Living With the Harley Davidson LiveWire, and the Truth About the UK Electric Charging Network

I'd like to go home now. Clear blue skies, warm enough to be pleasant. And I'm off to Harley Davidson in Gloucestershire to pick up for one week, if you can see a coffee or a hand with coffee, that's just Monica next to me. So I'm going with Monica and I'm off to pick up a Harley Davidson Livewire for one week. Here we go, let me give you an overview about this because it's 160 miles away that Monica and I have to drive. So I'm driving with Monica, then Monica of course will drive the car back. But the range of the Livewire is 145 miles a city and I know that it's significantly worse for the motorway so I will definitely have to go at least once. Let me give you an overview because by 2030 we're in 20 Ban the sale of all petrol and diesel vehicles. So we've got nine years to get a really big chunk of the popular onto electric. So yes I want to see how the Livewire is, I'm hugely excited. But also what's the network like and what's it like living with a Livewire because we don't live in a house, we live in a flat. So we don't have the luxury of being able to charge it overnight in a safe place. So there are loads of things I'm really excited to find out. But I live in the southeast of England and London specifically has 31% of the UK's electric chargers and the southeast specifically, southeast of England has almost 50%. So I live in the best area of the UK for electric chargers. Across the whole of the UK there are 15,000 charging locations with 40,000 chargers. So we should be in a fairly good position. We're ranked between 10th and 20th for electric chargers. So I should be well placed to live with it. But I'm going to do every type of riding in the next week to find out what it's really like to live with a Livewire. And I cannot wait. I just tried starting it, it wouldn't do anything. Just realized the keys in my jacket. It's in my possession for the next week. I'm too excited so I'm going to do at least a 20 minute ride now. Then I'll pull over, give a full walk around about everything and give my first 20 minute impression. Well that guy's got the best job in the world. And Monica's got her eye on that for the next bike. It's got a heated and cooled seat. Heated and cooled. First 27 miles in. And well, there's never been a more beautiful place to stop off and give a first overview, walk around of the bike and my first impressions. Let me start with riding positions. So, I know people like to know to make it relevant. I'm 6 foot 1 and actually it's a significantly lower seat height than I thought. Hand positions, it's fairly aggressive. I guess it's a bit like the R9T that I did in the last video. So, that's it. It's 250 kilos. So Monica, if you come round to the front, I'll just show you what this is like. Because it feels genuinely sporty. 250 kilos but to me it doesn't feel heavy. So, that's all the lean angle you'd ever need. Actually that's seriously impressive for a lean angle. Okay, come round here and I'll show you what I see. So, if you have a look at the dash. What we've got here, in fact I'll show you this. Push that down, that opens. That's where you put the adapter for your house if you plug into the house. And this, I'll be using this within about 60 miles. This is what you use for service stations and things. So you shut that, you shut that. To start it, we push this button. And then this lights up. And from there, I'll show you all of that in a bit. But basically you can just toggle a whole load of stuff. But listen to this, so I lift the stand up. So that's what we've got there. And I push the start button. Do you hear anything? Okay, get ready. Because that's on. You actually don't know if it's on. And sometimes I find myself, that's on. And also, look at the left side of my body. No clutch, so nothing there. No lever on my hand. There's nothing to do on the left side of your body. And that's really weird. But when you're going round a roundabout, or you just need to, on a petrol bike, feather the clutch a bit to give smooth delivery in case there's some gravel. You can't do that on this. But it's the smoothest power delivery. So you don't need to worry about it. There's no jerk of power. It's just so silky smooth. Handling's beautiful. Suspension, firmish, but not in an unpleasant way. But you will be able to shift on this bike. It's scarily quick. And interestingly, it was on 99% charge when I got it. And it had 98 mile range. I've done 27 miles. And it now says I've got 68 miles left. So actually it's almost spot on. Yeah, it's almost spot on actually. So I've got 68 miles left of this. The guy who walked me round it said in reality it will do about 100, if you're lucky, 120 miles. So I think I'm going to actually have to fill up at least twice today. Put that down and you can hear the engine stop whirling. And I want to show you one other thing. So this is how you charge it. You've got a key here and it's keyless effectively. So you just keep this in your pocket and you start it. Under here, if I can figure out how to do it, I think you hold that and then you flip a catch. I hope I can do this because otherwise we're stuck. I may get Monica to cut this and then cleverly come back to me in five minutes. I actually had to just spend about ten minutes googling that and I didn't think I'd be able to do it. So to open it, turn the key, pull that and this opens. And here we have the mains charger. So that plugs into your mains and then this bit here, that plugs into there. So that's for your mains charging. So that's all you need. That's the first impression. Actually, let me show you this. I've just figured this out. So we've got modes, five or four different riding modes and you can preset three others the way you want it as well. So you can choose that screen mode and then it shows at the top. That's road mode. Then you get road and then sport mode