Comment by Animats
5 days ago
Agreed. But you can supposedly book a test ride on a Verge motorcycle with this battery.[1] Verge has three stores in California, two of which are in Silicon Valley.
Base price $35,000 with the good battery.
Solid state batteries have been working for a while now, but they're still far too expensive. Mercedes has one demo car. Ducati has one demo motorcycle. Maybe they just decided to accept the high cost and sell a high-end product.
Yeah, I’m wondering if it could be a Tesla strategy of starting with the something imperfect but niche.
If the product is on the market and you can buy one and walk out the door, I feel like claims can easily be validated or invalidated with a tear down.
Not even a teardown. Just a few charge + discharge cycles, measuring the energy.
I'm not sure the test rides are for the version of the bike with this battery. The bike already exists with a more conventional battery pack.
I've had a brief test ride on a pre-production version of the Verge TS. All seemed OK but I thought the handling seemed weird - maybe due to the rear tyre size and geometry.