First ride: CSC RX1E $8k and 80 MPH electric motorcycle is a perfect starter bike
When CSC first announced the RX1E, I was super excited about the prospect of an electric motorcycle that could hit highway speeds while priced at a fraction of most big name e-motos today. And so, when I was swinging through LA recently, I made sure to stop by CSC’s Azusa headquarters and give the bike a test. Now I’m even more excited than ever about this new addition to CSC’s lineup.
At just $8,495, the CSC RX1E comes in swinging with a very nice spec sheet at a reasonable price point. For comparison, you’d have to pay 50% more to get an entry level Zero electric motorcycle that has similar performance specs.
There’s a lot going on here. The bike has liquid cooling for the motor and controller, belt drive, ABS braking in the front and rear, included storage cases and bash bars, reverse gear, a windshield, both a center AND a side stand, and a good-sized glove box in the faux tank. Half of these are features you normally find on much higher priced motorcycles, and the other half are features you generally have to pay many hundreds of dollars extra for.
But the unassuming CSC RX1E gives you everything you’d ever need in an around-the-town motorcycle, all for a reasonable price.
Check out my first ride on the new bike in my video below, then keep reading for my complete thoughts on this new entry into the affordable electric motorcycle market.
CSC RX1E video review
CSC RX1E tech specs
- Motor: 8 kW continuous, 18 kW peak-rated swingarm-mounted motor
- Top speed: 80 mph (130 km/h)
- Max range: 112 mi (180 km)
- Battery: 96V 64Ah (6.16 kWh)
- Charge time: 6 hours on Level 1 (110VAC wall plug)
- Curb weight: 465 lb (211 kg)
- Brakes: Hydraulic disc brakes with Bosch ABS
- Extras: liquid-cooled motor and controller, belt drive, three included storage cases, included crash bars, LED and analog gauges, windshield, side and center stands, USB charging port on instrument panel
Adventure look, city utility
So the first thing you notice about the CSC RX1E is the adventure-style setup. It’s got an upright stance, big cargo boxes, a bash guard and a windshield. All of these tend to scream “safari”, not “city.”
But all of those features actually make it a great urban runabout, which is what the bike is primarily designed for. Sure, it’s got adventure styling and matches the look of CSC’s popular ICE-powered RX3 and RX4 adventure bikes. But this baby is more than likely going to be sticking to commuter duty for most riders.
And that’s where it will absolutely excel. The upright seating position and tall bars make it super comfortable. Your legs aren’t tucked up underneath your body, you’re not crouched forward and you aren’t hugging the tank. Instead, you’re sitting up tall with a good view of the road, holding onto reasonably high bars and planted solidly on a comfortable saddle.
The suspension is also great for a city, especially one that doesn’t have the best streets. I pulled into CSC’s showroom on a borrowed LiveWire One, which gave me a unique chance to do some of the same route on both bikes. The LiveWire blows the CSC RX1E out of the water when it comes to power, but the RX1E was much more comfortable to ride, especially on speed bumps and other road irregularities.
Those lockable storage boxes are also just as useful as they seem. I normally ride with a backpack to carry all of my camera and audio gear that I use on rides, plus a few extra pieces of gear (tools, rain poncho, emergency kit, etc). But with the tail box, I could fit everything inside with room to spare. I didn’t even crack open the side boxes, that’s how much room I had in the top box.
But if you’re doing grocery shopping, running errands or picking up a takeout order for the whole office, you could probably fit it all in those three cases. And anything else can be stuffed in the faux “tank”, which has its own glovebox.
For anyone who doesn’t like the look of the boxes, you can pull them off with just a few bolts. But considering that’s an expensive option on other bikes, and with all of that added utility, it’s frankly amazing that they come standard.
Respectable performance
I’d call the performance specs decent, especially for a city bike that can handle freeway jaunts. This isn’t a powerhouse, but Sport mode definitely has good pickup. The bike comes with a rated top speed of 80 mph (130 km/h), but one of the CSC mechanics told me they got it up to a GPS-verified 88 mph (143 km/h) on the freeway in a full tuck.
The 18 kW peak-rated motor has good acceleration, and it pulled me up canyon roads without a thought. Does it compare to an Energica or a LiveWire? Absolutely not. Those bikes will have you holding on for dear life. But again, that’s not the type of ride the CSC RX1E is designed for.
If you’ve ever ridden an Energica, Zero, or LiveWire, you’ll know that when you punch it, those bikes are simply gone. You’re down the road before you know what happened.
