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They became popular in quite a different way in UK:
True, but those are different products than proper motorcycles although they are creeping up in terms of power/speed. The regulatory structure (US focus here) has a huge gap for such "ebikes". In the good old days, you could ride a 49.9 cc scooter without a motorcycle license on the road (not paths), but after that there was a pretty big power jump to proper motorcycles. Up to 50cc gets you a top speed around 25 mph and very slow acceleration. Now we have "ebikes" that are significantly faster, in particular acceleration but also top speed, that are effectively completely unregulated. And unlike gas scooters, they use bike/pedestrian infrastructure and not just streets/roads. It's frankly a mess. We need to allocate road space from cars to bikes/"ebikes" and encourage these vehicles (and licensing/training/safety) but I fear many areas just don't want to deal with it.
We already have this in California too. Electric bicycles can go 20 mph without pedaling, or up to 28 mph if the person is pedaling.
I think many electric motorcycles are pretty bad. 5 kwh battery and 4 hours charge time? Sounds like 2010 to me.
There are better models, but they're quite expensive in comparison.
In the US, the regular wall outlet supply is at 110V. Drawing about 12A from that outlet, the power comes to about 1.25kW which corresponds to a charge time of 4 hours. I live in India and drive a electric scooter/moped. It has a 3 kWh usable battery capacity and range of 65 miles. My average daily usage is 15 miles and once in 2 days, I am able to plug in my vehicle to charge from ~35% - ~75% using a 650W charger. It takes only around 2 hours. The charging time is never a hinderance
They're well suited for commuting, but for larger distances, your're out of luck if the battery is empty after an hour or so.
They're well suited for commuting
You have hit the nail on the head. The group of people described in the last paragraph of the article should be the target audience for now. Electric motorcycles, for now, are utilitarian vehicles meant to be used within a city. They are not meant for the long haul pleasure drives.
California is big and spread out. As the article indicates motorcycles are less than 0.5% of vehicle miles. And most motorcycle miles here are for pleasure, not for commuting. It’s very dangerous to ride a motorcycle on the highway with all the distracted drivers and huge vehicles with poor visibility. That’s why most motorcycle use is big groups of loud motorcycles - for safety and fun.
To be successful here, an electric motorcycle needs to be annoyingly loud, and have a range of 200 miles, with fast charging. And nobody is making that right now.
Perhaps nobody should be making an electric motorcycle for this use case. At such low quantities, maybe it makes sense to have ICE vehicles for the pleasure aspect.
Wasn't there just an article saying EV motorocycle manfucturers were going out of business?