The Current: Seeing the Light

Seeing the Light: Vintage Motorcycling on Electric’s Horizon

The steady drone of summer rain on the Sprinter van roof was not soothing. An hour earlier, race officials at Mid-Ohio had called us off the starting line as an approaching storm suddenly cascaded into a thunderous downpour. The longer this weather went on, the less likely we were to get back on-track. So I laid on the van floor… and waited.

Conditions did finally clear and it was soon time to re-light the fire inside of the 1974 Maico 250 GP. Unbeknownst until that moment, water ingress behind the flywheel cover – despite generous blobs of silicone sealant – was causing electrical cut-outs at high RPMs. No amount of quick-thinking fixes were making matters better as the minutes until my second moto ticked away. The gate dropped into deep mud while I was still fiddling in the pits and just like that, in a disappointing decrescendo, my race day was over before it even began.

With a hole already burnt in my pocket, an internal debate began during the long road back home. What’s the cost of commitment to the cause of this whole “vintage” thing? On one side of the scale, 40,000 other people who attended the American Motorcyclist Association’s annual Vintage Motorcycle Days rally that year seemed to signal an occasional mechanical failure as being quite alright. To be expected, in fact – maybe even a personal growth opportunity! But that cold gray storm front still clouded my mind, and got me thinking about the supposed dark side on our hobby’s horizon.

‘It’s Just Nuts and Bolts’

I was not around for Maico’s short-travel glory days atop natural terrain motocross tracks. I was just a kid watching from the sidelines when those same motorcycles turned 20 years old and were competing in vintage events. When it was my turn to try riding a dozen years later, it seemed important to first grasp the basics of mechanical functionality. That’s because just getting these things up the driveway under their own power was often left to a coin flip. “It’s just nuts and bolts,” one former Maico racer and European car mechanic offered as he tried to assuage my mechanical hesitancy. Yeah, easy for him to say.

Plain old motorcycles – not the coveted classic and collectible ones – are practical purchases that can be had for comparatively less than more recent models, although those are infinitely more reliable. Their faults can almost always be deduced at home through assessments of spark, compression or fuel, which makes them great for learning. That education, however, is often left to one’s natural inclinations. Either the new rider has the curiosity and support systems to dig a little deeper, or will farm out the work when something goes sideways so they can just get back to riding.

As time wore on and my own bag of tricks to suss out why the 1982 Yamaha XZ550 “Vision” street bike wouldn’t start this time around, weary exasperation took a toll on my vintage values. A more recent attempt to better understand where the classic bike crowd came from, how we all got here, and where the hobby might be headed resulted in a three-year book-publishing journey. The unwritten bit left on the cutting room floor was this: the more I ran out of sheer talent to troubleshoot big broken jobs, the more appealing the mere idea of electric bikes started to look.

Different Strokes

Twenty years ago, my elders bent an olive branch off the shade tree: shadow them now, or pay somebody else later. Over timing belts and under jacked-up hand-me-down cars, the question that reverberated in my head was this: “Could I have done the job on my own?” When the answer was “no chance” with a gallows humor laugh at the sheer thought of it, the titular twilight in my book became two-fold: an aging-out population of motorcyclists hailing from the 1970s “bike boom” glory days and the impending replacement of their snarling two-strokes with snappy cordless power drills on wheels.

I fear painting with too broad of a brush here, but the ongoing inter-generational mass media-hyped conflict between Baby Boomers and their Millennial/Gen Z heirs is also playing out in the motorcycling world. Whereas the former looked to print magazines and public television for advice from “This Old House” or “MotorWeek” – and then executed some of those tasks with rolled-up sleeves – the latter has been overcome by debt and disillusion. I posit that it’s the loss of seeing-is-believing functionality in this possibly purposely hidden digital age, combined with real wants for an easy escape instead of yet another demanding project, that has helped EV cut inroads. It’s not an outright rejection of motorcycling’s established values, but the big differences do create friction between these camps.

