Four petrol bikes and one electric: Dalmatia, Bosnia, 3,000+ kilometers – How does that work?
First of all, a note of thanks: huge thanks to Manfred Janek for generously sharing this story, and to SteckerBiker for making the connection. These real-life, real-mileage travel reports are exactly the kind of content THE PACK wants more of: honest, funny, unglamorous-in-the-best-way accounts of what it’s actually like to ride electric, day after day, alongside people who didn’t necessarily choose to believe in it yet. (Story and photos originally by Manfred Janek for SteckerBiker. English retelling for THE PACK, based on the original German article >).
Manfred Janek is now in his third season riding electric, and each year the concept wins him over a little more. His riding group runs a big annual tour, and in past years he’d simply retraced their petrol-bike routes afterward on his electric bike, solo – first a four-day loop through Bavaria and Austria, then a demanding 2,500 km, eight-day, roughly 30-pass run combining the Route des Grandes Alpes with Tuscany.
For 2026, there was nothing left to retrace. So he decided to just join the group ride itself … on the electric bike.
That meant matching pace with four full-size combustion machines: a BMW R1300 GS, a BMW R 1250 GS, a BMW F 750 GS, and a Ducati Multistrada V4S. Complicating things further, the whole route had already been planned by the R 1300 GS rider, hotels booked and daily stages fixed, back when everyone assumed Manfred would be riding his usual BMW K 1200 R. His first tentative suggestion of bringing the electric bike instead was flatly rejected. Only after checking that the route avoided highways and had just one stage over 400 km did the group come around.
„Nein! Eine Elektrische nehmen wir nicht mit!“
Manfred then built his own parallel plan: a charging point for every lunch stop, overnight charging at hotels, and – since the Großglockner pass was still on his personal electric-bike bucket list – a two-day solo extension after the group split off in Bosnia. He also had to switch hotels in Sarajevo when the original one couldn’t offer charging.
That left him the outsider on three counts: electric instead of petrol, a solo cabin on the night train instead of sharing a four-berth compartment with the others, and a different hotel in Sarajevo. Not exactly the ingredients for a harmonious group photo.
Manfred: “What you won’t find here, however, are elaborate descriptions of landscapes, old towns, coastal roads, or culinary highlights. The internet already has the hundredth travel report from the ten-thousandth GS rider. All I’ll say: they’re all lying. It’s even more beautiful.”
The route
The petrol group’s plan looked simple on paper: about 1,000 km from Graz to Dubrovnik, then another 1,000 km back north via Sarajevo. For Manfred, that’s where the real planning began – a second table tracking not just kilometers and riding time, but distances to the next charger. In the end, the plan held up well; the longest gap between chargers was about 225 km, comfortably within range. Day-to-day deviations came mostly from weather, ferries, road closures, and ordinary touring chaos – not from the electric bike.
After the group returned through Bosnia, Manfred split off solo for another roughly 1,000 km home via Slovenia, the Großglockner, Mittersill, and several Alpine passes. Total distance: over 3,000 km.
Manfred: “When planning, the others were mainly interested in two numbers: kilometers and travel time. I was interested in a third as well: “How far is the nearest power outlet?” That’s why, alongside the actual trip planning, I kept a second spreadsheet. While the petrol riders only knew where we’d sleep and drive, I also knew where my motorcycle and I would get our energy boost along the way.”
Riding together
On the road, the electric bike settled naturally into the ‘sweeper’ position at the back of the group – not because it was slow, but because the big adventure bikes, somewhat surprisingly, accelerated out of overtakes more gently than expected. When Manfred asked the R 1250 GS and Multistrada riders to give it more throttle on passes, the R 1250 GS rider insisted he already rode flat out – after which Manfred quietly backed off rather than risk a collision.
He also highlights one underrated electric advantage: ultra-low-speed control. No clutch, no revs, no stalling – useful when the R 1300 GS routed the group onto increasingly rough, washed-out, muddy tracks better suited (on paper) to the ‘Adventure’ and ‘Enduro’ branding on the petrol bikes than to his own bike’s ‘Sports Road’ category. He couldn’t resist pointing that out to his companions; they were not amused.
A city-traffic anecdote: stopped at lights beside the R 1300 GS in Sarajevo, its rider revved theatrically while waiting for green – only for the silent electric bike to pull away faster off the line, with no clutch or engine drama to manage. Another Sarajevo moment: to cut a 200-meter walk down to nothing, Manfred ‘pushed’ his powered-off-looking bike through a pedestrian zone at walking pace – technically legal, since a wheeled motorcycle counts as pedestrian traffic if no one can tell the motor is running.
Overall, his companions can attest the electric bike never stood out dynamically – it stayed glued to the bike ahead even past 180 km/h. Its worst showing, ironically, came when Manfred led at the front through Bosnia and refused to exceed speed limits by more than 20 km/h – much to the group’s dismay.
Charging
The widespread assumption before the trip – that petrol and electric bikes can’t tour together because the group will constantly be waiting on the electric one – turned out, in Manfred’s words, to be complete nonsense. The key factor: his bike started every morning full, while the petrol group was still checking tire pressure and weather apps over breakfast. Three to four hours of riding later, hunger stops did the charging for him; often a partial top-up during lunch was enough, and some days needed no charging stop at all.
His bike supports three charging types – up to 12.3 kW via Type 2, up to 7 kW via three-phase power, and up to 3.3 kW via a standard household socket – used respectively on the road, for fun/emergency top-ups, and overnight at hotels.
Highlights along the way:
- A restaurant chef in Graz unplugged the kitchen fryer to give the bike a 7 kW breakfast top-up.
- A planned charger at a museum in Trbovlje was blocked off by a festival, so Manfred charged at a nearby Lidl instead – finishing at the exact moment the petrol group rode past on their way to their own food stop, at zero net time cost.