The CSC RX1E, on the other hand, has a more muted but actually quite comfortable throttle response. Even if you crank it full throttle from a dead stop, you get that first quarter to half a second of easy throttle ramping up to full power. It doesn’t dump it all at once like an on/off switch, which is quite rare among lower cost electric motorcycles. Low-cost electric motorcycles can sometimes be a bit more jerky, since good throttle ramping requires careful programming – something often overlooked on cheap motorcycles. But the RX1E really nails the throttle response for a comfortable profile that doesn’t leave you feeling lacking. It’s both responsive and comfortable at the same time.
As far as range goes, the bike has a claimed 112 mile NEDC range, but CSC will tell you right away that the real-world range is closer to 80 miles with mixed riding. If you’re on the freeway the entire time, you’ll of course get less. But if you’re doing 30 mph around town, you might even get more.
When it comes time to recharge, you unfortunately don’t have a J-1772 charge port. That means you can’t use public charging stations when you’re out and about. Instead, the CSC RX1E comes with a charger not unlike an electric bike or Sur Ron, just a bit bigger. You plug it into a normal wall outlet in your garage and the other end goes into the bike.
With over 6 kWh, the battery is too big to be removable. A removable battery is nice for apartment dwellers that don’t have ground-level outlets for recharging, but they don’t make much sense past 4-5 kWh. At that point you’d be trying to muscle a 60+ pound battery around. But with 50% more battery (and thus 50% more range) than bikes like the SONDORS Metacycle, the lack of a removable battery is simply the price you pay for more range.
So much value
Compared to the competition, the CSC RX1E comes in at around the same ballpark. It’s around $1k more than a Metacycle but goes 50% further. It’s comparable to a Ryvid Anthem but again, goes further (even if it can’t compete with the awesome look of the Anthem). And its about $4k less than a comparable entry-level Zero motorcycle with similar specs, despite coming with several features not found on those bikes.
Just look at what you get. The bike comes with anti-lock brakes in the front and rear, which many low-cost electric motorcycles skip out on. There’s a small radiator to liquid-cool the motor and controller, letting you push the bike harder than air-cooled alternatives. And then, there’s those included accessories like the storage boxes, bash guards, and windshield. Oh yea, and don’t forget the reverse gear. Not even a $22k Energica has that, and the $25k Zero DSR/X I rode recently only JUST added a reverse feature. The CSC RX1E’s reverse is much easier to use though. It’s a single physical button on the bars, unlike Zero’s reverse gear which requires navigating several clicks through the bike’s on-screen menu.
The only downside here that I can reasonably see is the lack of a local dealership network. But even with that, CSC goes pretty far toward negating the issue entirely. I’ve toured their parts warehouse in California and it is absolutely massive. They sell mostly Chinese imported motorcycles, with the RX1E being no different. But they don’t bring in bikes without also bringing in a huge supply of spare parts for everything. If you ever have a problem, they will have a replacement part out to you by Fedex in a day or two.
I even had the chance to test that a few years ago when I got a City Slicker that eventually had an issue with its rear pulley bearing. They sent me a new pulley immediately and the lead mechanic talked me through the replacement process over the phone. I probably could have just taken it to a shop, but doing it myself helped me learn the motorcycle better. Also it helped that the City Slicker was so light that I could just gently lay it on its side instead of needing a motorcycle lift.
Anyway, the point is that CSC has proven that they’re there to take care of issues if they ever arrive, and that helps give me back most of the confidence that I’d normally get from having a local dealer nearby.
Summing it up
Alright, it’s about time to bring this first-ride review to a close. Basically, my takeaway from this test ride is that the RX1E is punching way above its weight class, which is ironic because it’s actually kind of a heavy bike (465 pounds) that feels much lighter than it really is.
I did a mixture of city riding and canyon carving, and the bike excelled at both. In fact, it was so comfortable and easy to ride that I was actually pushing much harder in the canyon turns than I normally do. The bike carries its weight low and feels so responsive that I just had more confidence pushing myself more than usual.
For pleasure riding, it was a blast. For utility riding, it was a dream. It’s fast. It’s peppy. It’s fun. It has the gear I want and the features I need. I wouldn’t mind if it were $1,000 cheaper, but I can’t even say that it isn’t worth it. Dollar for dollar, it comes in at higher value than nearly any other electric motorcycle I know of.
If you’re looking for a starter electric motorcycle that won’t break the bank, this very well could be it.
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Environment
OpenAI leads private market surge as 7 tech startups reach combined $1.3 trillion valuation
Three years ago, Sam Altman lit the fuse for what’s become the most explosive bull run in the history of tech startups with the launch of ChatGPT.
