Officers with the Scotts Valley Police Department will be rolling a little less raucously in 2011 after the department assumed ownership in early December of a brand new electric motorcycle. The machine, the first zero-emissions bike to serve a California police department, is capable of 50-mile trips, freeway speeds, instant acceleration and perfectly soundless patrols of the streets.
Its name is the Zero DS, and it’s a locally grown product made by Zero Motorcycles, a company born and raised in Scotts Valley (soon to be relocating to Santa Cruz). Already officers with the Scotts Valley department are using their new bike on routine patrols, and information officer Lt. John Hohmann expects the Zero DS to improve his department’s capacity to stay active and “patrol more places, more often.” The bike’s lightweight frame and automatic shifting make for easy maneuvering, and Hohmann foresees the Zero DS’s upright seating position and noiseless motor being sharp advantages for officers navigating traffic while simultaneously apprehending the lawless of Scotts Valley—in part, no doubt, by sneaking up on the nefarious criminals and catching them unawares. Lt. Hohmann also calls the bike “a great cost-effective solution for small departments.”
Cops aren’t the only two-wheelers riding a Zero DS. The bike, which costs just shy of $10,000, was first released to the public last March. According to Zero spokesman John Ewert, “thousands of happy customers” are riding them in lands as distant as Sweden and Australia.
Recharging the bike’s battery requires four hours and a standard 110-volt outlet, and though the bike has no gas tank or direct dependence on fossil fuels, it brings along some logistical baggage of its own: its top speed is just 67 miles per hour. It is permitted for freeway use, but with a range of only 50 miles before the batteries bonk, the Zero DS will not likely move much beyond the Highway 17 corridor. That would leave those hair-raising freeway pursuits we see on TV to the department’s noisier motorcycles and black-and-white patrol cars—the sort designed last century.