- The trickiest charger of the trip, in Knin (the only one within about 30 km), worked perfectly – though Manfred sabotaged his own charging session by turning the ignition on for photos, which stopped the charge without his noticing, costing him time and a solo ride into the worst thunderstorm of the trip.
- A garden socket in Brist turned out to be smart-home controlled; a phone call to the house’s German owner and a quick word to his home AI fixed it.
- In Dubrovnik, Manfred left his bike charging near the old town and hitched a ride in on the Multistrada’s pillion seat rather than pay for a taxi.
- A charger just over the Croatian border was occupied and its second connector broken – the only technical charger fault of the whole trip – so he moved on to a charger in an unglamorous industrial zone instead.
- Near the Jajce waterfalls in Bosnia, a school bus gave him a lift to the sights while his bike charged, and an F 750 GS rider later ran him back.
By the end, Manfred reckons he spent about as much time waiting for petrol riders at gas stations as they spent waiting for him at chargers.
The (other) tires
Manfred had never quite been happy with the stock Pirelli tires on his electric bike – wear was steep on the 2025 tour – so he fitted fresh Metzelers before this trip. Wear turned out excellent (only about 1.5 mm lost over 3,000+ km), but partway through Bosnia the bike started feeling odd in corners. When the group’s most vocal electric-bike skeptic, the R 1250 GS rider, borrowed it for a test ride, his verdict was blunt: great motor, terrible chassis, wobbling over bumps in lean – he’d never buy one.
The real cause, discovered the next morning: a rear tire pressure of roughly 1 bar (practically flat), caused by a three-centimeter nail picked up somewhere in Dubrovnik. A Sarajevo tire shop fixed it in minutes for ten euros – plug in, air up, done – quietly clearing both the tires and the chassis of blame, and leaving Manfred crediting his small battery-powered air pump as the unsung hero of the trip.
Notable moments
Hotels were consistently helpful about charging, most not even asking for payment (Manfred insisted on a flat 5-euro fee per night regardless). His one real complaint: charging fan noise – his “No Noise” marketed electric bike was louder overnight than all four petrol bikes combined, running its cooling fan continuously while charging. He asks manufacturers directly to fix this.
Other asides: a plea to petrol riders to think about people standing behind them when they start a cold engine (especially night-train staff working around the bikes), and a tongue-in-cheek warning to Balkan snakes to watch for the Ducati Multistrada before crossing the road.
A telling comparison: his electric bike used under 9 kWh per 100 km – roughly the energy content of one liter of gasoline – while the petrol bikes burned at least four liters per 100 km covering the same roads, speeds, and corners. He notes that the extra energy the four petrol bikes burned over the ~2,200 km group route could heat his daughter’s modern heat-pump house for half a winter.
He closes with praise for the R 1300 GS rider’s hotel picks, especially two four-star, motorcycle-friendly properties in Sarajevo and Vransko, and a final charging/coffee stop at the R 1300 GS and F 750 GS riders’ home before the last 100 km.
What the petrol riders said
Asked for their verdict, the group was generally positive but flagged real trade-offs:
The Multistrada:
“In the end, the charging stops didn’t slow us down because during shared breaks, we often used the available charging options. That way, we could usually continue riding together. However, the effort required to plan charging stops, search for alternatives if stations were occupied, and the limited ability to take spontaneous detours would personally take away a lot of the fun of a motorcycle trip for me.”
The R 1250 GS rider:
“Ultimately, electric mobility always comes down to range. Many current models are too limited in this regard and are better suited for regional use. Your Zero really impressed me with its range of between 200–250 km. However, this requires a disciplined riding style, always keeping an eye on the remaining range. For me, riding a motorcycle is primarily an emotional experience where I want to be able to decide at any moment whether to speed up, cruise, extend the route, or take a shortcut. With the constant need to search for the next charging station, this spontaneity is partly lost, especially if the stations are occupied or even out of order.”
The F 750 GS rider:
“The only disadvantage for me personally would be the lack of spontaneity, which is a big part of what makes motorcycle riding so special. As long as you stick to the planned route with charging options, it surprisingly didn’t bother me much. I had expected that we would almost always have to split up during the midday break due to charging times. In the end, however, the lunch or sightseeing break was often long enough to fully charge the Zero so that it could reach the next destination. What did impress me was how quickly and directly the Zero puts its torque down the first time it overtakes you – you see how fast it shrinks into the distance, and it suddenly makes sense why someone would want to ride one.”
The R 1300 GS rider:
“I never would have thought that riding style (speed, route planning) would have such a significant impact on range. But I also never would have thought that it would end up being so irrelevant: Even if we couldn’t ride together the entire day due to charging stops or range issues, we still almost always arrived at our destination at the same time.”
Closing thoughts
Manfred didn’t expect a mixed-fleet tour through Dalmatia and Bosnia – regions with charging infrastructure still well behind Central Europe – to go this smoothly, especially since the entire route was planned for and by petrol bikes, with charging having to adapt around it rather than the reverse. The few tight moments came down to circumstances (or, in Knin, rider error) rather than any real limitation of the bike.
His conclusion: petrol and electric motorcycles touring together already works far better than most riders would assume – the real differences show up in break planning, not in the riding itself. He closes half-jokingly asking readers not to rush out and buy electric bikes just yet, since being a small minority is exactly why hotels and chargers were so consistently available – a fleet of several electric bikes, or ones dependent solely on DC fast charging, would likely have forced real route changes.
For this trip, though: the route worked, the team worked, the infrastructure was enough, and so was the bike.
PDF for the number fetishists (German language) >
The full original article from Manfred Janek at SteckerBiker (in German language) can be found here: