ONYX RCR 80V review: A 75mph electric moto with pedals, because laws exist

ONYX sells the RCR 80V as a bridge between the ebike and motorcycle worlds, shipping with pedals and a street-legal ebike motor that converts to a 21,000-watt electric motorcycle capable of 75 mph (120 km/h) at the snip of a wire.I have a bit of history on two wheels, mostly sport bikes. I've put many thousands of street miles on things like a Yamaha YZF600R and Honda CBR-954RR, then eventually gave up street riding almost entirely for track days and racing on an R6. I've also owned several electric bicycles, which I've always enjoyed for the completely different experience they offer, especially when you can choose between getting some exercise and just letting electrons do all the work.So when I got the opportunity to ride and finish the review of an ONYX RCR 80V that had been left unfinished by my recently deceased brother, best friend and star New Atlas writer, Joe Salas, I was in. To be clear from the beginning, Joe did not die riding this bike. He died in a separate scooter crash before he was able to finish reviewing the ONYX, which is how I ended up here finishing the job for him.I did, however, make sure I had a full-face motorcycle helmet and something on my feet other than flip-flops. Joe, a guy who spent a good portion of his adult life riding motorcycles at very high speeds, ultimately managed to die falling off something with considerably less performance than this. I figured the universe had already made its joke and didn't need me helping with a sequel. Besides, everybody knows that if your shoes come off in an accident, you die. That's basic physics. Joe's flip-flops both flew an impressive distance in his final moments, according to the police chalk marks still visible on the road. He'd be proud.Joe had been riding this RCR shortly before he died, and it was one he specifically wanted his "wifey" Brianna to spend some time on as well. That makes this particular review bike one of those objects that's become much more important than the sum of its parts.Full disclosure: ONYX has also been exceptionally decent to Joe's family since his death, in ways that deserve recognition – but that also had absolutely no influence over the objectivity of this review or my willingness to call parts of the brand's bike stupid.And there are definitely some stupid parts. A beautifully angular bellyKevin Fanady / New Atlas First, what the hell is it?Pulling the RCR 80V out of the garage for the first time, I couldn't decide if I was looking at an electric cafe racer or a bicycle that had been sentenced to 20 years of hard labor and beefed itself up in the prison gym. It's a genuinely good-looking machine. Long flat seat, motorcycle wheels and tires, proper suspension, big headlight, signals, mirrors, a big metallic body covering the battery and electronics. It has a slightly retro cafe-racer silhouette mixed with the geometric styling of something that escaped from a Tesla design meeting.Then you look down... Pedals.Not little decorative pegs shaped like pedals. Actual bicycle pedals, complete with cranks, chain and sprocket. They're hanging underneath this 150-pound-ish machine like somebody got 98% through designing an electric motorcycle and then a lawyer burst through the door shouting, "WAIT!"That description turns out to be fairly close to the design philosophy. New Atlas MD Loz Blain sat down with ONYX founder and Chief Design Officer Tim Seward in the company’s Los Angeles showroom, and Seward told us he'd originally spotted a hole between conventional ebikes and full-sized electric motorcycles back in 2017.Seward wanted something small, light, electric and easy to live with, the sort of thing you could stick in an elevator and take into an apartment rather than leave outside, but capable enough that it didn't feel like a toy. The new 80V, he says, is essentially the bike he wanted to build from the beginning but didn't have the money or production resources to create at the time.In motorcycle terms, it follows the same basic philosophy that made bikes like the old Yamaha RD350 so much fun: keep the thing small and light, then give it considerably more performance than anyone looking at it would reasonably expect. Nobody needed a little two-stroke street bike that could spend its afternoon embarrassing motorcycles twice its size, either. That was rather the point.At one point during the interview, even Seward stopped dancing around the obvious and said it himself: "It's an electric motorbike, right?"Yes. Yes it is. In what world is an ebike this phat?Loz Blain / New Atlas We'll get back to those pedals. First I had to figure out how to turn the damn thing on.I don't like reading instruction manuals. I realize this is an objectively bad personality trait for somebody reviewing technology, but reading the manual before touching anything removes the important exploratory phase where you press buttons without understanding the