Do Electric Motorcycles Have A Future? | Can-Am Origin Review (electric dual sport!)
I really don’t. Whoa. This thing is a riot. Absolute most fun I’ve ever had on this road in my life. Hello everyone and welcome to Big Rock Moto. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I really appreciate that. two favors as we start out. One, if you’re not subscribed to this channel, please subscribe. And two, whenever you’re shopping, use my affiliate links. I really appreciate that. All right, here on my right is a 2025 KTM 390 Adventure R. It’s a lightweight adventure bike. It costs around $7,000. It weighs somewhere around 400 lb or 180 kilograms and you can ride about 200 miles or 320 kilometers uh using its 3.7 gallon or 14 L fuel tank. And then when that fuel tank is depleted, you can charge it up or fuel it up in about 2 minutes at any gas station. Now on my left is a 2025 Can-Am Origin and this is an allect electric lightweight adventure motorcycle. However, it costs $14,500. It weighs about the same as that bike around 400 lb or about 180 kg. But on the Origin, you’re only able to travel, in my experience in the real world, about 60 mi or about 100 km based on its 9 kWh battery pack. And then when you run out of electrons, you have to stop and to charge from 20% to 80%, it takes you about an hour, assuming you have access to a level two charger. So today we’re going to take a look at the CANM Origin and we’re going to use it as a basis to discuss why electric motorcycles are both amazing and horrible at the same time. All right, I’ve got a question for all of you. Let’s assume for a second that there was a fantasy world where this Can-Am Morgan had a 200 mile or 320 km range. It costs the same as the KTM we just talked about around $7,000. and assume it could somehow charge in less than 5 minutes. Would you then buy this bike? That’s what I want to know. Put it down in the comments below. All right, so let’s cover the basics of the Can-Am Origin and then after that I want to get into the pros and cons of electric motorcycles in general. So the Can-Am Origin, so first of all, Can-Am is a Canadian company that a long time ago actually did build motorcycles. Recently, however, they’ve become known for side by sides, ATVs, and those three-wheel Canm spiders you’ve probably seen around on your local roads. Now, the Origin is their attempt at a fully electric dual sport motorcycle, and it’s got some pretty cool features. First, it’s got a 47 horsepower liquid cooled electric motor inside the swing arm, and it uses a fully enclosed, nearly maintenancefree chain final drive. And that is super innovative. and super unique. Now, because the motor is in the swing arm, there’s no chassis squat on acceleration, making for a smooth, fast, and refined power delivery that you just don’t get on any other motorcycle or any other adventure motorcycle. Now, the battery is also liquid cooled as well as the charging system. The suspension on this bike is by KYB and it has about 10 in or 250 mm of travel front and back. Combine that with generous ground clearance, it’s actually quite capable off-road. To help put some charge back into the battery, the Origin has both passive and active regenerative braking. The Origin also has a very large TFT dashboard with integrated Apple CarPlay with Android Auto coming soon. Another cool feature this bike has, which hardly any motorcycles have, except for maybe something like a Gold Wing, is it has a reverse gear. All right, let me show you some sport riding or backro riding with the Origin. Uh it’s going to be really, really fun cuz I already tried this out last week. It’s anyway, just trust me on this. So, uh we’ll go ahead and put the bike into sport mode just because it just makes it a little more fun. makes the throttle even sharper. Uh, and let’s This is like what I call like a paved mountain trail. It’s like a paved one lane, one and a half lane like road in the middle of the mountain. So, nobody goes on cuz it’s a goes to a closed campground way down there. So, shouldn’t have any traffic unless it’s really send this thing. Um, there is dirt and leaves on the road. So, we’d have to be a little bit careful. But, I want to show you an environment that this bike really excels. The acceleration is just ridiculous. Whoa. Whoa. Oh my god. Whoa. Holy crap. This is I am not embellishing this. This is seriously one of the most fun things I’ve ever done on a motorcycle. this road on this bike right now. It’s just ridiculous. Whoa. It’s just Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. The way that it blasts out of corners is just crazy. There’s no delay from shifting or waiting for the RPMs to get up or anything. And somehow that just makes it that much more enjoyable. And the fact that this road has like these little jumps, these little kind of jump things in it. Oh my god, it’s so much fun. Like I really do think that once electric motorcycles come of age someday with the range and the charging and the price issues that people are going to realize how much just ridiculous fun these things can be in addition to all the other benefits that you have. I do love the fact that when I’m going downhill like this on this road where there’s no traffic, um that I can just let the bike coast and put energy back into the battery and I see that little blue thing come up on the dash. I I do like that. That is super cool to be able to recapture energy that you can then use to drive forward again that otherwise would be wasted to heat in the brakes. That that is really cool thing about electric vehicles. All right, doing some performance testing with the Origin. So, I want to show you all all