CSC Blog

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…