consequences.The RCR presents you with quite a few buttons. Naturally, I began pressing all of them. Nothing. More buttons. Nothing. Then a very loud horn. Progress.Loz, who is also a close friend of Joe's, and who'd flown over from Australia, stood there watching me continue this process for several minutes with the bemused expression of somebody observing a chimp trying to operate an ATM. Eventually he explained that the RCR doesn't have an ignition key in the conventional sense. There's a wireless alarm-style key fob. You press unlock once, then press the lightning-bolt button twice, and after a few seconds the bike chirps and comes alive.The chirp sounds exactly like one of those aftermarket car alarms from the 1990s. I fully expected a robotic voice to announce "VIPER DISARMED" before the Limp Bizkit CD started playing.It turns out Joe and Bri had a similar experience when the bike first arrived. The RCR also arrives needing some actual assembly, including the front wheel, pedals and display. Joe had Bri do that work herself because the two of them had never really done a motorcycle project together before and he wanted her to learn it.So her introduction to motorcycling was less "here are the keys" and more "here's the front wheel, some tools and a motorcycle that needs some puttin’ together." By the time it was actually ready to ride, she'd already had the kind of hands-on introduction most people only get after buying their first used bike and discovering the previous owner believed torque specs were a government conspiracy.Bri's take: "Like Kevin, we couldn't work out how to turn it on, even after watching the videos on the ONYX website. Turns out in our case though, the battery was disconnected."Once the display finally came on, the bike was still in Park mode. Another button press changes that to Ready, which arms the throttle. At that point I could toggle between Eco and Normal, while Sport and Hyper were visibly sitting farther down the menu like the two options on a restaurant menu with a little skull next to them. I figured we'd get to those later. That chain is direct drive, single-speed, zero pedal assist... Making it quite possibly the least useful set of pedals ever fitted to an ebikeLoz Blain / New Atlas About those pedalsI wanted to know whether the pedals had any real purpose, so before using the throttle I tried riding the thing as a bicycle. They do technically work, but there is no pedal assist whatsoever. Pedalling does not wake up the electric motor, amplify your effort or do anything clever. Your legs turn a chain, the chain turns the rear wheel, and the enormous 80-volt electrical system spends this entire process sitting silently above you, judging.Getting it moving from a dead stop was awkward. The crank length and riding position feel closer to BMX geometry than something designed to pedal a 150-lb (68-kg) machine around town, and you can't really get up over the pedals and hammer away like you would on a normal bicycle. Standing on them feels more like standing on motorcycle pegs and then attempting to pedal the motorcycle.Once rolling, though, I managed to pedal the RCR up to around 17 mph. Maintaining that speed required a cadence somewhere between "spin class instructor with something to prove" and "washing machine with an unbalanced load."So yes, you can ride the RCR 80V without electricity. You can also move a dead pickup truck by putting it in neutral and pushing from behind. Both are useful capabilities to have in an emergency, but I wouldn't build my daily commute around either one.Bri reached basically the same conclusion without bothering with the cardio experiment.Bri's take: "The pedals are pretty much decorative. I'd only pretend to use them when I saw a cop. This bike would make a lot more sense if my feet were solid and stable underneath me."The real reason for those pedals becomes fairly obvious once you start looking at American ebike regulations. In its locked configuration, the RCR is limited down into ebike territory. It has functional pedals and a throttle, and ONYX sends it out neutered enough to participate in the elaborate American legal theater where everybody looks at the electric motorcycle and agrees to call it a bicycle as long as nobody touches the wrong wire.And yes, it really is a wire.Inside the battery compartment is the restriction wire. Cut it and the RCR transforms from "street-legal ebike" to "75 mph electric motorcycle." ONYX is also launching a footpeg kit that lets you throw the pedals in a drawer altogether and stop pretending. The author strikes a dashing pose by the Rockport seasideLoz Blain / New Atlas Seward was refreshingly open about how we got here. Earlier versions used software restrictions to keep the bike within nominal ebike limits, an approach he freely admits existed in what most people would call a loophole.Regulations are now closing that gap, particularly in California, but ONYX is making the RCR as easy as possible