the regenerative braking, all that kind of stuff, how that works. But let’s just pretend it’s a gas motorcycle. So, we’ll put it in normal mode. Now, the ride modes for the ride modes, you have these different modes. Uh, and you would think that they all kind of change the acceleration, but they really don’t. The only one that really kills your your acceleration, and in my opinion, it’s just dangerous to use cuz it’s so slow is eco. So, I don’t use that. I just think that should be taken off. It’s like a liability for them to even have that on here cuz you just can’t accelerate. Um, sport, you know, you’ve got, uh, off-road, off-road plus, we’ll talk about those later. Sport, normal, rain, and eco. Rain just makes it traction control work a little more. Makes the throttles a little softer. Um, normal is what I normally ride in. Sport makes a sport and normal and rain, they all have the same power. It’s not faster or anything. It’s just that the throttle response is different. So, I’m just going to leave it in normal mode for this test. So, what we’re going to do is uh we’re going to go 0 to 70 mph. back to zero as fast as we can. We’re not going to use the regen braking. We’re going to use the regular friction brakes. God, that’s good. Holy crap. 70 full emergency brake. Okay, so the brakes, the friction brakes on this bike, the regular brakes are they’re okay. They’re not great, honestly. The front brake is in particular kind of soft. It does work, but man, you have to really squeeze really, really hard to get this thing to stop. All right. Now, now I want to talk a little bit more about the regenerative braking. So, uh, you can configure this in the menu, but you have two kinds of regen braking. The regen puts electricity back in the battery. Now, it doesn’t put that much back in because that’s just the laws of physics. You’re just not getting much out of it, but you get a little bit. So the act the normal region braking is if I let off the throttle, you see the dash goes blue or negative there. So it’s slowing down on its own. It’s putting a little bit of energy back into the battery. That’s like what they call like passive regeneration or just letting off the throttle. Now let’s say I’m going to So let me go here 30 mph. And when I roll the throttle forward, you see how now I’m getting I’m not using the regular brakes. I can stop the bike using the active regen. So I roll the throttle forward and the bike stops. Let me do that one more time for you. Let me go faster this time. Let me go 50 mph. Active regen. This is as fast as I can stop with the active regen. Now, when you get good at this bike, it’s like a game to see how much regen you can get. And every time you come to a stop, you’re using that regen. I really like it. Personally, I think it’s really fun to use, and I like not using the friction brakes and wasting the energy. So, I I really like it. Full power. The acceleration between like zero 0 to 50 0 to 40 or 0 to 50 miles an hour on this bike will blow everything else blow out every other bike on the road pretty much. But when you get above about 50 m an hour that’s where that horsepower you just don’t have a whole ton of horsepower. It’s still fast. Like look 60 65 70 75. It’ll go about. So yeah, right there about 80 miles an hour slowing down here with the regen, all the energy going back into the brakes. Uh 80 mph is the top speed of this bike. It gets it pretty quick, but that’s the top speed you have. So that and I’ll tell you, if you go 80 mph on this bike, you’re going to drain the battery really, really fast because physics and aerodynamics, that’s that’s how that works. Now, an awesome feature of this that is useful in many situations, if you kind of park downhill, either by on purpose or by accident, and it’s a heavy bike, it’s kind of hard to hard to push it. Well, don’t worry because unlike a gas motorcycle, you have reverse gear. So, what I can do is, okay, it’s in normal drive mode. I will hold this hold this down. It says R on the dash. And now I hold the throttle in reverse. And look at that. I’m reversing up the hill. I’m reversing uphill backwards and walking the bike backwards. That is fantastic. Even going over these rocks, I have enough power to go in reverse. That is more useful than you would think, and you end up using it more than you’d think. And uh it’s really, really nice to have. And then to go back, you just hold the brake, switch back into drive mode, and there you go. All right, let’s start our off-road testing with the Origin. So, first I want to put the bike in off-road plus mode, which kind of backs off the traction control for off-road. Uh, turns the rear ABS off and gives you just really powerful acceleration in the dirt. It’s kind of insane how fast. I’m going to show you. You can accelerate in the dirt with this bike. It just blows everything else away from like 0 to 40. It’s just ridiculous. And the off-road traction control is very effective. Surprisingly effective. You can turn it off. It’s very easy to turn it off right here, but I’m going to leave it on because you can actually accelerate faster. So, let’s see how fast we can get to 40 mph in the dirt. Holy. That was like Z. That was like almost 60 miles an hour. It just is so much build speed so much faster than you would think. Let me kind of show you again. And although I’ve got kind of a bump up here. Holy crap. Oh my gosh. It really It really will blow you away. Like 0 to 50. I don’t There’s just nothing like that. That’s crazy. Now, the off-road TC lets you slide around quite a bit. If you turn it off, boy, you’re really going to be sliding everywhere. You’re going to have to be really careful not to crash. Holy Whoa. Oh my god. There’s my Oh, this thing this thing is an absolute riot. It’s It can be a bit much to handle if you don’t know what you’re doing. Come on. 60 miles an hour. Because the reason it’s so efficient at accelerating is because there’s no uh gear shifting delay, right? And that the torque is just it’s just constant, just pulling you forward. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about the actual off-road stuff and stop laughing here for a minute. So, the suspension is on the soft side, but it has a lot of travel, and it’s actually pretty effective if you’re not riding too crazy aggressive with it. Actually, I the suspension’s pretty decent. Um, but I would like to have more adjustment and it is it is a little bit on the soft side. So, riding this bike offroad, the general experience that Whoa. You see that? What just happened there? I have to um remember that I have this regen braking thing. So, when I turn the throttle forward, uh it kind of slides the back end because it’s trying to break to put energy back into the battery. Now, you can turn that down, which you need to do off-road, or you can turn it off, or you cannot use that and just let off the throttle. So, that’s totally customizable, but I kind of like to play with it and use it use the active regen. But yeah, you got to kind of be careful with that because it’ll lock the rear end. Uh the regen is so strong if you have it set to maximum like I do. Yeah, we kind of talked about the suspension. The the riding position for standing is I like it. I think it’s very good. It feels natural standing up and then gosh, you could just make such fast progress. You can get going way too fast very easily on this bike because the acceleration is so instantaneous. I think in certain situations you can go really fast on this bike, but it is heavy. Like for a so-called dual sport bike, it is rather heavy. Um, and you have to be mindful of that. It’s more to me, it’s more like riding like a small to midsize adventure bike because of the weight of it. Although it can be deceptive because uh the bike’s not physically that big. But yeah, it’s really more of like an adventure bike. So, in terms of like slow speed control, it’s superb because there’s no clutch. There’s no clutch you have to worry about. So, you can you can drag the rear brake if you want uh to do your slow speed maneuvers or not. But you can see like I’m not my feet are not touching the ground right now and I’m still riding. I’m doing these U-turns here off-road. Like it’s I messed up that. But it’s extremely impressive uh because that’s one advantage of electric off-road motorcycles is there’s no um power engagement with clutch. So it’s actually really easy uh to do low speed stuff. And the power like you can just like get 1% power from the electric motor if you want just 1% and when you stop you don’t have to worry about stalling out or anything. So there’s a lot of advantages to it. All right. So, let’s delve into the benefits of electric motorcycles. There’s certainly a lot of hatred out there towards electric motorcycles. Um, the reasons which I don’t really fully understand. But let’s talk about some of the benefits. We’ll get to the drawbacks in a minute and they are serious. Absolutely, I’m not denying that. But there’s also a lot of really cool benefits to an electric motorcycle that you may have not thought of. So, the first benefit to an electric motorcycle is the acceleration is instantaneous and intense and smooth and uninterrupted. If you’ve ridden an electric bike, maybe done a demo on one, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no gear changes. There’s no clutch involved. There’s no waiting for the motor to get to a certain RPM. Everything is just right now. And at any time you open the throttle and you just surge forward and it feels very futuristic and it feels good. The next benefit to electric motorcycles that a lot of people haven’t thought about is that they are extremely lowmaintenance in comparison to a typical internal combustion engine motorcycle. So think about it. There’s no oil to change. There’s no oil filter to get dirty. There’s no air filter to get clogged by dust. There are no valves to check and adjust the clearances on, which often costs a ton of money when you have to do that major service on your bike. Overall, with an electric motorcycle, there are a lot less moving parts and a lot less things to break. And in theory, they should be much more reliable than an internal combustion engine bike because there’s just less stuff to go wrong. The next benefit that you probably didn’t think about with an electric motorcycle is there’s no power loss from the engine as you go up in elevation. So, this Origin will make the same 47 horsepower at sea level as it would on the top of Mount Everest. Not that you can get to the top of Mount Everest because you can only ride about 60 miles before the battery’s dead. But if you could get there, you’d have the same exact power because think about it, it’s not a combustion engine. It’s not using air combined with fuel to create an explosion to give you forward momentum. It doesn’t have to do that. So air pressure, air density, how much oxygen is available, it doesn’t matter. With a typical gas motorcycle, you’ll see dramatic power losses at high elevation. Not the case with an electric bike. All right. The next benefit to an electric motorcycle that a lot of people don’t know about is that an electric motor is far far more efficient at turning energy into forward motion than an internal combustion engine is. Put in other terms, an electric motor wastess far less energy than a gas