Truth be told I've never been to *any* sort of motorcycle race, to say nothing of an EV motorcycle (or car) race. But one of the most exhilarating spectating experiences I've had was going down to the Indianapolis Speedrome on the southeast side of town to watch a night of racing. Everything from little kids go-karts, to smashed up Honda Civics duking it out (they have to run stock mufflers, actually), to Yamaha-FJ09-powered "Legends" cars that sound amazing, and finally the crazy nitro-methane running Figure 8 cars that are running open exhausts and leave spectators near the fence with bits of tire in their teeth/hair.
Yup, the grassroots racing down at the speedrome is crazy good fun. We went to a night of flat track racing down there while back, and it was a blast. Very different, and in most ways far better than the high-dollar racing over at IMS, ORP, etc. You can get up close and personal with everything, that's for sure.
Back when we had MotoGP in Indy, I regularly hosted a crowd at my house for that three days of racing. There was also the brief return of flat track races at the Indy Mile at the fairgrounds on 38th street for a few years on the same weekend, not to mention the "Motorcycles on Meridian" event, with thousands of bikes and riders hanging out downtown.
MotoGP was a full three-day event, with several other classes of racing, shows, demonstrations, etc. -- there was pretty much always something happening on the track. And that's where I saw the electric motorcycle races I referred to; this was in 2008 through about 2012, IIRC, so before many of the recent developments in EVs. They also had the Harley XR1200 races, and at least two other classes of MotoGP.
Back to the topic, sort of: as mentioned above, electric or electric-assist bicycles are already big sellers. There are also many other small electric vehicles on the market, like all kinds of scooters and suchlike. One of the persistent issues afflicting these is that the vehicles, or at least the majority of the components, are made in China under thousands of fly-by-night brands, and the design and quality ranges from downright dangerous to just pitiful.
I tried to help a friend of a friend recently who paid well over $3,000 for a high-end electric stand-up scooter (terrifyingly fast and powerful, when it worked). After a few months of use, the electronic components began to fail one after the other. I helped replace many of these, but it was a constant battle. Just accessing common components is far more difficult than needed; the thing was never designed to be serviced or disassembled. If you remove a cover, miles of wires connected (and many not connected) with no rhyme or reason explode everywhere. Fasteners are hidden or inaccessible... it's a nightmare to work on.
After a mighty effort to replace the main controller (an obviously undersized, badly made, improvised gadget if I ever saw one) it worked for about three minutes before failing again. He's pursuing a warranty claim with the importer, but I don't know where that's going to end up.
So I suppose the overall point is that things will be very different, and rapidly get a lot better in many ways, once the established manufacturers get more and more involved in the electric two-wheeler game. They're only dabbling right now, but more, much more, is coming.
The same process is further along in the four-wheeled EV game; Tesla showed the way to make EVs people would actually buy. Tesla did so many things brilliantly, but they also made a lot of mistakes, and are still making a lot of mistakes. Uneven quality is the biggest; quality is extremely hard to do, but the legacy brands have a lot more experience with this. They're rapidly catching up and surpassing Tesla in a lot of ways (although they're also having their own quality and other issues, of course.)
Others (like Zero) are making compelling, high quality electric motorcycles, but they've all ended up with absolutely ridiculous high prices, only affordable for the wealthy and bored.
Buell's Fllow is the first 2-wheeler I've seen offered for a use case that makes sense at a price that (sort of) makes sense, and made with quality engineering in the US or Europe to a quality standard that makes sense. Obviously we'll need to see how these things work out in the real world to find out whether they've actually pulled it off. But so far... it makes sense.
