The LiveWire: Harley-Davidson’s whisper-quiet electric bike

It’ll hit 100km/h in three seconds flat — while hardly making a sound. Meet the Marcel Marceau of Harley-Davidsons.

Oddity: the LiveWire

I recently caught Covid and, while it failed to either kill me or make me stronger, it was a unique experience because it’s the only thing I’ve been through that was less enjoyable than a colonoscopy. In fact, I think I’d even rather have a second vasectomy than catch the dreaded virus again.

One of my many fleeting and fatalistic concerns while lying in bed, wrestling with the invisible pangolin on my chest, was that I might lose my senses of taste and smell (fortunately the constant scent of my own fear was always with me). I think this may have alarmed me even more than usual because I’d recently been riding Harley-Davidson’s de-branding exercise, the LiveWire electric bike.

Other than the man I recently saw wearing a high-vis Harley-Davidson vest – a piece of clothing so at war with itself that I feared it might tear a hole in the space-time continuum – there can surely be nothing as bizarre as an entirely silent motorbike. And not just any bike, but a brand defined almost entirely by the stupidly loud and unnecessary noises they usually make. A silent Harley-Davidson is a lobster that tastes like a Filet-O-Fish, a Billy Connolly show with ear plugs in, parachuting without leaving the ground, or gazing at the Grand Canyon blindfolded.

On the road

It’s not just weird, it’s wrong, and that’s only the start of the LiveWire’s problems. Electric cars require very large batteries to go any kind of distance; they can be hidden away under the vehicle’s floor, but in the Harley’s case there’s no room, so you only get a claimed range of 235km (more like 180km in the real world), which is obviously not enough to go for that long weekend ride. You probably wouldn’t take it, in any case, because you’d be too afraid of seeing another Harley owner who would mock you with a Marcel Marceau routine.

The bike corners well

It should come as no surprise to learn that Harley-Davidson is splintering the LiveWire away from its core business as a separate, EV-only brand. For now, the one I rode still has “Harley-Davidson” written on the bit that looks like a fuel tank but isn’t. I ran the battery down to 50 per cent, and when I plugged it into my home wallbox charger (which is faster and more powerful than just a wall socket), I was told it would take six hours to fill it up again. Apparently you can get to 80 per cent of charge in just 40 minutes at a fast-charging station. I have heard tell that the range and the silence are not the two things putting most people off buying a LiveWire, however, which seems quite incredible until you hear the price, which is the biggest problem of all, at $49,995.

Yes, electric cars are expensive too – and the fact is that, at some stage, noisy, petrol-burning motorcycles are going to disappear and enthusiasts will all have to ride something like this, so it’s important to evaluate the LiveWire in the context of what will be instead of what I used to love.

But first, I thought I’d ask a proper enthusiast, a luridly colourful friend of mine who is a former motorcycle outlaw and the author of a hilarious book called My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me, Boris Mihailovic.

It looks like a fuel tank, but isn’t

He became frothingly enraged at the very mention of the LiveWire, described it as “an appliance, not a motorcycle” and pointed out that the lack of organic feel and vibration that you get through a proper bike, which connects you to the very heart of the combustion engine between your legs, is unforgivable. “Ultimately it is one of the most soulless, unengaging, and uninteresting motorcycles I have ever ridden,” he concluded before swearing a lot.

The thing is, I very rarely ride motorcycles at all, so once I’d attempted to get used to all the things that were missing, I did find myself being won over by all the good stuff still inherent in the LiveWire. It accelerates like a Ferrari, for a start, with all of its 116Nm of torque instantly available at a snap of your wrist and the ability to silently pounce on 100km/h in three seconds flat.

Similarly, it can stop in no distance at all, change direction with the slightest input and plaster a grin across your face as you ponder the sheer naked madness of motorcycling in general.

While it’s not as sharp as a Japanese sports bike, it is still vastly more enjoyable to corner at speed than any car, and it allows you to navigate a city as if traffic doesn’t exist at all.

I did deeply miss changing gears, which is so much more fun on a bike than it is in even a manual car. In an electric-motorcycle future, the inability to blip the throttle on down changes and produce sexy sounds, even when slowing down, will be much mourned.

As motoring experiences go, riding the LiveWire wasn’t as bad as Covid, but it was certainly as memorable. And you really do have to take your hat, or your helmet, off to Harley for being bold enough to even try to sell it. As electric motorcycles go, it’s probably quite good, but frankly I think all scooters and mopeds should go electric first, because they only make puny, horrible noises anyway.

Harley-Davidson LiveWire

ENGINE: Three-phase electric motor (78kW/116Nm)

TRANSMISSION: Single-speed, belt driven, rear-wheel drive

PRICE: $49,995

STARS: 3 out of 5