest parts of the experience is that the motorcycle is absolutely silent.  There’s no engine sound.  Zip.  Nada.  It is an exhilarating and liberating ride.  Read the blog below and you’ll see what I mean.

But when you do a video on an electric motorcycle…that’s another thing altogether.  I watched all of the video I recorded on the road yesterday.   All it had for sound was my narration and my heavy breathing (I wore a mike inside my helmet).  Hmmm, I thought.  Boring.

Experiencing an e-bike ride first-hand is ultra-cool.   Experiencing an e-bike ride through a video is ultra-boring.  That’s going to be the next challenge:  How to make a motorcycle video interesting when there’s no motorcycle sound.  Steve and I joked about it yesterday. He said maybe our first accessory should be a baseball card and a clothespin…

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More good City Slicker info…

A peek from the saddle on Route 66 in Duarte earlier today.

Wow, the City Slicker questions are pouring in, and many are along the lines of “So what’s it like to ride the CSC electric motorcycle?”

In a word, it’s like being a kid screaming “wheeeeee!” on a roller coaster. I think you know what I mean. It’s that feeling you get on a bicycle when you’re going downhill, or when you jump out of an airplane before the parachute opens, or when you’re tacking into the wind on a fast sailboat. You accelerate with no effort, there’s no engine noise, and you’re initially surrounded by an eerie, serene silence. As you rapidly pick up speed, the silence grows into the screaming wind. It feels like you’re getting away with something. You’re going faster and faster without pedaling, without engine noise, and without effort. It’s fun.

I rode the City Slicker in China, and I’m putting more miles on it here. The bike is new to us, and I’ll be honest…we have a lot to learn. At this point, we have more questions than answers, and the wizards of Chongqing are working overtime to get us the information we need. And, we want to do our own testing here in California to confirm things like range, top speed, time to recharge the battery, and more. We’re just getting started, and it’s fun. I’m having a blast. I haven’t had this much fun on a motorcycle in a long time.

I guess the major question is: What’s the price? That one we know: It’s $1,995, plus fees (the fees are in the mid-$300 range). You’ll have to pay whatever your sales tax is. Shipping is free in the Lower 48. You can argue with me all you want, call me names on the Internet, and do whatever else you want to do, but we’re not going to let you pay a penny more for your City Slicker.

You know, this whole electric bike thing is fascinating from many perspectives.  One of these perspectives is extremely low maintenance costs.  One of my good buddies who sells scooters (yep, he’s a dealer) is dropping his electric scooter line.  The reason?  There’s no follow-on service work after the initial purchase.  Dealers rely on the built-in service annuity inherent to their new motorcycle sales, but other than the odd tire purchase on an electric scooter, there’s just no maintenance.  To me, that’s a paradigm shift in the new motorcycle business.  We’re through the looking glass.  We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with being from Kansas, but if I offended you that comment, hey, you’re young.  You’ll get over it.)

The City Slicker is a different approach to motorcycling.  It’s kind of like an iPhone…you’ll have to plug it in every day to recharge it. We’ll be providing more data on this and the bike’s other characteristics as we get it, so keep an eye on the CSC blog (like always, you’ll hear it here first). The City Slicker is not a long distance cruiser, and it’s not a freeway bike (we call it the City Slicker for a reason). It’s a bike that’s ideal for bopping around town. It’s cool.

So like I said, we don’t have all the answers yet. But I grabbed a few photos today that will tell you a bit more about this exciting new motorcycle, and I’d like to share some of them with you.

You’ll get a charge out of this…Zongshen told us it takes 6-8 hours to fully recharge the City Slicker. Our bike went from 0% charged to 100% charged in 4 hours. We’ll see what it takes on the other bikes.

The dash. Lots of good info here.

See that “P” switch where the starter would ordinarily be? That for Park, but the bike doesn’t have a parking brake. It just disables inputs from the throttle to prevent any inadvertent motion if you accidently twist the throttle.

The “P” indicator, showing the throttle is disabled.

