While electric bicycles have a motor, you can’t use one to take your motorbike test because:
- They don’t have indicators and other requirements that a road-registered vehicle must have.
- They aren’t (or, at least, shouldn’t be) capable of high enough speeds. The motor should be limited to 200 watts and the maximum speed should be less than 25km/h – read more about the limitations here.
Can you use an electric scooter or electric motorbike?
There are electric scooters on the market which comply with road regulations and you can use them to take your motorbike test if they are LAMS-approved but, in general, the public has been slow to adopt electric motorbikes and scooters in Australia because we don’t have the mass-market cheap scooters that are available everywhere in places like China. This article has a good round-up of the challenges faced by early adopters to electric motorbikes.
Electric scooters could make for cheap, non-polluting, city transport, as they are already doing in many Asian cities
Darren is an expert on driving and transport, and is a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists
