Why The Livewire S2 Del Mar Could Be The Perfect City Bike!

Why The Livewire S2 Del Mar Could Be The Perfect City Bike now this week Livewire announced some of the details in the full pricing of their second electric motorcycle the S2 Del Mar this is the follow-up to the live wire one which was previously part of the main Harley-Davidson brand and to me it looks pretty awesome I love The

Styling with a bit of a flat track stance but do the specs live up to the looks well in this video we’ll go through all the details to find out now straight up I think Livewire a position in this bike differently to the Live Wire One see when it was originally launched under the Harley-Davidson brand it felt more so like it was positioned as an all-rounder

electric Naked Bike but for me it could never compete with the petrol equivalent you see electrics are decent on Range when it comes to City riding because you’re at low speeds where there’s less wind resistance and rolling resistance to overcome but also they can regenerate when you’re decelerating so actually being in stop start traffic

lengthens the range of the bike whereas doing constant stints on the motorway a steady Speed without any deceleration is only going to shorten it you see it’s basically the opposite of internal combustion petrol bikes where you’d expect better fuel

Why The Livewire S2 Del Mar Could Be The Perfect City Bike!

economy at cruising speeds on the motorway and then worse fuel economy when you’re between traffic lights and when you start to look at the range figures of electric motorcycles out of town on the motorway they do start to look pretty bad so take the Live Wire one as an example you see that’ll get you 146 miles in the city according to the official spec sheet 95 miles combined which is a range of types of riding and then if you’re doing purely Motorway

stuff it’s down to 70 miles and you just can’t argue that it’s a viable competitor to petrol bikes on the motorway offer long days out or for touring because that’s just not practical now under the Live Wire brand they’re actually describing it as built for the urban environment explicitly and the marketing for this new S2 Del Mar is pretty much the same I mean the photos in the press kit are all in town the launch events that they’re running are all the urban

biker Hangouts and even the spa spec sheet is pretty brief and the only range it cites is City range and so this is firmly a city bike that’s where electrics are at their best and so that’s what we’ll judge it upon now for me one of the most important things when you’re riding in town and I did it for years in London on my Triumph streets win is the ability to accelerate away from the traffic lights and get ahead of any traffic that might sort of put you in danger now this

bike they say does not to 60 miles per hour in just 3.1 seconds which is pretty rapid that should easily outdo most cars up to the sort of 30 or 40 limits that you get in town and anything above that and beyond that is really Surplus to requirements for reference that’s almost the same as the Live Wire One at three seconds for the naught to 60. and you

could argue that’s the bigger more premium more powerful bike so have they done it well firstly it delivers a boatload of torque with 250 newton meters listed on the spec sheet so that’s an absolutely huge torque figure and the thing with electric is they deliver it right down from pretty much at a standstill and that’s what’s going to count when

driving off the line as quickly as possible remember though electric motorcycles sort of make that Peak talk figure that looks super impressive for a few thousand RPM and then it starts to tail off and look horsepower is a product of torque and revs and so the peak power figures won’t be competitive or comparable with an internal combustion bike take the Live Wire One For example that makes about a hundred horsepower which is decent but it’s not exactly

Market leading if you set it against like a super naked which you could buy for similar money but the key thing is with this bike that low end punch to get you moving and it looks like the Del Mar should be pretty awesome now the other factor of course when it comes to getting off the line quickly is low weight so that you’ve got a decent power to weight ratio and the S2 Del Mar is targeting a final

production ready weight of just under 200 kilograms Now set that against the other middleweight naked petrol bikes that you might consider for City riding and commuting and it looks decent if not you know a few kilograms over but look electrics are typically super heavy because of the battery it’s actually set against those bikes it looks really quite

good the Live Wire One For example comes in at 256 kilograms and even the zero Sr and generally I’d say zeros are at the lighter end of the electric spectrum that comes in at 222 kilograms and not only is this slender weight gonna help with acceleration but also you know that agility and nimbleness that counts for so much in town in fact if you want to cut down on your commute time the most important thing is probably the ability to thread through City

