Electric Motorcycle Chargers Explained
Most of the bikes we stock here at AEMC have Type 1, slow charging from a run of the mill wall plug. Some are able to use AC fast charging which is type 2 and also some of them are able to type 3, DC fast charging.
If you’re charging from a standard wall outlet, and have a high battery capacity bike, you’re looking at 8 to 9 hours to get a full charge.
At the AEMC shop we have two three-phase AC fast chargers, and these bad boys can actually charge up to 22 kilowatts per-hour depending on the connection to the grid. We actually share a connection with other industrial buildings in our complex, which means that we can’t get the full power out of this. But most of our bikes won’t allow you to charge at 22 kilowatts anyway, so we can usually get the Zero electric motorcycles up to 12 or 14 kilowatts, a Tesla model S for example has a battery pack between 80 and 100 kW/h.
If you’re using an AC fast charger at full power you can get that car charged in about four hours, verses about 40 hours from a standard wall plug.
The Zero motorcycles that we have in stock like the SR/F and SR/S Premium are built with an additional six kW charge-tank, which means that they can automatically charge at least 6 kW per hour. With the additional charge tank which draws power from our level 2 AC charging station, you can charge the whole bike in about an hour. That’s adding 200 kilometers driving range to your bike per hour.
Some of our top performing electric motorcycles like the Energica’s have DC fast charging as standard. This allows them to charge up to 25kW per hour. We don’t have DC fast charging on site. Installing a DC fast charger requires a direct connection to a power grid, we don’t have that infrastructure yet. But these are usually the fast charging stations you will find available in public.
We do have access to DC fast charges about 10 minutes away where we can get bikes like the Energica’s fully charged in 20 to 40 minutes.
Want some more info about charging? We have articles on how to use solar power to charge your electric vehicle and FAQs on electric motorcycle charging.