there. And then if I click here, there are a few different options on the top there. And that is pretty much that. But you can see there, 67% charge left time there, 227 miles. I got it on 190. So this is almost as new as it gets. But with regards to bloodline of the Harley Davidsons, there's almost nothing at all. The mirrors that you can see and the way that you indicate left and right is pretty much the only thing I recognize from a Harley. We're going to have some lunch now, get back on the road and in about 40, 50 miles, I'll start panicking about range. So just soak up this beautiful day. So we've just finished lunch and we're about to head off. But this is me on the pillion seat. It's actually significantly more comfortable than the R9T. I'm surprised by how comfortable this is for a pillion. It's nice. But before we go, I'll show you the gear for the day. Jacket, the Byron jacket from an Australian company called Blackbird. Kind of late summer, late winter, early spring jacket this one. It's really nice quality. Not quite as warm as a proper out-and-out winter jacket, but it's good. Jeans, Broga Moto. This is a Polish company and they make really cool, great value biking gear. These are only about £150, which I think is brilliant value. Boots from a French company called Furygun. And these are just as classic as you like black boots. Zip on the side for easy access. Padding on the ankles. Just super classic, super classy. With AGV X3000 helmet. Brilliant field of view. Super slim padding. Really comfortable helmet. And somewhere... Here we go, I'll just get these. Garibaldi Heritage gloves. Love these. Putting the bike into gear with my hand, it's just... OK, here we go. This is the first ever charge. I've got no idea about the charges. I've never researched them. So this is going to be interesting. And I really hope you don't need to register. And you can just charge up like you would fill up with fuel. Hopefully it's just going to be tap and plug in. Ah, here we go. So, guest. 30p, so 30p per kilowatt hour. £15 credit reservation and £1.50 minimum. OK, let's accept that. Tap your debit card. Card verified. OK, your card has been accepted. Select your... Ooh, OK, so I'm just checking here. So it will be that one. So I need this one. So tap that. OK, connect your vehicle. Establishing communication. And that is communication OK. Still establishing. Oh, actually it says... Oh, here we go, here we go. So 35% battery at the moment. Elapsed time, 10 seconds. Payment total £1.50 so far. OK, and here... Well, this will be interesting because it's now 4 o'clock. So let's see how long it takes. Oh, estimated time to full. I think it's still calculating. Brilliant. So we'll go and get a coffee, chill out. I'll give you a few thoughts on this bike because I've really got some thoughts on this bike. And we'll go and wait maybe an hour or so. So while it's charging up, my initial thoughts. You lose absolutely 0% of fun going from petrol to electric. It is incredibly fun and it's so easy to ride. I could give the keys to Monica now and get her to ride back for 130 miles. It's as easy as a scooter to ride. The only thing for me is, as you're riding along, the accelerator, of course, right hand, and the brake, the front brake, right hand, and the rear brake's still right foot. But for me, I would put the rear brake on the left hand so it just feels a bit more balanced because on Vespas and scooters and things, front brake, rear brake, and I think it works really well. It just feels a bit more balanced because everything is going through the right side of your body. Not that it's a big issue at all, but just an observation. The charging point works absolutely brilliantly. So that was way, way more seamless than I thought it would be. Took no learning curve at all. Just pulled up, completely coincidentally, we're riding along, saw that there was an electric charging point in this pub. So just pulled in, left it here. I think it's 48 minutes to get fully charged. So maybe we'll leave it for about 35 minutes. The sound, it's brilliant. We were riding through the beautiful Cotswold villages and usually on a petrol engine, the sound would be pummeling from left to right off the close claustrophobic walls around the small little lanes and people would be looking at you. But here, you can just ride in, do a U-turn, right outside a pub garden. Not everyone's looking because there's no sound at all. You don't feel like you're annoying the locals. And Monica and I were riding along and I didn't realise at the time, but we were just talking to each other while riding. And then after about three minutes, I said to Monica, hold on, we can talk while riding. It's really, really nice. So a few things that you don't really expect, but, but I did say when I was sitting on the back and demonstrating, actually it's more comfortable than the R9T and maybe, yes, the legroom's a bit better because the pegs are a bit lower down, but Monica sat on the back and she informs me it's not a comfortable bike for a pillion. The suspension's hard, possibly even a bit overly hard actually. You do crash over the bumps a bit and the seats are hard as well. Character-wise, for the diehard Harley fans and the old school biking fans, even biking fans in general, how much of the character is lost? You don't get that beautiful sound from the exhaust. You don't get as many of the vibrations. Although actually, what I did notice is when you're stopped in traffic, it has a little heartbeat. So every three seconds or so, it's just a very, very soft da-dum, da-dum, every three seconds, which is quite nice. But of course, yeah, you don't get the character of a petrol engine with the exhaust, but that has completely gone out the window for me. When I'm riding it, it's so beautifully smooth. You can hear everything. It's a completely different way of riding and you lose none of the feeling of riding, the pure feeling of