Kawasaki Ninja e-1 and Z e-1

[Theo]

link to Ninja specs
link to Z specs

I've actually found them out only recently.

Notice that they both have a foot operated rear brake.
Each of them has two removable batteries.

Personally I think that they can't become successful:
too expensive for commuting in a city,
too little powerful and with too little charge to be used to travel or to have fun.

I also think that they will feed the (wrong, I know) consensus about the fact that electric motorcycles aren't exciting.

Considering the awesome ICE bikes they produce, surely at Kawasaki they know how to make successul motorcycles and therefore I wonder why they have made these models.
Hopefully they just wanted to dip their toes into the waters of EVs and test how to make, sell and service them before committing to something more powerful.
As far as I've understood, asphalt applications are too energy demanding to let someone making a decently performing, decently light e bike with a decent range at a decent cost, but they should be able to produce something better.

 

[Beagle]

It's interesting to see Kawasaki dipping their toes, this is for sure a timid start. Just goes to show how far most OEMs are from Stark performance right now, they're not in the same league.

KTM Freeride 2.0 was quietly ditched (disappeared from the website overnight), it might come back but it wasn't up to Varg standard at all, disappointing after 10 years...

Honda is doing good with electric little scooters but they've been working on the CR electric proto forever, I would guess the Varg release was quite the setback for them, like we need to do better.

Yamaha investing in Electric Motion is a smart move, they may be the first OEM to get their Stark competitor out.

And Suzuki... lol

 

[Border Dave]

It's interesting to see Kawasaki dipping their toes, this is for sure a timid start. Just goes to show how far most OEMs are from Stark performance right now, they're not in the same league.

Those new Kawis aren’t even in the same league as Chinese made bikes like Surron, Talaria, eride, or Arctic Leopard. Even Zeros are more powerful than the Kawis. A 5kw Ninja? Pathetic! You’d think at 308 lbs. either range or power would be greater than the other lighter e-motorcycles, but no.

 

[Theo]

It's interesting to see Kawasaki dipping their toes, this is for sure a timid start. Just goes to show how far most OEMs are from Stark performance right now, they're not in the same league.

KTM Freeride 2.0 was quietly ditched (disappeared from the website overnight), it might come back but it wasn't up to Varg standard at all, disappointing after 10 years...

Honda is doing good with electric little scooters but they've been working on the CR electric proto forever, I would guess the Varg release was quite the setback for them, like we need to do better.

Yamaha investing in Electric Motion is a smart move, they may be the first OEM to get their Stark competitor out.

And Suzuki... lol

Probably none of us knows for sure why the giants are still not selling high performance electric motorcycles, but IMO it's not because they couldn't match Stark Future's technology, but rather because they have assessed that it's still not profitable or not enough.
Here are a couple of examples of what they can do:
• Ducati V21L, used in the Moto E championship:
link to a V21L description on Ducati's website
link to a description of the V21L from Moto E's site
• Triumph TE-1: I've only found some videos and pictures about it and as far as I know no journalist or youtuber has ever tried it, but according to the specifications it's quite impressive. We still don't know how easily it overheats or has any kind of other problem, though:
link to a TE-1 description on Triumph's site

 

[Beagle]

Probably none of us knows for sure why the giants are still not selling high performance electric motorcycles, but IMO it's not because they couldn't match Stark Future's technology, but rather because they have assessed that it's still not profitable or not enough.
Here are a couple of examples of what they can do:
• Ducati V21L, used in the Moto E championship:
link to a V21L description on Ducati's website
link to a description of the V21L from Moto E's site
• Triumph TE-1: I've only found some videos and pictures about it and as far as I know no journalist or youtuber has ever tried it, but according to the specifications it's quite impressive. We still don't know how easily it overheats or has any kind of other problem, though:
link to a TE-1 description on Triumph's site

The Ducati MotoE is a work of art!


It was a huge surprise when it was announced they were going to replace Energica for 2023. They are seriously investing in electrics, they've set up an entire new department and are building a lot of knowledge, getting a ton of data, training their engineers...