Along with OpenAI’s rapid rise to a $500 billion valuation, other prominent names like SpaceX, Anthropic and Anduril have seen astronomical markups of late. In total, a basket of seven of the highest-valued private tech companies is now worth $1.3 trillion on paper, almost doubling in the past year, according to Forge Global, which provides a marketplace for private investments.
Forge’s value assessments are based on trading activity as well as funding round valuations and tender offers.
That number is continuing to grow. On Friday, CNBC’s David Faber reported that Elon Musk’s xAI is raising $10 billion at a $200 billion valuation, just months after achieving a $150 billion valuation.
Like in the public markets, where the artificial intelligence boom has dramatically lifted the market caps of Nvidia, Broadcom, Oracle and others, AI is also the dominant driver of private market valuations.
OpenAI leads the pack (Forge values it at $324 billion), followed by four-year-old Anthropic at $178 billion, with xAI at $90 billion, according to Forge. Those three companies are all competing directly with one another, as well as with Google and Meta, to create the large language models of the future.
Databricks, which is also one of Forge’s seven leading companies, is valued at $100 billion, due to the data analytics startup’s hefty investments in AI.
The other companies in the group are Musk’s SpaceX, fintech company Stripe and defense tech company Anduril, valued by Forge at $456 billion, $92 billion and $53 billion, respectively. AI is having such a big impact on defense and national security that Forge created a new defense fund to give institutions exposure to the sector.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (L) and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla.
Reuters
As as a group, they’ve quadrupled their value since late 2022, when ChatGPT first hit the market.
Forge CEO Kelly Rodriques said that the valuation surge is reflective of actual growth, not just projections.
“We’ve not seen this in the private market ever,” he said. “Companies that are growing at 100%, 200%, 300% on numbers that are already pretty big.”
The hunger for AI exposure is reshaping capital flows into AI, beyond just the few companies at the very top. According to Forge, 19 AI firms have raised $65 billion so far this year, accounting for 77% of all private-market capital.
With that kind of cash available, those companies have little incentive to going public, Rodrigues said.
“If these stocks are liquid and have access to as much capital as they can get, regulation is probably the only thing stopping them from staying private for as long as they want,” he said.
Even without being publicly traded, they’re having a significant impact on the public markets.
Oracle’s stock jumped 36% in a single day this month after the software maker’s earnings report, largely due to a massive contract with OpenAI. Broadcom also forged a new mammoth deal with the ChatGPT creator, while Microsoft continues to benefit from its substantial equity stake in the company.
Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta all recently raised capital spending guidance to reflect infrastructure demand.
OpenAI’s Altman sees some reasons for caution.
At a dinner with reporters in San Francisco last month, he described current valuations as “insane” and acknowledged that yes, “we are in a bubble.”
But he’s still betting big.
“You should expect OpenAI to spend trillions of dollars on datacenter construction,” he said. “We will spend maybe more aggressively than any company who’s ever spent on anything… because we just have this very deep belief in what we’re seeing.”
In July, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed a plan to delete its scientific finding recognizing that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health, with the goal of making cars less efficient and more costly to fuel. That plan went up for public comment last month, and the public comment period closes in two days, on September 22.
At issue is the EPA’s “Endangerment Finding,” which is the scientific basis of EPA’s regulation of harmful greenhouse gases. The endangerment finding found that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health, recognizing a scientific fact that every serious person has known for a long time – but now it was at least codified into federal procedure.
The Endangerment Finding focused specifically on carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), sulfur hexaflouride (SF6), hydroflourocarbons (HFCs), nitrous oxide (N2O), and perfluourocarbons (PFCs, now more commonly known as PFAS or “forever chemicals”), all of which we are certain cause climate change and harm humans.
And, in fact, the EPA is required to regulate these pollutants by the Clean Air Act, which tells the EPA that it must work to reduce air pollution.
Lee Zeldin wants to poison you and raise your fuel costs
Despite that legal requirement, in July, Lee Zeldin, a fraudster placed into the position of chief saboteur of the EPA by a convicted felon who sought a billion-dollar bribe from the oil industry while running for an office he is Constitutionally barred from holding, announced that he would repeal this finding, flying in the face of law, science, public health and American economic interests.
Zeldin’s stated purpose for attempting to delete this finding is because if the finding is gone, it will allow him to roll back other life- and money-saving vehicle efficiency regulations. He wants to revert those regulations because they constrain the fossil fuel industry – which has given him hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes over his political career.
The specific regulations that Zeldin has his eyes on are automotive regulations put in place by the EPA under President Biden. According to the government’s own numbers, these regulations stand to save 2,000 lives per year and save Americans over $100 billion dollars per year in fuel and health costs.