The thing is, electric vehicles break, too. Social media groups dedicated to the Vargs and Storm Bees of the world are loaded with many familiar troubleshooting questions. The difference here is that the power plant is so far removed from a cam chain that ate the insides of the motor or an out-of-round bore skillfully measured in increments thinner than a strand of human hair. The stakes are high; the stress of repair higher yet. Where can the collective go from here?

A question recently posed on several electric motorcycle forums was this: Did maintenance and recurring repairs drive you away from internal combustion? Their responses are both familiar and telling.

• “I never liked working on motorcycles. I fix my own car and can spend days at a time working on an airplane, but with motorcycles I just want it to turn on and off without having to think about it.”
• “My Zero shares the garage with a Triumph Scrambler 900, and I love them both, but honestly, only the Zero gets ridden these days as it’s just so much more practical. But living a life with a sense of nostalgia and purpose is good for the soul. Shifting gears, listening to vinyl, manual espresso coffee; there is still something noble and almost romantic about doing things the hard way.”
• “I bought an EV to commute to work on – a job it’s great at. The lack of maintenance is good, as it lets me spend time on my other bikes that need more time spent on them.”
• “Haven’t needed gas in nearly 10 years, will not be going back until I inherit my dad’s motorcycle, and then that will likely sit for a very long time.”

A Deal with the Gods

Electric two-wheel proliferation isn’t a prediction – it’s already plain to see. City and suburban streets across the U.S. are loaded with “micro-mobility” devices that are showing people – some of them quite young and early on in their riding careers – what the wind in their ears sounds like at 20mph. If just enough of these curious onlookers consider objectively “cooler” full-size EV bikes, there’s a chance to spark the second “bike boom” in the same vein as the early 1970s market explosion. Hell, even the vintage races I attend are now dotted with Talarias and Surrons (with the latter selling some 120,000 units globally between 2017 and 2023, per Motocross Action Magazine) as pit bike transportation.

According to May 2026 news reports around Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) data, motorcycle and scooter sales rose about four percent for Q1 year-over-year. This was “an encouraging sign that consumer demand remains strong,” the MIC president and CEO told Motorcycle and Powersports News. Additional research from electric mobility manufacturer CEMOTO saw 2026 as a “high-opportunity period for electric bike exports” where the North American market houses a “fast-growing, lifestyle and performance-oriented” consumer.

This is the critical moment of plurality that U.S. motorcycling hasn’t seen in 50 years. Those UJMs and primitive road-going dual-sports of yesteryear – part of the three million motorcycles registered in the U.S. in 1972, up from 500,000 in 1957 – have been replaced by cheap electric hacks that’ll help claw back some of the ground lost long ago. The end result is the same: surging numbers of people on two wheels who are learning to enjoy the basic facts around the acts of riding, repairing, racing and repeating. In the end, vintage and everything the sector celebrates is a “moving target.” The definition adjusts depending on your age, the executive director of America’s largest vintage racing league told me earlier this year, but it isn’t going away.

Of course there will always be old bikes, but it’s the patience and skill to tinker with them that needs fostering right now. If the next generations have a mentor, as I did, the amount of knowledge they can soak up is almost overwhelming. My hope is that we split the difference with battery power so these emerging motorcyclists can at least get some seat time and keep the clunker for those days when you’d like to stretch out your skills in the garage. Moreover, if something as simple as summer rain could sideline that brute-force Maico, the importance of do-it-yourself dexterity isn’t going anywhere as we dive ever deeper into the electric age.

True, you could just buy something new and skip the either/or catastrophic comparison I just blew 1,500 words on. Still, the benefits of a running start from the bottom of the hill are such that you’ll learn so much more on the way to reaping the rewards at the top. Just don’t ask Sisyphus about this same struggle, though. He’s still a bit jaded from all those huffing-and-puffing pop starts up the driveway.