traffic and waddle through those tiny gaps as opposed to some massive impressive Pete par figure that’s just irrelevant now range is said to be 110 miles of City riding so slightly down on the Live Wire one but realistically if you truly consider this to be a specific tool for a specific job who’s realistically going to be doing more than 55 miles through town to get to work and then 55mph miles on the way back again as you may well be aware London is our

biggest city in the UK and to ride all the way across it from Heathrow Airport to the Dartford Crossing so pretty much the maximum possible City commute right through town that comes in at 36.5 miles each way basically you just want enough to get to work and back and then stick it on charge overnight when you get home it’ll juice up overnight and then you’re ready to battle your way through the traffic again the next day in my experience charging electric

motorcycles overnight you know there’s plenty of time before you go out again the next day so that’s not usually an issue but if you do get caught short whilst you’re out and about then they’re saying a level two fast charge from 20 to 80 percent which again should be enough to get you home comes in at about 75 minutes so if you can find a level 2 charger then that’s easily enough time to nip into the office or even if you stop and go for lunch or something it’s

realistically about enough now there’s no word on the spec sheet about other charging times or a full charge or whether DC fast charging is supported I guess not but realistically this is probably the most common use case and it sounds pretty decent to me it feels a bit like we’re getting to the point where electric motorcycles are being designed like sensibly and acknowledging the sort of boundaries and physical restraints of what’s possible previously I felt like

you were getting incremental claims for each new bike that was announced that it had the most power or the biggest range or the best charging time but ultimately those limitations outside of town and the limitations around charging times at the moment you know they’re going to be there for some time take the zero dsrx for example it’s an

adventure touring style bike and yet again the range on the motorway is less than 100 miles it’s just never gonna compete with a petrol bike like a BMW GS adventure for example can probably do like three or four times that maybe more and yet fill up in a matter of minutes this though the S2 Del Mar you know it’s not pretending to be something that it can

never be and that to me seems a lot more honest now quick look in the cockpit and you’ll see some familiar features if you’ve ever seen some of the recent Harleys so the 9 Meister the Pan America the sports duress all have very similar switch gear if not the same switch gear and one would assume that the reason for all these buttons is that the four

inch color TFT Dash will not only offer up the basic riding and Battery information but also some connectivity and navigation features now generally I like this new generation of tech on the Harleys that I’ve tried and so hopefully more of the same here just with its own Live Wire design and branding price is usually the sticking point on electrics but the US price sounds reasonably competitive for this bike so they say there’ll be three color choices and they’ll

start at fifteen thousand four hundred and ninety nine dollars and yeah it’s still a lot of money for a bike and there’s a lot of other petrol equivalents that you could buy for that clearly you’re still gonna have to really want one of these to justify the cash but it is a lot less than the 20 or 30 grand that you were looking at a couple of years back for a lot of electrics on the market now in Europe a lot of the pictures actually we’ve been using in this video of the European launch edition they’re only going to make 100 of of these and they say that it features an exclusive finish and wheel design and the graphics and paint

in a unique Himalaya white finish are applied by hand using a process that takes five days to complete so as you might guess having someone spend five days on each paint job they’re a bit more expensive so 18 990 in the UK and roughly give or take 20ish thousand Euros in France Germany and the Netherlands can’t help but suggest that I’d

probably rather pay less and just put a normal paint on it but anyway they’re taking reservations as of now and you only need a hundred Euro deposit so peanuts to get your name on the list and they’ll aim to deliver them from September this year price aside certainly looks interesting to me and I can’t wait to take one for a spin and find out

what it’s like cutting through traffic in town and also just seeing if it has any guts for out of town riding even if the range is limited as always though let me know what you think of it down in the comments below and if you haven’t seen my review of the original Live Wire I’m going to link to here give it a watch and let me know what you think many thanks for watching and I’ll see you in the next one