In announcing his illegal plan to kill Americans and cost all of us more money, Zeldin was joined by Chris Wright, a former oil CEO who is currently the titular head of the Department of Energy. In April, Wright signed off on a DoE report which said the rollbacks sought by Zeldin would raise gas prices by 76 cents per gallon, showing that the people behind this plan know it will increase your costs and yet are shoving it down your throat anyway.
The reason gas prices would rise is because of higher demand. If vehicles are less efficient, not only will they burn more gasoline thus costing you more money and also causing more pollution, more dependency on foreign oil and higher health costs for everyone, but that gasoline will be more expensive because that’s what happens to prices of products when demand rises. And the proceeds from those higher gas prices aren’t going to anything societally beneficial, they’re rather going to line the pockets of oil elites.
Wright’s office also offered a junk report (which is wrong in 100 ways) to justify the EPA’s position, claiming wrongly that climate change isn’t all that bad. But in doing so, the DoE misinterprets data, which the author of one of the cited studies immediately pointed out that the DoE misinterpreted. So, even the stretched justifications offered for the plan are steeped in the ignorance we have come accustomed to since late January.
So far, this clearly harmful plan has only been proposed, and has been open for public comment on regulations.gov since early September, where interested members of the public can leave substantive comments on whether they support the planned regulatory change or not.
Since then, comments have been rolling in, though the docket only shows a total of 676 approved comments as of this writing. This seems exceptionally low, given that the original endangerment finding produced some 380,000 comments.
As it turns out, the EPA has actually received a total of 111,596 comments so far, but it has been approving those comments for public posting at a glacial pace. At the current rate, it will take some 30 years for the agency to sift through and approve all the comments.
We reached out to the EPA to ask what was taking so long, and it said that it was busy categorizing comments based on whether they were part of a mass comment campaign or written by individual commenters, and sorting through them for the presence of profanity (although, one wonders if profanity is really all that unjustified when it’s on a plan that will knowingly kill thousands of people per year). Many comments have been “deferred” after an initial scan, awaiting another look.
Regardless, the number of approved comments is still incredibly small compared to the total, and it’s hard not to wonder if something nefarious is happening here.
Looking through the few comments EPA has accepted, the vast majority seem to be in favor of the reasonable and both scientifically and legally correct position of maintaining the Endangerment Finding. If these are the comments that EPA deigned to allow through, even in the midst of its efforts to kill Americans, then we can imagine even more vehement opposition to its plan in the 110,920+ comments it has hidden (including this author’s… which was made as soon as the docket went up for comment, and much like this article, is forceful and truthful but not profane).
In addition to the public comment site, EPA also held a virtual public hearing, where interested members of the public could call in to make their voices heard. The vast majority of callers supported the scientifically correct position of maintaining the finding.
The comment period is also much shorter than usually expected for regulations like this, as pointed out by a comment made by the Attorneys General of several states. The comment period is likely smaller than legally required of the EPA, just another example of the EPA breaking the law to try to kill you. After this comment, EPA did extend the comment period… by one week, from September 15 to September 22. Which is still not as long as the legal requirement.
Public comments can be submitted here. In case you get lost, the docket code is EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194.
If Zeldin pushes forward with his idea despite the inevitable public opposition to a plan to raise Americans’ costs and make their lives more deadly, the move will likely be caught up in courts for years, wasting Americans’ time and money and jeopardizing American competitiveness as the world rapidly moves towards improving vehicle efficiency without us.
Even if this clearly unwise and probably illegal move loses in court eventually, we still will have lost time in the transition – giving Zeldin’s oil masters some extra runway to sell their poison to us, and ensuring America’s competitors get a leg up in the transition to cleaner technologies while Americans remain forever poorer and sicker as a result of the republican party’s actions.
Public comments on this ridiculous plan are open through September 22 at 11:59PM EDT, 8:59PM PDT. Comments can be submitted here. In case you get lost, the docket code is EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-0194. EPA has to respond to legitimate concerns made during public comment periods or else the rule could be voided, so the more substantive your comment, the better.
The 30% federal solar tax credit is ending this year. If you’ve ever considered going solar, now’s the time to act. To make sure you find a trusted, reliable solar installer near you that offers competitive pricing, check out EnergySage, a free service that makes it easy for you to go solar. It has hundreds of pre-vetted solar installers competing for your business, ensuring you get high-quality solutions and save 20-30% compared to going it alone. Plus, it’s free to use, and you won’t get sales calls until you select an installer and share your phone number with them.
Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way. Get started here.
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