to take down to your local DMV and register as a full-fat motorcycle for those who want to go legit with it on the street. Mind you, this process does vary from state to state.Whatever category you want to put it in though, pedaling isn't really the point of this bike.Actually riding the thingThe RCR looks like it should be uncomfortable. It's long, low and visually more slab than saddle, but at 6ft1, I found the riding position surprisingly natural. The seat was comfortable, the bars were where I wanted them, and once moving, the weight disappeared much more effectively than I expected.Bri is considerably less experienced than I am on motorcycles, and this is where her opinion is probably more useful than mine.Bri's take: "The first time I took it out, I felt comfortable and confident on it within a couple of blocks."That's a pretty significant compliment to the chassis. The best motorcycles have a way of shrinking underneath you. A 600 supersport can look like an angry piece of folded aluminum in the paddock, then disappear beneath you once you're moving. The RCR pulls off a milder version of the same trick. For something this heavy, powerful and visually intimidating, it gets out of its own way remarkably quickly.Normal mode was also much friendlier than the appearance suggests. There's good torque immediately off the bottom, but it doesn't snap forward with the hysterical throttle mapping that sometimes infects high-powered electric stuff. It builds speed smoothly and predictably, then starts running out of enthusiasm somewhere around 35 mph (56 km/h) in the restricted modes. It was quick enough to be entertaining, and tame enough that within minutes I stopped thinking about the controls and started looking for lumpy things to ride over the top of.Bri's take: "I loved it. It's really smooth. I like how it's not twitchy and doesn't accelerate suddenly. Very easy to ride."With the basics figured out and the first impressions out of the way, Loz and I finally rolled out to start the real ride. At the end of the driveway, I asked him the perfectly normal question of whether he wanted to go shoot photos right where Joe died. He paused. "Shall we?" We shall. Off we went. This is where Joe's last ride ended. He'd be delighted to see how far his shoes flew off. We couldn't even fit the other one in the frameLoz Blain / New Atlas This is probably worth explaining. The Sugar Shack had been Joe's destination on the scooter ride that killed him, and the crash site was along the way. Given the extraordinary circumstances around this review, going anywhere else for photos felt almost dishonest. Also, this group of friends has been coping with death using approximately 40% love, 20% alcohol and 40% wildly inappropriate humor, so taking this unfinished review bike back through the scene of the crime seemed entirely on brand.What I had failed to remember at the time was that Bri had been riding the ONYX that night too, with Joe following behind her on the scooter. After reading this, she told me something I somehow hadn't considered: by continuing on to the Sugar Shack, Loz and I had finished a ride that she and Joe never got to finish. I felt horrible when she said it, because she was right. What felt to me like honoring Joe was also a journey that belonged to the two of them, and one that had stopped forever that night. I'm sorry, Bri. I should have seen that.But I didn’t, so I used the ride there to investigate the suspension, which quickly became an excuse to behave like a jackass. Curbs, driveway lips, dirt, grass, small drops, whatever looked remotely jumpable. The RCR took all of it surprisingly well. The suspension has enough compliance to soak up much harder hits than I expected, and the chassis remained stable even when I started deliberately putting it places that a cafe-racer-shaped object generally has no business being.There was, however, an impressive amount of clunking coming from somewhere around the battery compartment whenever the bike got airborne. CLONK. Land. CLONK. It sounded like somebody had locked a bowling ball in a filing cabinet and pushed it down the stairs.Bri later mentioned that, during assembly, they may have simply forgotten to strap the battery down properly, which would go a long way toward explaining why it sounded like the thing was trying to punch its way out every time I got airborne.The bike itself felt excellent. Easy to place, easy to turn, stable over broken surfaces and remarkably predictable.The front brake on our particular bike was another story. It sucked butt. Joe had already contacted ONYX about how weak it felt before he died, and they sent him an upgraded front caliper and hardware.It’s important to point out that we’re motorcycle racers, and accustomed to one-finger braking. Seward explained to us there’s actually some thought behind the lack of initial bite. ONYX isn’t designed for apex-hunters like us, it’s for regular folk who’ve probably spent more time on