By Troy Siahaan
Photos by: Evans Brasfield
Critics of electric motorcycles – and there are a lot of you – have made their points perfectly clear: An electric motorcycle simply doesn’t make sense. At least not yet. They don’t go far enough, and they don’t charge fast enough to make any reasonable sense to own.
A scooter, however, is a different animal entirely. Unlike your usual motorcycle that’s built to whisk you away to faraway places, scooters are urban utility vehicles through and through. Built to zip around metropolitan areas quickly and with ease, scooters are all about short jaunts, running errands, and being practical alternatives to cars or standard motorcycles. This, friends, is where an electric scooter makes a ton of sense. EVs were made for this kind of thing. BMW’s CE 04, specifically, makes a strong case for itself in this very specific environment (except for one point, which we’ll save for the end).
Full disclosure; I’m writing this review after having the CE 04 in my possession for about a week, which is not nearly enough time to know every aspect of what it’s like to live with such a niche vehicle like this. A comprehensive review this is not, but it does give a taste. That said, my use case was perfect for the CE 04 (and any EV and/or scooter). I needed an around-town go-getter for making quick trips, running errands, getting a bite to eat, or going to the gym. All of these things are a 10-mile round trip, door-to-door. Max. My car or motorcycle has hardly warmed up by the time the trip is over. The CE 04 was made for this, and I ran around town for a week, multiple times. Additionally, I only plugged it in to my home 110v wall outlet at the end (with 30% charge still showing) just to see what that was like.
The CE 04 comes standard with three riding modes: Eco, Rain, and Road. Our tester came with the optional $500 Comfort Package which, among other things, includes a heated seat and a Dynamic riding mode. You can probably guess what kind of power delivery the four modes delivered, but the real difference is the regenerative braking. Eco and Dynamic modes both slow the scoot down with a fierceness when you let off the throttle. Road and Rain are somewhere in the middle and far less aggressive.
This matters because there is a small learning curve that comes with the CE 04, but if you’re familiar with BMWs, at least the user interface will be very familiar since the buttons and scroll wheel on the left bar are common amongst BMW’s other motorcycles. Me being me, I kept it in Dynamic mode 90% of the time, which gave me confidence that I could leap off the line with a bang and easily leave cars behind when the lights turned green. Conversely, if the light was red ahead and I timed it just right, I could let off the throttle and let the regenerative braking literally bring me to a stop without ever touching the brakes.
No discussion about an EV is complete without talking about charging. As mentioned at the top of the review, my specific use case for the CE 04 was exactly within the capabilities of an electric. Starting at 100%, a full week of short trips, including short jaunts on the freeway – where the BMW would routinely accelerate to exactly 79 mph and stay there unless in a draft, then it would hit 80 mph – left me with 30% by the end of it. Surely the regenerative braking around town helped restore some of that juice, too. I could have easily plugged it into my 110v wall outlet at the end of each day but didn’t see the need.
BMW claims it’ll go 80 miles on a full charge, but as we know with EVs, mileage claims vary wildly depending on how heavy your right hand is and how much highway cruising is involved. The onboard battery level indicator does seem to be extremely pessimistic – probably to scare its rider to charge long before it truly needs to. That said, BMW claims a completely drained battery will be back at 100% in a little over four hours. The optional quick charger will slice that to under two hours. Considering how rare it is for someone to truly ride an EV down to absolute zero each ride, charging from 20%-80% takes 45 minutes with the quick charger, but is still a matter of hours with a standard outlet.