183 electric motorcycles went into police service at Lalbazar this week. Every report listed the sirens. None of them asked where the bikes charge.
Ultraviolette handed 183 X-47 Skyforce electric motorcycles to Kolkata Police at Lalbazar this week, and by evening the country’s motoring press had printed the same list. Siren and hooter. Public-address system, extra LED blinkers, walkie-talkie and mic holders, panniers, the lot wired into the bike’s electronics rather than bolted on afterwards. It is a genuinely good list and I have no quarrel with it. Not one report asked where 183 electric motorcycles are going to charge.
Allow me to explain why that is the only question worth asking. A patrol bike gets the cruellest duty cycle we hand to any two-wheeler. It is not a commute. It is a machine asked to stand still, loudly, for a living – beacons going and the PA live at a barricade, then a short shove through traffic, then standing again. No fixed route, no predictable end of shift, no evening on a charger at home, because the bike belongs to a roster and not to a rider. Which is exactly the pattern that no test cycle has ever measured.
Brutal.
The figure everyone reprinted is 211km, IDC, and IDC is a laboratory. Ultraviolette’s own site lists the X-47 at 211km and 323km across two range options, so the fleet has been quoted on the smaller of the two. That is my reading, not their statement. I have had an Ather 450X for a week and a Simple One for a Bengaluru afternoon, and in both cases the sticker number and the honest number were far, far apart. Scooters, mind you, and I am not going to pretend that makes me an authority on a 10.3kWh motorcycle.
And yet, look at the size of it. Spain’s Mossos d’Esquadra runs 25 Zero DSR/X machines, described last year as the largest police fleet of its kind in Europe. Kolkata has taken 183 in one go. Ultraviolette’s best retail month was 694 motorcycles in July, up 406 per cent on the year before, which makes this one order about a quarter of its record month, at a company that told the market in August its priority was Europe. That is not a photo opportunity, right? That is a business quietly changing shape.
To be fair to them, and I want to be, a fleet is the best service situation an electric manufacturer could ask for. One city, one force, 183 identical machines, one depot. Spares get stocked because the volume justifies it, and chargers get installed because somebody signed for them. That is a spookily good position to be in, and Narayan Subramaniam is right to want it: the motorcycle, he says, “was developed as a tactical machine for police forces and could be adapted to different law-enforcement requirements.”
We at SBW have been hearing what X-47 buyers are saying, and their complaints are not about the motorcycle at all. They are about waiting. Delivery dates that slide by months. A bike parked at a service point past a fortnight. Small numbers, and I would not build a reliability case on them. But supply and after-sales are precisely the two things a 183-bike fleet leans on hardest, and Ultraviolette has never carried a load of this shape before.
So what would change my mind? Numbers from the force after one monsoon. Not IDC and not a press note – kilometres per shift, hours on charge, bikes off the road. Ultraviolette’s own website does not list a Skyforce variant yet, which tells you how new this is.
Put 183 of anything into police work and within a year it tells you the truth about itself. I would very much like somebody to publish that.