bicycles than motorcycles; ONYX simply doesn’t want new riders to lock the front wheel or perform an unscheduled flying lesson over the handlebars. A good rear hydraulic brake and stronger regenerative braking should handle most of the stopping. The whole front end is designed for compatibility with the Honda Grom. So there's heaps of aftermarket mods available, including these Brembo stoppersLoz Blain / New Atlas I understand the logic, particularly on a machine that's likely to put people with very little motorcycle experience behind the bars. But even with that in mind, ONYX says the front should still feel firm and responsive, and ours definitely didn't. So while the basic brake balance was intentional, something wasn't right with our example.Either way, Seward tells us there's an easy solution for upgrades: the entire front fork assembly is designed to make the RCR compatible with Honda Grom parts. So there's easy access to a huge range of upgrades, up to and including serious Brembo brakes if you really want to make that front lever feel sharp.Bri later filled in a few details I didn't know when I first rode it. The stock brake levers use cotter pins and aren't adjustable for angle, which annoyed Joe enough that our friend Dan drilled them out so they could reposition them. They also did eventually get the upgraded front caliper installed, although the existing brake line didn't line up cleanly with it, so that wasn't exactly a five-minute bolt-on affair either. Dan and Brianna fitting the replacement front brake setupKevin Fanady / New Atlas Thankfully, the rear brake was great. On heavier ebikes I already tend to favor the rear more than I would on a conventional motorcycle, and on the RCR that worked surprisingly well. Between the hydraulic rear brake and regen, I could haul the thing down quickly and predictably without locking the rear, despite the absence of ABS.I also discovered something interesting while screwing around with the controls. Hold the throttle open and pull the front brake, and the motor keeps pulling. Do the same thing with the rear brake and the throttle cuts, which makes considerably more sense once you realize the left lever is also controlling regenerative braking. The fact that front brake and throttle are apparently allowed to remain friends led immediately to one thought. Burnout? I didn't. But I thought about it very professionally.Bri, meanwhile, found the sort of things I tend not to notice while looking for curbs to jump.Bri's take: "Whenever Joe asked me for comments on things he'd always say, 'Jeez, do you ever have anything positive to say? Is there anything that you like?' I guess I always focus on what could be better. But these are really small annoyances. I absolutely love riding this bike."The indicator switch was awkward for her smaller hands, the headlight wasn't especially impressive, and one of the mirrors began vibrating enough to become annoying at around 24 mph (40 km/h).There’s one piece of technology on the RCR she liked a hell of a lot more than I expected: wireless Android Auto. Pair a phone, and the big touchscreen gives you navigation, phone and audio controls, then reconnects automatically when the bike starts.Which is hilarious when you remember what you're sitting on. Down by your ankles are bicycle pedals desperately maintaining the argument that this belongs somewhere in the ebike family, while six inches above the bars is a touchscreen doing the same job as the TFT on a modern touring motorcycle. It's like fitting a Gold Wing dashboard to a BMX and hoping nobody asks follow-up questions. The RCR finally made it to the Sugar Shack... Sorry BriannaKevin Fanady / New Atlas A drink at Joe's last destinationEventually Loz and I made it to the Sugar Shack, Joe's intended destination on his final ride. We parked out front, and while I was again fighting with the key fob, a guy riding past on a normal bicycle looked over and yelled, "Hey, nice bike!"He meant the ONYX. Loz was sitting right next to me on the electric trike he was reviewing and received absolutely nothing. Not even a courtesy glance. Sorry, Loz.Inside, standing there holding a motorcycle helmet, the whole thing suddenly felt strangely normal. It reminded me of stopping somewhere during street rides years ago, grabbing a drink, talking for a bit, and spending most of the stop thinking about getting back outside and riding again. That was exactly how I felt about the ONYX. I wanted to get back on it. Not pedal it. Ride it.While we were there, Loz and I finally gave up and opened the user manual, because apparently there are limits even to male stubbornness. The full-power unlock is wonderfully analog for something this electronic. Cut the restriction wire, and the bike gets access to its more entertaining personality. Once that's done, Hyper itself requires holding the mode button down for a few seconds, which is probably wise. The manual warns that it's an extremely powerful boost