Testing the Best 2025 Electric Dirt Bikes for Hard Enduro | Surron Ultra Bee vs Zero XE
All right, 2025 Red Bull Tennessee Knockout is a mere few weeks away and it’s probably a good time to start training for this event, right? See if we’re ready for this thing. Yeah, we only need a few weeks. I’m here with Dustin and we are kind of figuring out still what bikes we’re going to race. I think I’m going to race the bike that Dustin raced last year, which is the 2023 Ultra B that we built up. And Dustin, are you doing this? Yeah, I think I think this is the one. Feels right. So Dustin’s on the Zero XE, which we have some mods on it. You can see we’re running some prototype Cirrus suspension front and rear. Did some bars, bar clamp, what else? Some foot pegs. And that’s about it. I guess we have to throw some gummies on here for you, right? Yeah. Yeah. Some gummies and some moosees so we’re not getting flats out there. And then this thing, there’s a little bit of a saga with this bike here that I’ll I’ll get into, but we’re going to go ride a little bit and uh shake down these bikes, talk about them a little bit, and see if we’re ready for TKO or not. Are you ready for TKO, Dustin? No, I’m not either. All right, so we’re just riding trail right now to get out to some zones here and probably do some hill climbs, maybe find some uh rock gardens, see how these bikes are performing. Uh, this bike specifically, I need to shake down because we’ve been having some setup qualms with the bike. If you follow the ECR media stuff, you probably already know some of the stuff we’re going through on this bike. But if you haven’t seen it, I’m going to fill you in real quick. This bike had a cracked swing arm. That was the main thing. Put this bike out for a while. We’re trying to sort out what was going on and figured it out. New swing arm. Everything was going great. Bike was back in action. And then I rode it a little too hard at the sand track and I cooked the temp sensor in the stock motor on this bike and I had to make a decision. Do I just keep running the stock motor or do I replace it with an aftermarket motor like the EBMX XUB80? So I took it as an opportunity to do just that. put the XUB 80 motor into this UltraB and the motor is great. However, it is almost twice the size of the stock motor and uh going to try to not butcher this because there’s a lot of engineering that was explained to me by the smart engineers at EVMX. But basically, it’s taking a lot more phase to power this bigger motor. And now on the V1 EBMX X9000 that I’m running on this bike, it’s overheating the controller. So now we are out here doing some testing because yeah, I keep overheating the controller enough where it kind of draws back power on steep inclines, which is not great for what we’re trying to get ready to go do on this bike. So I keep dialing phase back. I was at a 1000 phase at 17 kilowatts and dropped it to 800 and was still seeming to overheat it. So now I’m at 700 today. See if that’s enough torque for this thing. And also see if 700 overheats that controller with this motor. One thing I want to get ahead of as I’m talking through this is this is the V1 EBMX X9000. We’ve had this controller for a while. It just ended up on this bike and it’s been good. So, we’ve been running it. The V2 came out a while back and that has better cooling than the V1. And now the V3 is out and that has even better cooling than the V2. So, hopefully there will be enough time to ride the V3 on this bike. So, it’s not just because it’s EBMX X9000. It’s just the fact that this is the V1 controller and I’m running the stock battery on this bike. I like keeping the weight down and historically it’s been enough power for this bike for the type of riding that I’m doing. And honestly, I haven’t really overheated it. I barely barely overheated it in that San Isabel Enduro race that I did. But oftent times this controller is getting enough cooling just from the air flow of moving. But when you ride hard enduro stuff, you’re going really slow. So, the bike’s under tons of load and it’s using all the phase amps to get up some of these obstacles now that we’ve got this big durable XUB80 motor on here. Just needs more cooling. And so, there is another option that we’ve debated. Not sure I want to do it, but I have not ruled it out yet. And that is to water cool it. But, it’s a ton of work and it’s another thing that can fail during a race. So, I think it would completely solve our problem. But I don’t know if I want to do it. So, we are currently waiting on UltraB harnesses for the V3. So, I can’t just slap that thing on quite yet. But, I may experiment with putting the V2 on here. or pains me to say that new 2025 Ultra B that I wanted to keep fresh, we may put the controller on that bike and run the 2025 motor, which is different, takes less phase amp won’t have the same overheating issues. So, yeah, the plan is to race this bike, but it really just depends on am I going to overheat it or not. This looks like a little bit of TKO type. What’s the line here, Dustin? Woo! I’m just going to get this thing down. Wet rocks. That’s what TKO is all about. All right, so we’re at 105 controller temp. See what this does to it. I will say right away feels like enough power. I’m getting traction, but it’s not as spunky as I would like it. All right, here we go. It doesn’t have enough torque to get up that. All right. I basically had to push it up that. Where are we at? 122. Okay. Yeah, this setting isn’t going to work. I’m wide open. All right. The controller is not overheating, but it’s not putting down enough power. I’m overheating though. It’s like 100° out. 140. All right. Well, that was a lot of talking about my bike. Let’s talk about your bike. It’s great. It feels pretty nimble. It got through all that pretty easy. I’m trying eco mode to see cuz it’s getting some wheel spin, which we got to point out. You’re running a Dunlop MX33 with like 15 PSI with like 15 PSI moto tire. So that will probably help your wheel spin quite a bit. So Dustin and I, we spent multiple days with Cirrus. They were out here to help set up suspension on the XE. You’ve spent time on this bike, but it’s like kind of not really because you were just doing short runs, changing settings, then going back out. So that’s where you accepted that you may ride this at TKO. You’re not regretting the decision? No, I think it’s going to be a perfect bike for it. It feels so much lighter than it is, which is awesome. It’s not too low. Like that’s the problem with some of these bikes in this terrain is this one has enough clearance. Yep. Sweet. All right. 