Zero Motorcycles’ Strategic Expansion of Volume Manufacturing Capacity for Electric Motorcycle Production in California

Zero Motorcycles, Inc., a California based company that designs, manufactures, and sells high performance electric motorcycles, identified an opportunity to increase its manufacturing volume and efficiency for building electric vehicles in California. Using both manufacturing and engineering process improvements and by placing new manufacturing lines into production, the company achieved a quadrupling of manufacturing capacity by the end of the project.

Under CEC Grant ARV-12-006, Zero Motorcycles, Inc. implemented the manufacturing and engineering changes required, purchased the equipment necessary to improve throughput and brought online significant new manufacturing capability, and then went into full scale volume manufacturing for its model year 2014 motorcycles.

Zero Motorcycles, Inc. successfully met all of the Strategic Expansion of Volume Manufacturing Capacity for Electric Motorcycle Production project objectives by enhancing its engineering and manufacturing processes and stepping up the scalability of its overall production. By the completion of the project, the company leveraged all of the engineering and manufacturing process improvements to go from an elapsed time of 66 minutes per station down to just 37 minutes per station. This represents an advancement of 78 percent. The overall manufacturing time went from 6:08 hours per motorcycle down to 4:10 hours, a 47 percent decrease. Zero Motorcycles, Inc. exceeded the goal of a 50 percent improvement in production workflow via process and design updates.

Zero Motorcycles, Inc. leveraged significant CEC and match funding for capital equipment to go from a fundamentally manual production system to a modern, flexible, and significantly more automated manufacturing line with higher degrees of process control. Not only will this gain the company the quadrupling of production capacity it sought, but it will come with higher quality product output as well.

This project has provided a platform to dramatically increase the California based manufacturing capacity of the next generation of efficient, practical electric vehicles and in turn reduced its cost of production. Zero Motorcycles, Inc.’s project has been a unique opportunity to manufacture significantly more electric motorcycles in California, exceeding consumer expectations, while replacing additional internal combustion vehicles in both California and worldwide fleets.