setting, creates additional heat and isn't intended as an all-day riding mode.Tap, tap, hold. Hyper. Oh, yes.The RCR suddenly stops pretending it has anything meaningful in common with a bicycle. Roll into the throttle and the bike leaves hard. The power delivery remains impressively smooth, but there is a lot more of it, and the speed builds with the effortless stupidity electric motors are so good at delivering. No gears, no clutch, no revs building toward a powerband. Your right hand moves and the scenery begins flying past considerably faster.My perception is admittedly broken. Years of riding and racing sport bikes have changed the scale I use for acceleration, so Hyper never frightened me. What impressed me instead was how easy it was to control. For somebody whose previous experience ends at a normal ebike, however, this thing could be a fantastic machine for discovering religion.You can go from zero to "OH F&*$" with very little administrative overhead.And from that point onward, I basically stopped testing it as an ebike. I started treating it like a motorcycle. I accelerated harder, braked harder, started flicking it around, hit bumps on the throttle and let the front wheel get light. Then I deliberately started bringing the front up.The RCR didn't punish any of it. The front would lift progressively and settle back down without slamming. Direction changes remained stable. The chassis communicated what was happening instead of simply presenting the consequences afterward. I started jumping driveway transitions again, carrying more speed through rough sections and generally behaving like somebody who'd forgotten this was supposedly a bicycle.Within a surprisingly short period of time, I trusted it. That's the part I find hardest to explain through specs. Anybody can bolt a huge battery and motor onto something. The internet is full of garage projects capable of generating enough torque to fold the builder into a nearby recycling bin. Making a high-powered machine feel natural is much harder.The RCR feels natural. The ride: comfy and capable. The pedals: a kinetically confusing legal fig leafLoz Blain / New Atlas So who actually buys this?I still don't know.At around the same money, you're entering the territory of real entry-level motorcycles. Something like a CFMOTO 450SS gives you a proper road-legal motorcycle, excellent brakes, highway performance and the privilege of explaining to the DMV that yes, you really did bring all six pieces of paperwork they specifically requested.The RCR gives you a different set of advantages. No gasoline, virtually no drivetrain noise, less maintenance, far less physical bulk, a semi-credible excuse to be out on the bike path, and quietly sky-high performance that would have seemed completely insane for anything with pedals not very long ago.And this is where Seward's explanation of what he was trying to build actually clicked for me. His original idea wasn't a bicycle with absurd power or a scaled-down motorcycle. He wanted the empty space between them, something small enough to stick in an elevator or apartment, quiet enough that nobody cares, simple enough that you're not constantly wrenching on it, but capable enough that it doesn't feel like a toy.Seen through that lens, the RCR makes considerably more sense.Then there's the legal question. The RCR exists in a regulatory space that reminds me of those businesses that sell cannabis bongs as "decorative glassware." Everybody involved understands what's happening. We just need to use the approved vocabulary while the paperwork is in the room.Locked down, here's your ebike. Pedals. Twenty-ish mph. Throttle. Hello officer. Unlock the rest of it and you have something capable of around 75 mph. Same pedals. Tim Seward tells us this bike's designed to be a blank canvas for creative designs like this one, inspired by a certain early-90s sitcom...Loz Blain / New Atlas The pedals are basically a fake mustache and glasses on a motorcycle.Seward didn't pretend otherwise when Loz asked him. He said the industry has spent years working around power limits using software restrictions, temporary boosts and similar tricks, and regulators are now understandably trying to close the gap.ONYX is doing its best to make its bikes easier to register legitimately as street motorcycles, and that seems like the sensible path forward.Because I find the current RCR hilarious, but I also understand why cities and states are getting increasingly serious about high-powered ebikes. Even locked down, this is roughly 150 lb of machine before you put a rider on it. Put that on a crowded bicycle trail with pedestrians, kids, dogs and ordinary bicycles and its kinetic energy doesn't disappear simply because a government document says "ebike."I love this machine. I also don't think it belongs blasting down shared bike paths. Those two thoughts can coexist.The part I wasn't expectingAfter spending enough time on the RCR, the question of whether it