Inverted forks. To some folks this is a big deal. Truth be told, I never could tell the handling difference on a motorcycle if it had standard or upside down forks, but if you need inverted forks, we’ve got you covered.

This is the retaining screw for the battery access door. Unscrew it and you can open the door to the battery compartment.

The battery access door screw is tethered to the bike.

The battery access door opens to give access to the battery.  The battery is mounted low, and with the bike’s 216 lb weight, the City Slicker feels very, very light.  The battery is locked into its compartment with the ignition key.

Those super cool trellis frame members? Hahahaha, they’re plastic. They’re styling touches. I like them!

LED turn signals.

The Economy and Power switch. The Economy mode gives a lower top speed and a longer range. The Power mode gives a higher top speed and a shorter range.

Super cool master cylinders, with transparent chambers. The front and rear brakes are operated by the handlebar levers, just like a scooter.

A storage compartment in the “gas tank.” It’s lockable.

The opened storage compartment. It’s not big enough for a helmet, but it’s a nice touch. I’ll carry my Nikon here.

The motor in this motorcycle. It’s in the swingarm.

The drive unit in the swingarm. It’s a very clever and compact design, and it keeps the weight low.

There’s a lot more coming, folks.  I’m going to be on the City Slicker again tomorrow, and I’ll grab some video and more photos.  You’ll see all of it here first.

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An electrifying excerpt from Riding China…

I was alerted to the electric scooter and electric motorcycle world two times.  The first was when the Zero company had a bike on display at Cal Poly Pomona.  I was an engineering professor there for close to three decades (I retired last year), and because my students knew I was a motorcycle guy, they told the Zero dudes they should let me ride the electric Zero.   They offered, I accepted, and I had my first ride on an electric bike.   Truth be told, I wasn’t impressed, and I concluded the whole electric bike thing was a passing fad.

The second time I encountered electric bikes was on the RX3 ride across China.  There, electric scooters and other vehicles were everywhere, and I realized my previous conclusion about electric bikes was wrong.   Electric vehicles were a way of life in China.   Rather than babble on about that, I thought I would include an excerpt from a Riding China chapter where I talked about this.   It happened in Beijing.  I was struggling with the heat and I had been nailed in the eye by a bug the day before, and…well, let me just get to the pages I’m talking about…

The next day we took the subway into Beijing. We already were in Beijing when we got on the subway, but Beijing is a megacity and you can’t simply drive into the center of it. We rode the subway for a good 45 minutes, and when we emerged, we visited the Forbidden City and Tien An Men Square. It was all grand. It was touristy, but it’s something that should be on any China visitor’s bucket list.

At the entrance to the Forbidden City.

In the Forbidden City. It’s an amazing thing to see.

A glimpse of ancient Chinese architecture in the Forbidden City.

After seeing the Forbidden City, we walked around downtown Beijing for a while. I told Tracy (note:  Tracy was our translator on this trip) my eye was getting worse and I wanted to get antibiotic eye drops for it. It was Sunday afternoon, but there was a large pharmacy right in front of us and it was open. Tracy went in with me and he told one of the young pharmacists what I wanted. She responded and it didn’t sound good.

“She cannot sell it to you without a prescription,” he told me.

“Well, shoot, Tracy, it’s Sunday afternoon,” I said. “We’re not going to find a doctor. I’ll be okay. Let’s just go.”

“No, it is okay, Dajiu,” he said. “We are China and we have a bureaucracy. It is my bad.”

Good old Tracy, I thought. The guy felt responsible for everything. I was resigned to the fact that my eye was going to take a while to get better. Tracy, in the meantime, had walked not more than 8 feet away to an elderly woman sitting at a wooden table. He spoke to her in Chinese and pointed to me. She never looked at me, nor did she look up. She simply pulled out a white pad with a big “R” at the top. Nah, this can’t be, I thought. She wrote something in Chinese characters and handed the slip to Tracy.

