Have you ever, in your life, been more frustrated than the time you spent in middle school math class? Hour after hour spent beating your head against problems that at the time seemed impossibly complex, going through them step by step and getting everything right without ever seeming to actually end up at the correct answer?
The BMW CE02 feels a lot like those middle school math classes. So much about this scooter is so right, even a professor might miss the single crucial mistake at first glance. But add everything about the bike up, and you’ll realize it’s simply not right for most American owners.
Full Disclosure: BMW shipped me out to Las Vegas, Nevada to ride the F900GS through the desert and the CE02 through Vegas city streets. The company paid for my transport, lodging, food, and all those precious electrons poured into the little scooter. Having seen the Vegas solar array in person, years ago, I can’t imagine that latter category was all too pricey.
When you first look at the BMW CE02, your eyes will deceive you. They’ll tell you that its 53-inch wheelbase is larger in real life than it looks in photos, and that the word “eParkourer” printed on the side is kind of dumb — both of which are true — but from then on out, it’s all lies. Your eyes will say this is a neat little commuter scooter, something to putt around on to work and back without spewing hydrocarbons, more eco-friendly than fun.
Turning to the spec sheet, it too will lie to you. BMW claims a maximum of 15 peak horsepower and 40.5 pound-feet of torque from the 3-series alternator that serves as the CE02’s motor, which seem to back up the initial report your eyes already gave — it’s a boring little commuter meant to shuttle you around without much fuss. Actually ride the CE02, though, and you’ll discover just how wrong both your eyes and the spec sheet are.
The CE02 is, by nature of simply being a low-powered electric scooter, nice and lightweight. It weighs just 291 claimed pounds, all of them held low in the chassis for ideal balance. The wheels, too, are tiny little 14-inchers that provide little gyroscopic stability at low speeds — the CE02 is nimble verging on nervous on city streets.
That agile nature quickly leads you to learn the CE02’s party trick: The scooter is only equipped with ABS on its front wheel. Mash the left-hand lever and you can slide the rear as far as you like, weighting the pegs to keep the bike fishtailing until you finally run out of momentum. Weight the front at a stop, and you can spin the rear in place for the world’s least-impressive burnout. It never fails to spark joy.
The more time you spend astride the CE02, the more you realize it’s so much more than some little electric runabout — it’s a supermoto in disguise, a lightweight torque-rich bike on tiny tires that turns you into an absolute hooligan with the twist of your wrist. Over two days of riding, I saw more dumb, wide grins from folks on the little alternator-powered scooter than I did on the 105-hp adventure bike.
BMW’s CE02 is an unexpected riot to ride, echoing the feeling of a Honda Grom or an unregistered low-cc two-stroke. It’s a bike meant for being an absolute menace on public roads, only with the BMW you’re doing it without burning costly gas. Sure, the CE02’s starting price of $7,600 may not be far off from that of two Groms, but electrification gets you some forms of access that gas simply doesn’t.
Those electric benefits, however, are where the CE02’s math problem starts to fall apart. BMW advertises the machine as something between a scooter and a motorcycle — that’s where eParkourer comes from — but in trying to straddle that line it hits the worst of both logistic worlds.
The CE02 claims a top speed of 59 mph, which I can say from experience is pessimistic, yet it’s still too high to ride without an M endorsement here in New York. It charges exclusively from 110-volt wall plugs, yet no apartment super would ever believe that this nearly 300-pound machine with passenger pegs is really an e-bike that’s totally allowed to park near an outlet in your building.
You end up with a bike that needs a garage to charge, but can’t go more than about 30 miles before you have to turn tail and head back home. You need enough room to plug it in overnight, but you can’t live so far from your job, grocery store, or other destination that the range makes the CE02 pointless.
Maybe in parts of LA, where apartments are often disparate houses, the CE02 can work as a commuter vehicle. Parts of Seattle, too, likely have the perfect mix of spacious-yet-dense to meet the bike’s restrictions. Most everywhere else in the United States, though, is either too dense or too sprawling to make the CE02 a practical option as a daily rider. No matter how many things the CE02 gets right, these little issues add up and leave the bike an incorrect answer for most folks.
