Electric motorcycles tend to be either extremely capable and unforgivably expensive, or affordable and really closer to scooter territory. The Ox Patagonia, coming out of Madrid, aims to find an attractive middle ground: a usable electric adventure experience for less than US$7200.
It's built on the Spanish company's first model, the Ox One cafe racer, and shares most of that $5,400 bike's performance platform. The 11-kW peak, 6-kW nominal (15-hp peak, 8-hp continuous), 50-Nm (37-lb-ft) hub motor, a fairly sedate unit on paper that allows a highway-friendly 110 km/h (68 mph) top speed. The removable battery pack, which weighs 22 kg (48.5 lb) and promises a 100-km (62-mile) range – although that doesn't seem to be a WLTP tested figure, so who knows?
We're unsure of the battery capacity, too; Ox lists the pack as 72 V, 60 A. If that's supposed to be Ah, then the pack holds 4.32 kWh, which seems roughly in the ballpark for the quoted range. Either way, it's either odd for an EV company to make that mistake, or odd for them to quote current rather than capacity.
Also from the Ox One come the double-cradle frame and flat bench seat for two, the digital dash and the small storage compartment under the "tank," complete with USB charger. Likewise the "Elisa" system, which gives the bike GPS navigation, a bunch of performance stats, phone app functionality and the ability to jiggle its handlebars when traffic is close by, as a kind of blind spot warning.
Where the One weighs in at just 150 kg (331 lb), though, the Patagonia gains some 10 kg (22 lb). It gets 50 mm (2 in) taller thanks to longer-travel suspension and a 19-inch spoked front rim. It gets a dinky little screen around the LED headlight, a dinky little bashplate, a dinky set of 14-liter leather saddlebags and some crash bars on the sides of the "tank," that ... well, they look a tad on the dinky side.
The Patagonia also gets its own set of apparently Ox-branded chunky dual sport tires to complete the ADV look and inspire misty-eyed daydreams about epic Congo-conquering cross-continental escapades. Now look, nobody's going to get much serious adventuring done on a bike with a 100-km range and a five-hour wall socket charge time, with no fast-charge capability.
If you live close to some trails, you might get this thing around a few of them on its bargain-bin dual-shock suspension before the battery calls time. Really, of course, this is an adventure bike in the same sense that most SUVs are four-wheel-drives: it kinda looks the part, but it's really most likely to get used helping people attempt to look windswept and interesting as they commute to work.
At €6,900 (US$7,190), though, perhaps there's a niche for it. There's no doubt in my mind that the Zero FX, for example, is a better performer, but that starts at $9,795 with a (probably) smaller battery and a shorter range. Ox is doing everything it can to keep its bikes accessible, and that's a good thing. Still, Patagonia deliveries won't start until September, and it doesn't seem Ox has started delivering the One yet. So it's probably worth waiting to see what this thing looks like in the real world before you slap any cash down.
Source: Ox Motorcycles
