Stop Pretending Kids Don’t Ride Motorcycles, EV Dirt Bikes Are Huge

Over the weekend, I had two very different realities presented to me. The first was a story by a prominent motorcycling outlet that decried the death of motorcycle ridership in the youth. It’s a story I’ve read and heard countless times before, as it’s every generation’s favorite thing to do in calling out how “the youths are killing XY and Z.” 

And after reading it, I sighed, closed the tab, and took my children to this nature and conservation area near Park City, Utah. Why spend more time concerning myself with folks’ idiotic grudges against the younger generations when I can just hang out with my kids? But the funniest thing happened while we were leaving the place, and I had to share this experience with you, as well as with everyone else calling out “This worrying trend of declining motorcycle riders!” 

There’s a small courtyard just outside this place, and there’s a bike ring-road that goes around the preserver’s acreage. In total, there are a couple miles of paved and unpaved trails. And as my kids played on the rocks, jumping off and having a blast, four tweens and teens came hauling ass into the area on Sur-Rons or whatever make they were. All had dirt bike helmets, all left in near-silent wheelies. 

This is a scene I’ve seen play out countless times in my little hamlet. It’s a scene I’ve witnessed firsthand on the myriad of trails around my house. It’s a scene that plays out each and every single day around this country. And it’s a scene that flies in the face of every motorcycle pundit’s belief that motorcycling is dying. 

It’s not. But it is time for the industry to start paying more attention to these motorcycles, start calling them motorcycles, and start counting them as motorcycles in sales data. Enough is enough. 

I do want to say, I don’t blame the motorcycling media for having this blind spot. The data to support my anecdotes and conclusions is hard to come by unless you’re asking these companies for their sales data. And for many of these folks, traditional motorcycles (i.e. gas from legacy OEMs) is all they know. Likewise, for a long time, Sur-Ron and Sur-Ron-like dirt bikes have been less than stellar in their build quality and not really presented to the motorcycling media as real motorcycles. 

That’s largely due to how local laws and import laws are structured and written, but still, I don’t necessarily blame them for not seeing the forest for the trees. At least, not up until more recent years when these electric motorcycles took off and captured the world by storm. It’s high time they start paying attention, and really, it was high time three years ago. 

We now have lightweight electric dirt bikes from Sur-Ron, Talaria, Niu, Rawrr, and Beta, along with EV dirtbikes from legacy OEMS, and a handful of new platforms from folks like Zero (coming soon) and Dust. But unlike gas dirt bikes, they’re targeting a youth who’s both hungry to ride, but not overly eager to care about maintenance, which is benefiting their parents, too, as they don’t have to worry about gas, oil, or replacing the heads every hundred hours or whatever.

It’s also beneficial to parents and neighborhoods as there’s no noise pollution. 

HOAs, as I’m sure you know, suck the fun out of literally everything. And the folks who make up their boards will call the police on an off-center blade of grass. Suffice it to say, for a period there, it was legitimately almost impossible for kids to ride dirt bikes around their own neighborhoods without pissing off the HOA and them calling the police. EVs, however, changed that. To a degree. 

They still hate children having fun. 

But the advent of these electric motorcycles has allowed kids to once again roam neighborhoods on motorcycles without the fear of a two-stroke’s braap, annoying Karl who’s on the neighborhood watch and has way too much time on his hands. Get a job, Karl. They’re the ultimate backyard play thing, just as two- and four-strokes were to my generation and the generations before me. It’s just different now, and that’s OK. 

So, again, it’s time to stop saying motorcycling is dying. I implore you all to start reporting on sales figures of these EV dirt bike manufacturers, and I hope you see that everything is, in fact, OK. So chill out, Chicken Little.