134. This looks like it’s going to do some damage. Yeah, she’s hot. 160. Ah, yep, that overheated the controller. That answers that question. All right, so Dustin’s fighting for traction, and it’s definitely because of those tires. Uh, if he had these tires, he’d be making it up this no problems, that’s for sure. But, uh, update on the Ultra B. I did just overheat the controller, so it’s got no power. So that answers that question. 700 phase amp V1 EBMX X9000 controller and the XUB80 motor for this slow steep riding is uh yeah too much motor and not enough cooling for the controller. So back to the drawing board. We can try the V2. The V2 has much better cooling. Um, so maybe that’ll get us where we need to. Or we do what I was avoiding or hoping to avoid and we take the brand new 2025 Ultra B that’s nice and fresh and just slam it on rocks in the backwoods of Tennessee for 3 days. So, decisions to be made. Uhoh, he’s walking. It’s actually a great photo if I had a camera. Oh, see that’s the type of training you need for TKO is just picking the bike up. See, I’m full throttle right now and it’s going nowhere. [Music] No power. Come back. You’ve got no traction from your tires. I got no power. Bad combo. Come on. Ah, it’s so frustrating. Yeah, this ain’t the move. H, what to do? The other thought is we could put the 2025 motor in this bike. This is steep. If you can’t tell, probably can’t tell. Even if it looks steep, I promise it’s steeper than it looks. And it’s already overheated. That just went literally just that one section right there. It went up 20°. Went from 140 to 160. And we’re back down to 150. Like look going nowhere. Made it. All right. So now that we added some hard into the enduro tires. Tires. The chassis feels great. I was able to like swing it and pivot and but the throttle is still very sensitive, but I found out this has traction control and that helped a little bit. Yeah. All right. So, this bike’s been around for a while. Dustin actually raced this exact bike at TKO last year and uh one of my favorite bikes in the stable. It’s got a lot of good parts on here and uh if you don’t know about it, you can look it up. Got a bunch of content around it. Kind of got it built for San Isabel Enduro, which I raced and then Dustin got it set up a little bit differently for TKO last year, but it’s got Cirrus on it. Right now, I’m running the Trail Tune, which is really good. Probably soften it up a little bit. Here’s one way to cool your controller off. What? Still getting hot. How’s that happening? That did not cool the controller off, believe it or not. Woo! Didn’t cool me off either. See, right now it’s got power. It’s kind of curious to see temp 147. So, yeah, little air flow goes a long way. All right, so little bit of TKO info. If you guys didn’t watch that announcement we posted last week, two classes this year, pro and amateur. They’re mostly going to run the same course. However, on the final on Sunday, the pros are going to stay on the same exact course as the pros. The amateurs are also going to do mostly the same course but slightly abbreviated. And uh yeah, pro purse this year is paying out. 500, 300, 200. So yeah, if you’re racing pro, stand to make some money this year. The reason that we did two classes this year is just last year was really the big year where you started to realize like there are a fair amount of pros and manufacturers trying to put prolevel guys on their bikes for the race. And there’s a pretty big spread of skill level between front of the pack and midpack. And so making two classes kind of just evens the playing field a little bit. Hopefully there’s enough entries in both to warrant the two classes. The race date is August 8th, 9th, and 10th in Saquatchi, Tennessee at the Trials Training Center. So, even if you’re not racing and you’re local, you want to come out and watch, that’d be sweet. But I hope you come out and race. Should be a fun weekend. Be pretty cool to see the XE in a hard enduro environment. It’s a pretty pretty torturous terrain for any bike, but uh yeah, cool that Zero’s down to let us race this one and they should be out there as well. Swing by and see the new Zero XE in person cuz we’ll have it there. This bike had no power. I am literally stuck. The throttle is in my boot. See, this right here is why I don’t want to race the 2025. That TKO, it’s going to take a beating. Ran out of power and ran out of talent at the top there. It got loose. I was trying to get up and over a rock and it just didn’t have anything to give and then I just got off kilter and just went way down and I was like that is why I don’t want to race that nice fresh 2025 Ultra B. You can always ride the Ewatt. Oh, good god. All right, wrapping up our ride here. What did we learn today? Uh sticky tires are nice. Sticky tires are nice. Soft moosees are also nice. Yep. And this thing’s going to do pretty well at TKO. Yeah, you don’t really need to do much, I think. Yeah, just tires, right? Yeah. Tires and moosees and the Zero’s ready to go. Yeah, exactly. Me, on the other hand, um keep overheating. So, we need to figure out powertrain whether we’re going to modify this bike a little bit more or just work on the 2025 Ultra B. But, uh yeah, the rest of the bike feels awesome. So, I think we got two A+ electric hardenduro bikes on our hands here. Uh a couple mods and we should be ready. But probably do a follow-up video closer to the race. Check in, see how things are going, and let us know if you guys are showing up to TKO and what you guys are racing. All right. See you. [Music]
We are getting ready for the 2025 Red Bull TKO ECR eMoto Race and we need to select which electric dirt bikes to race in this iconic hard enduro. So which bikes are the best? We shake down the modded Surron Ultra bee and Zero XE to decide what we’ll race this year.
Read More 2025 RedBull TKO ECR eMoto Class Info here: https://electriccyclerider.com/2025/07/11/2025-red-bull-tennessee-knockout-what-you-need-to-know
Registration Here: https://secure.tracksideprereg.com/tko/?event=37C6D8E967EB451A90E96DECFBE69E60
Shop ECR Here: https://bit.ly/ECRParts
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