“Our prescription,” Tracy said. “Such a bureaucracy.” He walked the three steps back to the pharmacist, Tracy handed her the prescription, and 30 seconds (and 24 yuan, or about $4) later, I had my antibiotic eye drops. I put two drops in my eye.

When we got off the subway after visiting The Forbidden City and the center of Beijing, we waited on a street corner for our Uber ride back to the hotel. I watched the scooters and small utility vehicles rolling by, and I realized that nearly every one of them was electric. I must have seen 200 scooters during the 20 minutes we waited, and perhaps 2 had gasoline engines. This wholesale adaption of electric scooters and small utility vehicles in China is nothing short of amazing.

One of many, many electric bikes and scooters in Beijing.

Another electric scooter…

…and another…

…and another…

…and another…

…and another…

…and another…

…and another. They were all over. I’d never seen anything like it.

Sean (note:  Sean was our guide) explained to me that the transition to electric vehicles started about 15 years ago, and the government has done a number of things to encourage people to convert to electricity. For starters (once again, pardon my pun), many of the larger cities in China now prohibit motorcycles and scooters unless the vehicle is electric. Electric scooters are allowed where gasoline-powered bikes are not. That alone is an enormous incentive. The next incentive is that you don’t need a driver’s license to take an electric vehicle on the street. You just buy one and go. And finally, as I’ve mentioned before, electricity is cheap in China. There are windfarms, solar panel farms, coal plants, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric power plants all over the country. We saw scooters parked on the sidewalk and plugged into extension cords running into small stores everywhere. People charge them like iPhones; they didn’t miss any opportunity to top off the batteries on these things.

An unusual electric trike in Beijing. We saw many unusual electric vehicles in China.

That night was a great night. The Zongshen dealer took us to a restaurant that specialized in Peking duck. The guys were excited about this development, but I was initially leery. I thought I didn’t like Peking duck. Boy, was I ever wrong! I tried Peking duck 25 years ago when I visited Beijing with Sue. We both thought the duck was awful. That’s because we went to a restaurant that served tourists. The food at that place didn’t have to be good. They knew they would never see us again, and Yelp hadn’t been invented yet.

This night in Beijing with the Zongshen dealer and the RX3 owners club was different. The Peking duck was incredible. The chef sliced it paper thin right at our table. They had thin tofu (almost like a crepe), and the guys taught me how to eat duck properly. The deal is you put a few fresh vegetables on the tofu, you add a slice or two of duck, you add this amazing brown gravy, and then you roll the affair up like a burrito. Wow, it was delicious!

We had several rounds of toasts at dinner that night and the liquor flowed freely. I got lucky. Kong sat next to me and he schooled me in the proper way to make a Chinese toast. To show respect, you clink your glass against the other guy’s glass, but you hold your glass at a lower level so that when the two glasses meet, the rim of yours is lower than the other person’s. When the Zongshen dealer toasted me, I followed Kong’s advice, and the Chinese riders all nodded approvingly. Ah, Dajiu knows.

It was funny. Sergeant Zuo and I had made several toasts to each other, and when we touched glasses, we both tried frantically to get our glasses lower than the other, so much so that we usually crashed the bottoms of both on the table (to a hearty laugh and round of applause from everyone). Zuo was being polite; I was being completely serious (I have enormous respect for him).

It was a great night, and the next morning was even better. Those eye drops Tracy had helped me secure a prescription for did the trick. When we rode out of Beijing the next morning, my eye was good as new.

So that was where I realized this electric bike thing was for real, and it wasn’t just a fad.  I wrote to Steve and put something about it on the blog, and then a year later, Zongshen introduced its electric motorcycle.   I rode the bike the last time I was in Chongqing, and I liked it.  Actually, I liked it a lot.  Being the visionary he is (hey, don’t forget who brought the RX3, the TT250, and the San Gabriel to America), Steve made the call to bring the City Slicker here, too.  I got some serious seat time on a City Slicker today, but that’s the topic for the next blog.   Stay tuned, folks, and I’ll give you my impressions of this great new motorcycle…

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Hunting tacos, on the City Slicker…

This morning I took my first US ride on the new CSC City Slicker and it was amazing. I’ll tell you a lot more about it later; I just wanted to post these first one or two teaser photos.


