Dear Zero

I’m convinced that giving that recently announced +10% charge speed feature away for free to your customers will render you more profit than having it listed as a paid option will ever do.

I have no numbers to back this up, I know quite unusual for me. But hey, I never expected Zero motorcycles to have a reverse either. Let me try to explain anyway.

I can totally understand how on dash navigation should (or rather could) be unlocked by another payment. Development cost and license fees are involved here. I also think people that rather not use their phone for instructions will happily pay for this useful upgrade. Well done 👍 (yes open letters can have emoji).

For the reverse I won’t question the upgrade. I personally think at the price point these bikes sell and the limited effort involved from the manufacturer you could just let them have it. But then I do see how this would sell well to current and future owners. So yes I don’t like but do understand that move 😌.

But then the extra charge speed… Do you really expect people to pay for removing a limit that is currently put in place for whatever reason? And then I’m not even talking about that very limited gain of 10% at best.

For a top of the line premium bike with charge tank that will gain you around… 6 minutes over a total charge time of around 1 hour. Most people will benefit from this on a standard or a premium config so by 12 minutes over 2 hours or 24 minutes over 4 hours. 24 minutes may look promising but not on a total charge time of 240 minutes.

The problem is that you as a company shouldn’t have put in that restriction in the first place. Or if it is required, maybe for protecting longetivity of components, then it should stay in place 🤔.

If the artificial charge speed limit is not needed (which the upgrade suggests) I recommend releasing this feature as a free firmware upgrade. If at all possible including some more bug fixes. And then you could even do this silently and I promise you people will notice and be all over it on the Internet. This is basically free publicity.

Resulting in more customers impressed by not only the awesome ride quality (like I was) but now also by firmware updates and sheer generosity of Zero Motorcycles as a company (like I wasn’t). Possibly forgetting about the buggy updates in the past, dealer mishaps or hardware related issues (I won’t).

What you then get are customers that would happily recommend a Zero to anyone asking at their next charge stop. Something no campaign will ever get you. And don’t forget this was free to begin with. Plus I don’t think that option will sell anyway.

Greetings from a fellow Zero SRF owner 👋