motor does. Overall, a gasoline engine can only convert about 25% of the energy in gasoline into forward motion and the other 75% of the energy is completely wasted in uh in terms of friction in terms of moving parts and exhaust and heat and everything like that. Now, an electric motor on the other hand is about 90% efficient, meaning that it can use about 90% of the energy from the battery to give you forward motion. And there’s only about 10% of energy that’s wasted, some in terms of heat and maybe a very small amount of friction. I think that this reason alone, this dramatically increased energy efficiency is the reason why electric motors for transportation are the future. just for that reason alone. The next huge benefit to an electric motorcycle, and this may seem obvious, but I think people don’t really think about this in the appropriate way, is that there are zero tailpipe or zero vehicle emissions from an electric motorcycle. Now, while there obviously of course still are emissions and pollution and wasted products when you’re producing the bike and producing the battery, when you’re disposing the bike and disposing of the battery and also in the generation of the electricity that goes into the battery, there’s actually no pollution at the vehicle itself. And that’s very, very important. This can potentially have enormous positive impacts in congested cities where vehicle emissions are a huge source of air pollution, health issues, and thousands or hundreds of thousands of premature deaths every single year. For instance, in places like in India and New Delhi or in Vietnam and somewhere like Hanoi, in cities like these, replacing gas and diesel cars and bikes with electric vehicles could be transformative for public health and for well-being. All right, now let’s get into for some of you what will be your favorite part of the video. I told you so. Electric bikes are terrible. These things should not exist. Um, what are the downsides to electric motorcycles? Well, there are some, at least right now, some pretty glaring obvious downsides. So, the first is kind of obvious. The range of the current electric motorcycles that we have is terrible. This CANM Origin is basically and sadly useless as an adventure motorcycle because in my testing I can only go between 50 to 70 m somewhere on average around 100 km before completely running out of electricity. And that makes it effectively useless as an adventure bike. Let’s be honest. But let’s dig deeper. Why is this? So to understand this we have to understand energy density of gasoline versus the energy density of a lithium ion battery. Lithium ion being the most widespread current battery technology that’s out there. So to understand this this 5gallon jug of gasoline contains about 167 kilowatt hours of energy inside of it if it’s a full 5 gallons. Now, in contrast to that, the battery pack on the Origin, and you can see it’s quite large, actually probably as big or bigger than this 5gallon gasoline can, only contains 9 kwatt hours of energy. So, let me say that again. This is 167 kwatt hours of energy. This is 9 kwatt hours of energy. So, what’s going on? If we put this in other terms, gasoline is around about a 100 times more energy dense in terms of energy per unit of weight uh than a lithium ion battery, 100 times more energy dense is a really really big deal. So, even though like we talked about earlier with electric motors being about four times more efficient at turning energy into forward motion than a gasoline engine is, it simply cannot overcome the fact that this is 100 times more energy dense than a battery. So, you might be thinking, why do modern electric cars have comparable driving range to modern gasoline powered cars? Well, the reason is that electric cars and electric trucks, they have plenty of room underneath the vehicle uh to put a gigantic and heavy battery pack to overcome the problem of energy density. However, on a motorcycle, because it’s physically small, there’s no where to put such a large battery pack. And even if you could, it would be enormously heavy. All right, the next major downside to electric motorcycles is that the charging speed, the time it takes to recharge the battery is simply too slow. So, let’s unpack this. Now, to get the origin from 20% of battery to 80% of battery, in other words, only filling up about 60% of the quote unquote gas tank, this would take about an hour, assuming you have access to a level two charger. If you don’t have a level two charger, if you have a home outlet like a level one charger like I do in this garage, it would take considerably longer than that. So why is this? Why is there such a discrepancy in the charging speed of an electric motorcycle? So when you fill up your gasoline powered motorcycle, all you’re doing is you’re transferring fluid with a pump, right? And that can happen very very quickly. But when you quote unquote fill up an electric motorcycle with energy, you are forcing the battery to undergo major chemical changes inside of the battery. So you’re not transferring liquid via a pump. You’re making the battery undergo these chemistry changes inside of it. And that physical process because the law of physics just takes much much longer to do that. The other problem with battery charging and lithium-ion batteries and in cars and bikes in particular is that it has to go in stages. Uh because of again physical laws and heat management and all these things and battery degradation over time, the last 20% of charge of the battery takes a disproportionate amount of time compared to let’s say going from 60 to 80%. So going from 60 to 80% might be fast, but going from the 80 up to