Honda Australia’s new WN7 subscription could point to the future of motorcycle ownership

Honda is taking a different approach to selling its WN7 electric motorcycle in Australia, but could subscription ownership actually make more sense for electric bikes? And is this the future of motorcycles generally?

You may also like to read our Honda WN7 review.

Buying a new motorcycle has traditionally been a fairly simple transaction. You hand over some money, the bike becomes yours, and somewhere down the line you either sell it, trade it in or keep it until the wheels fall off. What happens to its value in between is your problem. That last bit could become increasingly important as electric motorcycles become more common.

Honda's WN7 is an interesting example. The firm's first full-size production electric motorcycle costs £12,999 in the UK, puts out up to 67bhp and has a claimed range of 87 miles under WMTC testing. It’s also, by motorcycle standards, an expensive machine. A CB1000 Hornet SP costs considerably less, goes much faster and a fair bit further between fill-ups. The biggest difference, though, is how it’s powered, and that raises some obvious questions about how much the bike will be worth a few years down the line. The fact of the matter is that most electric bikes are fairly expensive to buy and tend not to hold their value terribly well. For many would-be electric bike riders, that is a big problem.

That brings us to Honda Australia's latest move. The company has confirmed a subscription service for the WN7, effectively giving customers another way of accessing the bike without necessarily treating conventional ownership as the only option. And that raises our first question: would subscribing to an electric motorcycle actually take some of the risk out of ownership?

Depreciation is one of the biggest unknowns when buying any new vehicle, but it is particularly difficult to predict with electric vehicles. Battery technology is moving quickly, charging infrastructure is changing, and new models are arriving with increasingly impressive specifications. Nobody really knows what a three-year-old WN7 will be worth if the next generation of electric Hondas has twice the range. With a subscription, though, that becomes somebody else's financial problem.

Instead of buying a £12,999 motorcycle and accepting that you will take the hit when it comes time to sell, you effectively pay for access to the machine for as long as you want it. If you decide the technology has moved on, you hand it back and move on too.

There are obvious downsides. A subscription can end up costing more over the long term than simply buying a motorcycle, and you're never building any equity in the machine. There will also be contractual restrictions and, depending on how the scheme is structured, potentially mileage or usage limits. But it does change the calculation.

Perhaps that's particularly relevant to electric motorcycles. If you're still unsure whether an EV works for you, committing to ownership of an expensive machine with uncertain residual values is a fairly significant leap of faith. A subscription could make it easier to try the technology without taking quite so much financial risk.

Which brings us to the second, rather bigger question: is this where the motorcycle industry is heading anyway?

Look at what has happened with cars and vans in the UK. Personal contract purchase, leasing and salary-sacrifice schemes have already made the idea of paying for access to a vehicle rather than simply buying it outright completely normal. Honda itself is already selling the WN7 through PCP in Britain, currently advertising it from £199 per month with a £1,876.56 deposit and a £5,427.05 optional final payment. The subscription scheme launched in Australia comes in at $400 AUD a month, roughly £200, and includes the bike, registration and insurance. On top of that there are no lock-in contracts, meaning subscribers can cancel or change the subscription with just two weeks’ notice.

The industry has spent years trying to make new bikes more affordable through PCP. The next logical step could be to move even further away from the idea that the customer needs to own the machine at all. And crucially, that doesn't necessarily have to be an electric-bike thing.

A subscription model could work just as well for a petrol-powered motorcycle. Fancy a Ducati for the summer? Subscribe to one. Want a GS for a year before deciding whether you actually need one? Subscribe. Want to change bikes every 12 months without having to worry about selling the old one? Again, subscription starts to look attractive.

The difference is that electric motorcycles arguably have a more compelling reason to adopt the model.

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