Interestingly, for 2025 they're using 5 Ah 21700-type cells, just like the Varg EX.
Ducati battery pack is 101.5 kg for 18 kWh, Varg EX battery is 32 kg for 7.2 kWh. Ducati makes 177 Wh/kg to Stark 225 Wh/kg.

Of course it's apple to oranges, track bike to dirt bike, water-cooled to air-cooled battery pack, prototype to production bike but still, pretty sure they wouldn't knock the Varg out of the park.

For its part, Honda has been showing its CR electric proto since 2017, now for 2 years they've seen Stark selling thousands of bikes and still nothing (and no specs!)...
I don't believe they could match Stark from the get go, I mean look at the evidence, for electric cars, which are a much bigger and much more crucial market than dirt bikes, they're still playing catch up (in specs as much as in sales) after 10 long years!

Back to the Ducati: 20 kW onboard charger for the win

 

[Theo]

For its part, Honda has been showing its CR electric proto since 2017, now for 2 years they've seen Stark selling thousands of bikes and still nothing (and no specs!)...
I don't believe they could match Stark from the get go, I mean look at the evidence, for electric cars, which are a much bigger and much more crucial market than dirt bikes, they're still playing catch up (in specs as much as in sales) after 10 long years!

But you see, the problem is that the most modern Varg you can buy is still basically like the first version and after all, in these two years from the first deliveries it doesn't seem to me that the more common ICE bikes have received any amazing improvement either, except for the questionable usual slight changes in the geometry of the frames marketed for their pros without comments about their cons. Like A. Wass said in an interview, Stark doesn't want to release a new model every year just because everybody else does it -and I like this- and after two years it seems logic to me that the bike is the same for the most part.
Ok, they have made gen 2 powertrain and gen 2 battery and the battery and phone and other things of the EX apparently are improved, but still the bike is quite similar and Stark is too young, IMO, to have accrued enough knowledge to become hard to match by one of those big manufacturers. I also think that those older, bigger manufacturers have a lot more resources.
The CR Electric has been pretty successful against the Varg in the E-Xplorer enduro championship. I don't know whether the riders were comparable but I guess they were all good riders who shown that both the CR and the Varg are good performing bikes.
Maybe, hopefully, five years from now we will really see a more evolved bike from Stark Future which will be hard to match by anybody.

This is just my opinion, which I guess is as good as yours, maybe I'm wrong.

 

[Beagle]

But you see, the problem is that the most modern Varg you can buy is still basically like the first version and after all, in these two years from the first deliveries it doesn't seem to me that the more common ICE bikes have received any amazing improvement either, except for the questionable usual slight changes in the geometry of the frames marketed for their pros without comments about their cons. Like A. Wass said in an interview, Stark doesn't want to release a new model every year just because everybody else does it -and I like this- and after two years it seems logic to me that the bike is the same for the most part.
Ok, they have made gen 2 powertrain and gen 2 battery and the battery and phone and other things of the EX apparently are improved, but still the bike is quite similar and Stark is too young, IMO, to have accrued enough knowledge to become hard to match by one of those big manufacturers. I also think that those older, bigger manufacturers have a lot more resources.
The CR Electric has been pretty successful against the Varg in the E-Xplorer enduro championship. I don't know whether the riders were comparable but I guess they were all good riders who shown that both the CR and the Varg are good performing bikes.
Maybe, hopefully, five years from now we will really see a more evolved bike from Stark Future which will be hard to match by anybody.

This is just my opinion, which I guess is as good as yours, maybe I'm wrong.

Oh yes absolutely, I'm just guessing.

HRC prototype 7 years in the making with full on HRC crew and engineers almost as good as privateers on a production bike made by a startup was not such a good showing in my book. I believe the Honda has a smaller battery than the Stark but performance wise they were mostly on par for these very short races, that's correct.

Again, allow me to point out that despite Honda might and vast ressources they're still playing catch up against new manufacturers in electric cars.