The Motorcycle Industry Council (MIC) has taken it upon itself to establish a new standard on how to gauge the range of electric motorcycles. Since their entry into the market, we’ve seen some interesting performance claims from electric motorcycle manufacturers — some more misleading than others. Doing a little self-policing, the MIC has stepped in and established a universal standard that will attempt to quantify the real-world range of electric two-wheelers.

This news is important for two reasons, with the first being the obvious need of some sort of apples-to-apples comparison between the electric motorcycle brands, and the MIC’s desire to intervene on the nonsense occurring in this space before things get really out of hand.

The other major takeaway from this news is perhaps more subtle, as the MIC’s interest in regulating electrics is incredibly telling of what’s coming down the pipe from the major OEMs. A group comprised of executives from the largest US motorcycle brands, one has to wonder why this organization would be interested in regulating this budding segment in the motorcycle industry, that is unless it was setting the groundwork for OEM involvement in the E2V space…and boom goes the dynamite.