this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2026
195 points (94.9% liked)
Technology
78543 readers
4287 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I think it’s irresponsible of the Verge to tout an electric motorcycle’s range as “up to 600km”. It’s absolute fantasy.
I have an electric dirtbike and a gas bike. My gas bike has an 11.1 L tank and can go about 360km per tank.
The highest actual range I’ve seen on an electric motorcycle is about 100km of mixed use (highway and city).
Solid state batteries have the potential capability of having almost double the power density as lithium ion. So approx 200-300km (maybe).
Pretty solid but doubling THAT is just dishonest and in no way going to happen. You’re claiming to have more power density than internal combustion. That’s just straight up dishonest.
It's not The Verge. It's Verge Motorcycles. I know, it confused me too.
Reached 310.69km with 7% charge on the 20.2kWh battery remaining during a challenge in London.
https://www.motorcyclenews.com/news/2025/april/verge-electric-bike-distance-record/
It took 16 hours though, so that works out to around 19km/h or 12mph. 🐌
Yes so even gaming this by driving very slowly, the range isn’t even close
The 20kWh is the low end battery which they rate at 350km of range. The high end battery is 33kWh
Yes, assuming a linear scaling, 33kWh would get you 506km with some percentage available.
They did still have 7% left though. So more like 540km.. And it's actually 33.3 so we get another 1% which brings us to 545... with almost no degradation over time or from running from 100% to 0% or in hot or cold weather. So I'd still say pretty darn good.
Adding the extra weight of the battery will reduce the range but more importantly going 12mph is not a way of rating a street legal vehicle… it’s like bragging about a laptop having a 30 day battery life when it’s in standby. Drag is a function of velocity squared which means that going at even 45mph you are experiencing 14x the drag and at 60mph it’s 25x the drag
The batteries are actually lighter than the Lithium batteries in there previously. But yeah, we can put them in the same category with most EV makers when it comes to overstating range.
They are claiming a weight of 400Wh/kg so the extra weight should be at least another 70lbs if it didn’t require any extra bracing which it probably does that while it may not be a lot for a 3000lb car it is sizeable for a 400lb bike
it’s a lot worse than other EV makers misleading claims, because 12mph is literally a joke of a speed to test at considering that’s slower than a cyclist on a non motorized bike and it is not even considering a fast speed to run at.
A still misleading but at least defendable claim would be if they did one at 25mph and called that their city range but 12mph is just an insulting claim
Your suspicions were well founded. The CEO's starting to look like a charlatan
Some very rough math suggests ~545km range.
that was an older model though.
It probably won't do that in anything less than perfect conditions, but it will still be far more than any other electricbike on the road today.
It is probably 3x that of classical Lithium Ion already. It's roughly double that of usual NMC batteries, and still a good 50% better than the absolute best NMC.
Combine that with no range degradation when consistently charging to 100% and discharging to 0%, no loss of capacity in hot or cold weather, and something like 20x the charge cycles of NMC/LiFePO4, and over the lifetime you will likely start seeing 4 or 5 times the capacity in later stages of vehicle ownerships
It's 600 km (in ideal conditions) <- this is the part they don't say.
It doesn’t matter. It’s a lie. Ideal conditions and driving the bike at 19km/h achieves that. How many people are going to be driving a top speed of 19km/h on a bike? Their stats are physically impossible given the hardware they’re stating and are relying on people with little knowledge of real world range on electric motorcycles or charge density of solid state vs lion
Maybe you're not dreaming big enough on what makes ideal conditions. The fraudulent Nikola company managed to film a semi "driving" a few km without a powertrain, by just letting it roll downhill. I bet there's a place that has a high enough altitude and smooth enough roads for a long downhill descent where 600km on a 300km battery is possible.
Ideal, as in "100 mph tail wind all the way".
Every manufacturer says your mileage may vary.
"up to" is dishonest to start. They claim on some of their models 600+ km range. It is city mileage though. Solid state batteries claim 400wh/kg, and may be replacing 180wh/kg batteries. That can mean more than 2.5x range city due to reduced weight. The highway mileage is much lower though.
It's a 33 kwhr battery, cars with that amount of storage get 250km.