Zero XE: The mountain bike on steroids that zips silently around the countryside

The bike arrived at lunchtime on one of those bright mid-autumn Norfolk days when the dew lies heavy and the sky is full of pink-footed geese searching out sugar beet tops.

‘You’ve driven one of these before?’, the delivery driver asked as he rolled it out of the van, backwards down the ramp. ‘I haven’t actually’, I replied. He kicked out the kickstand, looked me up and down, then passed me the key. ‘But you’ve driven a motorbike?’, he continued.

I told him that in actual fact I had not, but I was, I assured him, perfectly competent on a bicycle. He nodded thoughtfully then said that the ‘Zero XE’ is like ‘a mountain bike on steroids.’ With that he passed me the charger, handed me the brochure, and drove off. Telling me out the window, as he pulled out the gate, that I should be careful because there is a rapacious community of electric motocross stealers. They are apparently just the thing for nicking mobile phones when unsuspecting pedestrians are making calls. I had all sorts of activities planned for the XE, but phone theft was not on the dance card.

The brochure confirmed that the delivery driver had been underplaying it somewhat with the observation that the XE is just a mountain bike on steroids — in almost complete silence, it can tear across fields at up to 53mph. It weighs very little, it’s road legal if you’ve got a motorcycle licence, and its peak rear wheel torque is 468lb ft.

Truly, I have no idea what ‘peak rear wheel torque is’, and until I met the ‘Zero XE’ I’d never heard of ‘lb ft’; but what I can tell you is that when I got out on the lane and gave that throttle a bit of twist, I was off. I had much the same feeling as I did that sad afternoon, several years ago, when a horse I had on loan from a man called Donald took off across Dumfriesshire with every bit of wild energy it could muster.

Unlike that afternoon, I kept it together, broke no bones, and steadily I started to get the hang of it. I drove it through the village and was met with a look of half-admiration half-horror from a local retired Gurkha who told me that motorbikes ought to be ‘oily and very loud.’

As happens, my confidence grew and grew and half an hour later, feeling I was quite sure that I knew what I was doing, I managed to crash the bike into the wall of my own shed. My shoulder was fairly done in, a couple of flints are missing, but the Zero SE was entirely unharmed. It is, my cottage walls can attest, a sturdy bit of kit.

The countryside is full of machinery. October in East Anglia is when sugar beet is lifted — the process requires a beet harvester, a tractor, and then a lorry. Most sugar beet pads round here currently have at least two pick-up trucks parked up every morning. Rural England runs on diesel. Climate science is complex, but there’s no doubt that we should be trying to use electricity rather than fossil fuels where we can.

The Zero XE is handy, but there are any number of electric vehicles that agricultural workers and gamekeepers can turn to. Polaris makes an electric ATV buggy, and there are a growing number of electric quad bikes. Initially, they were very heavy and tended to be two wheel drive rather than four, but that is changing and farming forums are full of beef and sheep farmers admitting that they can’t quite believe how good the electric offerings now are.

As time goes by, wrinkles like their poor towing capacity are starting to be ironed out and the battery life of electric vehicles, and therefore the range, is increasing. Not so long ago, every farm yard had a petrol pump, these days it’s increasingly rare, which is another good reason to ‘go leccy’.

At about 4pm, my phone rang. It was the local farmer, whose cattle have been escaping almost every day for the past fortnight. There is very little grass for them in the meadow they’ve been grazing and the winter wheat in the adjacent field is coming through well. Sensibly, as they see it I’m sure, they have become well-versed in leaping the wire.

The farmer, who was on foot, couldn’t find the cattle and wondered if I’d seen them pass my cottage. I hadn’t, but I told him I did have just the thing. Within 15 minutes of riding around the field margins, I’d identified exactly where they were. I can quite see that if you were a farmer needing to get about, particularly on tricky ground, the Zero XE would have proper utility value.

After heading back the way I came, I went to check my pheasant feeders. One of the immediate benefits of the Zero XE is that because it makes almost no noise, you don’t disturb wildlife. The pheasants, at the feeders, nipped into the scrub as I passed and then emerged again behind me. In a world where we are increasingly trying to give animals peace and space, it is of great benefit to be able to move around without the roar of an engine.

As dusk started to settle, I had a final task to do before lighting the stove and settling in. I needed to head down to the larder to see if the hares I’d been promised had been left there. A number of people had asked me if I could source them hare for Christmas. The larder is some way away but there is a green lane that runs all the way to do it so without a motorcycle licence, I would be perfectly fine.

‘The Green Lane’ as it’s known locally, which runs to Walsingham, has existed for time immemorial. It’s been used, I’m quite sure, by drovers, potato pickers, poachers and pilgrims. The local village is a famous pilgrimage site and for almost a thousand years, the devoted from across Britain and beyond have walked to Walsingham.

As I sped down the Green Lane, I became aware of two things. The first was that just like the pheasants, deer seemed to hardly notice my presence at all. They’d stand there, with their heads cocked, vaguely aware that something was coming up on them and then at the last minute, they’d trot away in confusion. Hares in the fields didn’t seem to notice me at all.

I became very aware too that I was travelling the same way that so many people have travelled by different means: on foot, on mule, on horseback, by cart, and certainly by quadbike. But I was travelling the green lane in the latest iteration of travel. I suspect I am the only person who has ever been down there on an electric vehicle. It was a first for a very historic route.

But I highly doubt I will be the last. As a means of getting round the countryside when land holdings are becoming bigger and bigger and gamekeeper’s ‘beats’ are growing, the Zero XE really has its place. I’m not sure quite which electric vehicle I’m going to go for, but I’m immensely tempted to add an electric offering to my muddy stable.

On the road (or field): Zero XE

Price: £5,590

Range: 100km at 31mph

Top speed: 53mph

Power: 20.1 hp (15.5 kW)