I had to stop at my good buddy Pepe’s restaurant for a taco on this inaugural ride (Pepe’s restaurant is right here in Azusa on the way into the San Gabriels, and their tacos are amazing).

More to follow, folks. Much more…

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Joe and Orlando in Texas

My good buddies Joe Gresh and Orlando Cavazos recently completed a ride in Big Bend, Texas.  Joe rode his Husky (the bike, not the dog) and Orlando was on his RX3.  Joe sent a video and Orlando sent some photos to me, and I thought I would share them here with you…

Here’s what Orlando wrote in his note to me…

I rode that bike hard thru the river trails, jumping it up to 3 feet in the air and bottoming out on most of the ruff sections, but I kept up with the big bikes (Joe’s Husky and a friend’s KTM, both bikes 500 cc and long travel suspension). The bike handled great and I had a blast on the Sunday ride home again (another 590 miles to get home).

What is cool about this ride is that Orlando rode a hard 680 miles just to get to the area where he and Joe wanted to play in the dirt, and then he put another hard 590 miles on the bike to get home.   Joe covered a few miles on his Husky to get there and back, too.   Good show, guys!

I was originally planning to ride with these guys, but my schedule back here at the ranch kept me from doing so.   That’s too bad; it looks like these guys had a fun ride.

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The New York Post weighs in…

Hey, how about this…none other than the NY Post weighed in with an article about, well, motorcycle travel articles, and it sure was interesting.   The bottom line?  The folks at the NY Post read three articles about moto travel, they panned two, and they liked the third one.   You might be thinking:  So what?  Well, the “so what” is that the one they liked was my article.  It was an article about the ride we took to the Devil’s Punchbowl on one of our monthly Dual Sports and Donuts rides.  I wrote a Destinations piece about that ride for Motorcycle Classics magazine, and you can read it here.

Check out this quote from the Post’s article…

Funny how it’s Motorcycle Classics, a magazine focused more on the bike than the ride, that really revved our two-wheeled wanderlust.

Joe Berk takes us on a ride through a passage in California’s San Gabriel Mountains called “The Devil’s Punchbowl.” The piece opens with a picture of a San Andreas Fault sign. Berk only gets one page to draw us in, but he has us ready to put our keys in the ignition.

“The Nirvana-like northern segment through the San Gabriels’ scenic twisties is … where the fun begins,” Berk advises. Later he describes a “ragged and rugged canyon” created by “a misbehaving San Andreas fault.”

Having indulged in the “crisp pine-scented mountain air” and taking in views of the Mojave Desert to his right and the San Gabriel summits to his left, Berk stops to recommend the French toast at the Grizzly Cafe. “You can thank me later,” he writes.

We had a great time on that ride, and we have another one coming up this Saturday to the Nethercutt Museum.   We’re at capacity on that ride, but keep an eye on our Meetup.com page; we do rides like this every month.

We’ve got another awesome trip coming up in June, and that’s our Pinnacles tour.  It’s a three-day California backroads extravaganza, and you can read a little bit about the roads we’ll be riding in this Motorcycle Classics piece.  You’ll need to be mounted on a CSC motorcycle to ride Pinnacles with us, and a lot of you reading this blog already are.   But if you’re not already riding one of the best bikes on the planet, we have a couple of apps for that:  Our RX3 page and our TT250 page.   Both of these bikes have been selling briskly, and if you want the ideal motorcycle for a ride like this (and the ideal trip to break it in on), there’s no time like the present to pull the trigger.

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The San Francisco Scooter Centre

Barry Gwin, San Francisco Scooter Centre proprietor and scooter maestro extraordinaire, with his private collection of vintage Lambrettas.