riding. And you can say, yeah, you don't get the character of an exhaust. I don't think that matters one bit. Not one time riding these past 65 miles have I missed any of the character of the exhaust note because I can get off the bike and my ears aren't throbbing from hearing the petrol engine. It's a really nice feeling. So I think the character argument almost goes completely out of the window. Plus, I love the fact that when you're riding along in the villages, you know, people just stop and look. They can't believe it. A completely silent electric bike. It's just, it's not remotely antisocial in any way. And I really like it. I'm pretty much completely sold already. I'm actually going to take this Harley Davidson back to Harley tomorrow because honestly, I've seen enough. I'm completely sold on the electric revolution. I cannot tell you how amazing this bike feels. You glide along. It's so easy to ride. You know, I was talking to the guy who did the sign over for me. When you service it, there's nothing engine related that you need to do. Of course, you check the brakes, you check the belts, but there's no oily bits that you need to check and change. It's just so beautiful riding. You hear everything. You get off the bike. You feel great because your ears aren't throbbing. I'm completely sold. That's it. 100%. Okay. That's exactly 30 minutes since we charged it. And honestly, I have no idea if this is a fast charger or not, but let's see what it's done. Okay. That's half an hour to 79%, 28 minutes done payment total. So I think that means, I think that means £1.95. It's charged me. Here we go. 24 more minutes to fill it up. So that is 82 mile range. I think we may, we may just carry on from there. Okay. This is really interesting and actually satisfying because first things first, if you charge your bike at home at night, I've heard that this tank will fill up for £1.50 if you charge it at home at £1.50, but these are much more expensive. But even these, we've now got on this, we've gained 50 miles. So 50 miles range and it's cost £2.07. So £2.07 for 50 miles range. To give you an idea, my Bonneville would cost about £5.50 for a five mile range. And this is £2.10 for a five mile range. And of course, this is much more expensive than doing it at home. Really impressed. So our home in the Southeast of London, the far Southeast of London is 111 miles. And this at 99%, it will say 99 miles is the range of a full tank. But, but I put this with about 60 miles left on the tank into green mode, which is the least sporty mode. And honestly, that's still scarily fast. So I'm just going to leave it in green mode and hope we may be able to squeeze out 111 miles, although it is motorway and I know the consumption goes down significantly, but this is going to be really tight. Okay. 100% done. Total debited from account £2.88. And I've just had it flash up now. Just cover that. I've had it flash up £2.88 to get a 70 mile range. Sign me up. Charging done. I'm 50-50 if I'm going to make it. 111 miles. The bike says 104 miles. This is going to be really interesting. Still feels weird. So we've just stopped to fill up for about a 30 mile top up because home's about 35 miles away and we stopped here. And this is, this is Eco-Tricity and actually I did see online they don't have a great write up. The fast charger we need has been broken for four weeks. So there's no fast charger. The only charger they've got is the standard charger. Plugged in the standard charger. You have to download an app first and it's charge time for this is eight and a half hours. Eight and a half hours. So we left it for about 15 minutes to see if it would charge. Didn't even get one mile. So the reality is we now have to leave here and try and find another charging point. And this, this is the downside of the charging network. A kind taxi driver told me to download ZapMax. It shows you all of the charges. So if we stop maybe somewhere around here. Epping. So we'll stop in Epping somewhere. Zoom into Epping. There we go. And it will show. So we'll go to this one which is the Bell Hotel. Fingers crossed. So we're at the second charging point now and this is a pod point and again this is another one where you have to download another app but this is seven kilowatts so this is not super fast and it only puts on about 30 miles per hour apparently of charge. So that means we'd have to wait about an hour hanging around. So this in day one shows you the rollercoaster of emotions that you have with charging. It can be brilliant if it works well but the system, the infrastructure is nowhere near good enough. Too many different things. Too many different apps taking too long to charge and too many are broken. So we're going to have to go and try and find another one. Okay. So just starting to figure it out. The place we're at now is seven kilowatts. That's the charge speed but this place we've seen with this pink funny shape here this is 150 kilowatts. This is the super fast one. So this is the one we're going to aim for now with 150 kilowatts and this little pink sign here I think this is what we need to start looking for because that's the shape of the super fast one. So this is the third electric charging spot and the man in front of us is having difficulty working it so it may be faulty but that's the third one and of course if someone's there we just have to wait. Okay. So this is the fourth place we've been to now and finally after three that we couldn't use. One because someone was charging and couldn't get it to work. He was on the phone trying to get it to work. The other was eight and a half hours to charge and the other one was also a super slow charger. So finally we found a super fast charger. You have to download the app. It's not good enough the infrastructure here at all. When you've got a range of 100 miles so you're always looking from about 40 mile range left. It's four places we've been to. If we want to