Bumpy Road for Electric Motorcycle Conversions: Limited Legality and Workshops

JAKARTA, KOMPAS.com - The programme to convert petrol motorcycles to electric in Indonesia still faces a bumpy road to widespread adoption among the public. Besides the limited number of certified conversion workshops, the legality of vehicle types is one of the main barriers preventing people from choosing to convert their motorcycles. Bambang Setiawan Yudistira, or Ibeng as he is commonly known, an electric motorcycle enthusiast from EV Holic, revealed that not all motorcycle types can easily obtain official documents (blue plate) after conversion. “There are already few conversion workshops, and not many motorcycle types (that can be converted and have legality). It means this: it’s not just possible, but easily certified,” Ibeng told Kompas.com recently. This is because every converted motorcycle type must have a type certification approved by the testing centre. “When talking about easily certified, we mean these conversion workshops only take popular types. Honda has many types, but not all. Mostly Beat, Vario, Scoopy, the popular ones,” he said. This situation makes it difficult for owners of motorcycles outside the popular types to legalise their vehicles. As one of the pioneers who carried out conversions in the early days, Ibeng truly experienced how laborious it was to handle the legality of a motorcycle unit that did not yet have reference standards at the testing centre. He had to go through a process that took up to half a year. “I was one of the early converters. It had to be type-tested. All sorts, back and forth (testing centre-conversion workshop), didn’t pass, the process could take six months,” Ibeng recalled. This complexity includes detailed technical examinations where the parameters are sometimes unclear to the examiners, from component placement to high-voltage battery warning sticker issues. If even an enthusiast like Ibeng has to spend six months on one motorcycle unit, this certainly becomes a nightmare for the general public. Without simplification of type testing standards for various motorcycle models, the population of converted motorcycles is predicted to remain limited to the mass-market models that already have a “green channel” in the bureaucracy.