Out riding. Too busy grinning the BrammoGrin (tm) to spend time typing!
As to how I'm doing switching to pure electric... I never want to go back to gas. In city traffic where I ride everyday, I most of all love the instant, clutchless, smooth, effortless, quiet torque off the line. It's always fun and sometimes has saved my bacon. I've posted elsewhere here about drag racing a 1000cc sport bike. Yes, this bike has performance.
As I predicted before I bought the Empulse, my brain has come to associate the new sounds of whine and howl (as the motor spools up and brakes back down) with my experience of speed, much like it learned to associate the blat of ICE exhaust notes. Unless I'm creeping along, I also find that pedestrians tend to notice the novel sound, especially under heavy regen in sport mode as I approach their presence in intersections: this is a good thing.
I usually arrive home each evening with 30 to 60% SOC remaining and love plugging into my charger which is on a timer to start after midnight when my rates go down. I love waking up each morning to a full tank and am ultra-smug in telling my car-owning friends I haven't bought gasoline since December, or 8000 miles, so far. I do enjoy stopping at gas stations every once in a while, just to empty my bladder.
After break-in the transmission got easier to shift, and I've learned to be more precise and smoother in my throttle control. I do like shifting, especially downshifting for regen braking, but I also appreciate NOT having to shift all day long in city traffic. My clutch hand used to ache at the end of the day.
I replaced the tires at 6500 miles with Pilot Road 3's and find them much more forgiving of road bumps and just as grippy in fast turns.
There's a long, steep, uphill run from the freeway toward my house that I've used as a kind of comparative test run for different bikes I've owned. When there's no traffic, and with no cross streets, and being a divided boulevard, I feel safe twisting the throttle all the way for the almost 1/4 mile run. The Empulse R can get to 80 mph, compared to my 109 hp BMW R1200R getting to 90 mph and my 500 cc Yamaha TMax getting to 70 mph. Plenty for me. This translates into my being very much at ease in fast freeway traffic, where the Empulse is also the most comfortable lane-splitting bike I've had.
I don't mind the easy DIY maintenance of the tranny oil every 3K miles, and don't miss fighting to change buried spark plugs and get the valves just right. After the BMW, I vowed I'd never go back to the dirty mess of a chain drive, but I find that using Dupont's Teflon chain lube solved the messy part and is really quite simple: I spray it on every Friday night when I come home. I scrub the chain with solvent when it looks really grungy, which is probably every couple of months. Not very time consuming and still allows me to feel "mechanical."
The only component I plan to change (after adding a loud horn and brighter lights, and revalving the rear shock) is to get a custom seat built. The stock seat is fine for a sport bike, but I've got an old skinny butt and sit, as a commuter, more inactively than a kid throwing himself back and forth in the twisties. In addition to achieving less pressure by having a more contoured contact, I'd also like to build the seat up some so I can move forward an aft instead of being shoved down into one and only one groove. While raising the seat will somewhat impact handling, it will also make my knees happier, a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
To sum up my experience: this bike is the Ultimate Street Fighter and suits my needs, with minimal customization, perfectly. And still looks purty.
There. Back to riding!