move over to electrification by 2030 a mountain to climb. Seriously. But on a positive point at least we found somewhere so I'll get the app charge this up and hopefully we'll finish off the last 30 miles home. Well this is like a joke. I mean these electricity companies it's like they don't care. They don't want it to be easy. Why can't you just tap your card and you can fill up. Why is that not possible? If you can fill up with fuel like that why can't you fill up like this? So there's an app you have to download so I downloaded the app and then you have to list your model and of course Harley-Davidson isn't there so I've had to put this model as a Honda e-car. It's like a joke. It's ridiculous. Okay so here we are. I'm following these instructions. Select pod point by getting the app done that. Select connector in-app. So for one you can't change your vehicle. So there's no Harley-Davidson listed. So I just put Honda and then it says select connector in-app. Select connector in-app. So we've got about 15 miles range. This is the fourth one we've gone to and I honestly don't know how just to put some electricity in a motorbike. What's so difficult about just putting some electricity in a motorbike? This has turned into a nightmare honestly. Okay so the bike's charging. It says 56 minutes to full. I'm in the car of Monica just warming up because it's dropping in temperature but the time now is quarter to eight. It's quarter to eight now. It's got another hour charge but let's give it half an hour. So let's say we're going to get home by quarter past eight. Quarter past nine. Quarter past nine we'll get home but in the car it said we should have got home by 7 p.m. So it's an extra two and a quarter hours. Four attempts at filling up. Four attempts and we're lucky here because of course if someone else is filling up here we have to wait half an hour now for them to fill up. So it's tough. It's tough and every time you get to a filling up station you're like oh yes I can fill up my vehicle. It shouldn't be like winning the lottery every time you manage to fill up your vehicle but wait here for about half an hour. Head off home. It's about two degrees now. It's really dropping in temperature. I'd like to go home now. We ended up getting back about two and a half hours after schedule. Finally managed to charge it but let me start by wrapping this up and I'll start with the bike. Positives. Forget about being a good electric bike. This is a good bike full stop with the most beautiful power delivery I've ever felt. I forgot all about the sound of an exhaust because the power delivery is so smooth and addictive and you can hear what's around you. I actually really liked it and that surprised me. It's well made. It feels lighter than its 250 kilograms and it's an incredibly, incredibly easy bike to live with with regards to riding. There are a few negatives from my side. Just things that didn't quite work for me. Number one is the buttons. For me there are too many of them. So when you're riding along at night I about four times press the horn because you don't know where you're pressing. For me there should be way less buttons and somehow just make it easier to use this display with less buttons. I found the seats a bit too hard and the suspension probably a bit too hard as well. And for me personally I'll put the rear brake lever here as a hand lever so you've got two levers on the front. I'm not sure if that's, I guess it's possible. I don't know why they didn't. I'm sure there's a good reason but for me that would make sense. But the charging system and this is a big, big problem because we went to four charging stations and only the fourth one actually worked for the bike. And a bike can only be as good as the infrastructure so that's the reason internal combustion bikes and cars work so well because they've got a brilliant network. But it's just not good enough in the UK at the moment and that is not Harley-Davidson's fault. And the likes of Harley-Davidson, Zero and all of the likes of Teslas from the car front they should be hugely, hugely applauded because they've stuck themselves out there. They've made these electric vehicles but they need the support of infrastructure in order to be genuinely widespread. And it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation because you need the consumers to buy these electric vehicles and you need the companies and or the government to build this electric infrastructure. It's not good enough just having one semi-broken charger in the corner of a Tesco car park that takes four hours to charge one vehicle. And I know it's a good start and that's great but if we're going to in the UK be electrified by 2030 with no internal combustion engine sales then there has got to be a gigantic accelerated increase in getting out this infrastructure. It's got to be huge. So it's a brilliant bike but we're in this really, really awkward awkward transition period at the moment where we're trying to move towards electrification but there's a very, very big journey ahead of us. And that was apparent. You've seen the very best of electric ownership with the initial 60 miles on this. It was just 60 beautiful miles riding and then the first charging point worked incredibly well. It was seamless and it was a joy. If we can get it like that, I've seen the dream and it works brilliantly but we have to get the whole country to that level. It's a great start though and this Harley-Davidson is a game-changing bike and this bike will change the biking industry. I've got no doubts about it. It's done an incredibly brave first step. Well done, Harley-Davidson. Thank you so much for following me on this video. I'm sure I'll do another video about this bike probably in city riding which for me probably is where this bike will make most sense. So stay tuned. Subscribe to the channel. Give the video a like if you liked it and I'll see you in the next one.