About 10 years ago when we were manufacturing the CSC 150 and CSC 250 Mustang scooters we had several dealers.  I was one of the guys responsible for talking to potential CSC dealers, and one of the dealers I contacted was the San Francisco Scooter Centre.  My research indicated that these guys were the “go to” spot for all things scooter related and that they were the heart of the scooter scene in San Francisco.

As you know, we ultimately decided with the RX3 that dealers were not the right approach to market for us (you can read all about that in 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM), but when I spoke to Barry Gwin at the San Francisco Scooter Centre, I was impressed for several reasons.  I didn’t know Barry from Adam at the time (and he didn’t know me), but he took my cold call and spent an hour on the phone with me.  I learned more in that one hour about how a dealer approaches the question of taking on a new line than I had in all of my time with the other prospective dealers.  The other dealers I spoke with were condescending and cynical; Barry was polite, patient, and informative.

A year or two later, Sue and I were watching an episode of American Pickers (one of our favorite TV shows) in which Mike and Frank had purchased a very rare Vespa Ape (it’s pronounced “Op Ay” and it’s a Vespa three-wheeled cargo vehicle).  On the show, Mike and Frank took the Ape to an expert to get it appraised, and that expert was none other than Barry Gwin at the San Francisco Scooter Centre.   “Hey,” I told Sue, “I know that guy!”

The Holy Land for San Francisco scooteristas…the San Francisco Scooter Centre!

Sue and I are in Nor Cal on a fairly regular basis, and I knew I wanted to get into San Francisco and meet Barry in person some day.   Well, that some day was yesterday.   I sent Barry a note, he said sure, come on in, and we did.  It was a hell of a day.

We drove into the city early in the morning and we got lucky (we found a parking spot directly in front of Barry’s dealership).   We entered to find a big guy moving scooters around in the shop, staging them for the day’s service activities.  That guy was the world-famous Diego, Barry’s premier scooter tech (if you don’t believe me on that, do a search on Google and see what shows up).  I asked if Barry was in, Diego told me Barry would be in a little bit later, and when I asked about finding a good coffee shop nearby, he pointed us in the right direction.   The coffee in downtown San Francisco was great, and Sue and I shared a WBE chocolate-covered coconut macaroon (as in “world’s best ever”).

A WBE macaroon!

After enjoying our macaroon, we crossed the street to go back to Barry’s shop, where we met Barry.  Barry immediately introduced us to Lunchbox (his 11-week-old bulldog pup), and then he gave us the grand tour…the showroom, the service area, the parts and accessories area, and his private collection of Lambrettas and other vintage scooters upstairs.  It was really cool stuff.

Meet Lunchbox, a very cute and friendly pup!

While Barry was busy helping a new scooter rider select a helmet, Sue and I chatted with a guy named Steve and his wife, Debbie, who had just flown in from England.   Debbie told us that she had always wanted to visit San Francisco, but Steve did not want to make the 11-hour flight from London until she told him about the San Francisco Scooter Centre (it seems Steve is a vintage scooter enthusiast, too).   That sealed the deal for a trek to America.  It was a funny story told with a delightful British accent.  Imagine that…flying across an ocean and a continent to see a scooter dealer!

New bikes on the showroom floor…that’s Steve and Debbie on the right, who flew in from England!

New Genuine Buddy scooters. We sold these a few years ago. They’re great scooters.

We spent a lot of time with Barry on the second floor, where he keeps the vintage stuff.   It was an amazing collection, and it was obvious Barry loves his bikes and all that goes with finding, restoring, and in some cases, hot rodding vintage machines.

A hopped up Lambretta.

Vintage scooters in Barry’s personal collection.

It was a great day for us, and spending it with Barry at the San Francisco Scooter Centre made it even better.   This is a guy who knows his stuff, and it’s obvious why Barry’s dealership has become the epicenter of the San Francisco scooter scene.   I was impressed before I met Barry; I’m even more so now.

Yours truly and Sue in the San Franscisco Scooter Centre

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