that 100% takes a disproportionate amount of time because the charging speed has to slow down as the battery gets to almost being full. And that is a big big problem. Now the next downside to electric motorcycles is that compared to their gasoline counterparts, they are exorbitantly expensive. So why is this? Well, there’s a few reasons. Uh number one is that the simply the cost of producing the batteries and producing the electric motors and some of the other specialized componentry is very very high. Uh also tying in with that is that there’s no economy of scale here with uh gasoline powered bikes because they produce large quantities of them. Uh they are very afford relatively affordable to manufacture because that’s how factories and supply chains work. when there’s a lot of something, it gets cheaper. But with them only making a few of these every year, really, the economy of scale isn’t there and the price is very high. The next downside to electric motorcycles is that they tend to be on the heavier side. Now, you have to go back kind of to the energy density part of this video to kind of understand this, but for instance, the origin weighs 412 lbs or 186 kg, but it can only travel about 100 km or about 60 miles or so on a quote unquote tank of gas. Well, why is this? Well, it’s because going back to the energy density, the B in order to give you enough energy in the battery, they have to make it big. It becomes heavy. And so these bikes become disproportionately heavy uh in terms of you know relative the capability and the range and stuff that they have because the batteries are heavy. All right. So my final thoughts on the Can-Am Origin as a motorcycle and then sort of electric motorcycles in general. Now, the Origin itself has a lot of really cool and innovative design and technology inside of it, and it’s actually pretty amazing to ride, but for a very short amount of time, it’s completely impractical. It doesn’t make very much sense, and I don’t see really much market for it, and it’s really sad because it’s quite a great motorcycle to actually ride. Now the bigger question is for all of us, are electric motorcycles the future of motorcycleycling? What do you think? Put it down in the comments below. What are your thoughts about this? Now, because this is my YouTube channel, I get to give you my opinion about this. And my opinion is a cautious yes. I do think that electric motorcycles will someday eventually become the norm and become the mainstream. The reasons for that I’ve kind of talked about in when I talked about the benefits of the electric motorcycles, the energy efficiency, the smooth acceleration, the increased reliability, and the lower maintenance. However, for this to actually come true uh and for these bikes to be practical, there will have to be major leaps and bounds in terms of the energy density of batteries, the charging speed of the battery and also in the overall cost of the motorcycle itself. I think when those things if if those things can be addressed and come true then I think that the overwhelming benefits will take over and you will see more electric motorcycles in the future. If we think about urban mobility as it is right now in a lot of countries around the world you’re seeing a lot of people ride not only uh electric bicycles, ebikes, but also smaller electric motorcycles because there’s so many benefits to that. And we have to realize that while in rich countries like here in the United States and in parts of Europe, we may see things like this as a pleasure toy, as a rich person’s toy, the truth is if you live in one of the world’s most polluted cities with most of that pollution coming from vehicles in those cities, if you can have electric scooters or electric motorcycles that are affordable and practical, uh because you’re not driving long distances, they could have major adoption there. and the reduction in pollution could be seriously life-changing and transformative for public health and for well-being in those types of areas of the world. And for that reason, I really do think that we need to pay more attention to electric motorcycles. Also, in the world of off-road motorcycles, we’re seeing companies like Stark Future bring out bikes that are unbelievably competitive in terms of their power and their performance and their weight and everything like that. and they’re having some success with that. Uh, and I think that’s really worth paying attention to and I’m excited to test out some of those bikes in the future. All right, so in wrapping this up, I need you to let me know, would you like me to feature more electric motorcycle content on this channel going forward? Yes or no? And if so, what kind of bikes would you like me to feature? I do have a few plans here and there uh with some bikes I have in mind, but if you have particular things in mind, let me know and I will definitely do my best to review those bikes. All right. Well, I hope this video has been useful and informative. If you want to support the independent uh journalist work that I’m doing here on this channel, there are a bunch of ways to do that down below, and I hope you will participate in those. Uh, other than that, thank you so much for watching. Ride safe. I’ll see you out there.
Electric motorcycles cause a lot of debate. We review the Can-Am Origin (electric dual sport) and discuss why electric bikes are great, but also why they are terrible at the same time. #motorcycle #electric #dualsport #advrider @CANAMOFFROAD
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00:00 Intro
02:33 Bike Overview
04:18 Ride Test
16:27 Electric Benefits
21:18 Electric Downsides
27:24 Electric Future?