is a motorcycle or an ebike stopped being particularly interesting. It's fun. Really, really fun.The best machines tend to have that effect. Eventually the specifications become background noise, and you stop interacting with a product and start having experiences because of it. Even while writing this, I've caught myself looking toward the garage and thinking about going back out. That's probably the highest praise I can give anything with wheels.Bri put it more simply:Bri's take: "I'm not an experienced motorcycle rider, although I've done about 40,000 miles (65,000 km) as a pillion. This 'not a motorcycle' is kinda my first motorcycle, and the feeling of riding it hit me instantly... Freedom. Freedom, and the chance to briefly escape the grind of a stay-at-home mom with three little terrors."Not horsepower. Not range. Not classifications. Just freedom and escape.That also makes what she said next considerably harder to hear.Every night, according to Bri, Joe would bounce around asking her to go riding. "BriBri, wanna go for a ride? Rideriderideride?" She usually said no. Somebody had to be the responsible parent and get the kids to school instead of disappearing around the back roads of Rockport, Texas until four in the morning.Now she wishes she'd gone.Bri's take: "I really regret that now. That was my chance to ride motorcycles with Joe, busted leg and all.”Joe and Bri were supposed to write this review. He requested the bike, dealt with ONYX, had already found the brake problem and wanted Bri to ride it. Somewhere in his head was probably an article that would have contained completely different observations, different jokes and at least one photograph involving something I would advise a normal person not to try. Then he died, and now I'm sitting here writing it. There's nothing like the tragic death of a best friend to remind you to enjoy your precious life while you can. And there are few quicker paths to enjoying life than jumping on a powerful two-wheeler and cruising back and forth over said best friend's fresh but fading chalk marksLoz Blain / New Atlas There are a lot of strange things that happen when someone close to you dies, but one I wasn't prepared for was how quickly ordinary objects become artifacts. A camera becomes his camera. A computer becomes his computer. An unfinished project becomes one of the last things he was working on. Nobody but Joe and his "scooter bros" cared what was sitting in the garage two months ago. Now everything has provenance.For Bri, this one has even more attached to it. One of her final memories with Joe alive was riding the ONYX while he followed along behind her on his scooter. ONYX knows what the bike means to her, and the company has gone out of its way to make sure she can keep doing exactly what Joe wanted her to do with it: Ride.And maybe that's why riding this fantastic machine to the place Joe died didn't feel as morbid as it probably sounds. There I was, on one of his unfinished projects, wearing Joe's motorcycle helmet, heading toward the place where his story ended. Then I passed it. I just kept riding. Joe didn't.There's no analogy that makes that fair. There's no lesson about living every day to the fullest that suddenly makes three little girls having to grow up without their dad acceptable. Sometimes something this brutal is simply brutal, and trying to extract inspirational wisdom from it feels like demanding a refund from the universe after discovering the universe doesn't have a customer-service department.What we do have is everything he left in motion. His photos. His writing. His family. His friends. A garage full of projects. And apparently an electric motorcycle wearing bicycle pants as a legal disguise.So a handful of us are going to finish some of these review projects as acts of love. We'll probably get things wrong. Joe would've told us exactly what we got wrong, likely using language unsuitable for publication. He would have found something else to jump. He would have taken better photos. But he's not here, is he? So these memorial reviews will have to do.The ONYX is still sitting in the garage. The memories of Joe guiding Bri through the assembly are still there. The front wheel, the display, the pedals, the little problems they had to solve together. The memories of him following behind her on the scooter while she learned are there too, along with all those nights he kept asking her to come ride with him.One of Joe’s final gifts to Bri was giving her the chance to become the rider she had wanted to be for years. He got to help build the bike with her, watch her take those first rides, and see the beginning of something that was finally hers.Now the bike is still there. So are the memories. And every time she opens that garage, there it is, waiting for her to keep going.“BriBri, wanna go for a ride? Rideriderideride?”The ONYX RCR 80V is available directly from ONYX Motors in the USA at a discounted price starting at US$4,599.