It’s not hard to find someone, be it a journalist or everyday person, who thinks electric cars are the future. While some companies struggle to sell electric cars, Tesla gets so many people in EVs that it’s making best-seller charts. The same cannot be said for the electric motorcycle industry. As of this month, things are looking bleak. Fuell, Erik Buell’s venture for electric motorcycles, is dead. It joins a list of other freshly dead companies including Energica and Sondors as well as struggling brands including LiveWire and Cake. Now, Zero Motorcycles is asking for more money as it seems everyone isn’t having a good time selling electric motorcycles.
I’ve known for a while now that electric motorcycle manufacturers have been struggling. However, I didn’t realize things were as bad as they were until I ran into a Tech Crunch article from yesterday. In it, Sean O’Kane points out which brands are struggling and which brands are dead, and what I read shocked me. A couple of these brands died just days ago with their corpses still warm, leaving the whole industry feeling uneasy.
One thing is clear, and it’s that electric motorcycles aren’t catching on nearly as well as electric cars are, and there could be more stormy weather ahead.
The Dead Ones
I think I’ll start this with the companies that have already died.
On October 17, Electrek reported the Chapter 7 bankruptcy of the promising upstart that was Fuell, a company co-founded by motorcycle legend Erik Buell.
In the report, Electrek‘s Micah Toll writes about how Fuell successfully delivered on its Flluid-1 eBike, but failed to deliver the Flluid-2 and Flluid-3 at scale despite the company getting over $1.5 million in crowdfunding. These electric bicycles were supposed to fund Fuell’s flagship product, an electric motorcycle designed and engineered by Erik Buell. This was supposed to be Buell’s answer to the future of motorcycles and the one product that would have his name on it that was actually designed by him. The Autopian had been in contact with Fuell and we were supposed to ride the Fuell Fllow when a prototype of it was ready.
Contacts to Fuell are met with this response, emphasis mine:
To the creditors of Fuell Inc,
I am currently representing Fuell Inc. in a chapter 7 bankruptcy proceeding filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin on October 16, 2024 as case #24-25492. A trustee has been appointed to liquidate the assets of the Company. All creditors will be advised to file claims in that proceeding as it appears that there may be assets for payment of unsecured claims after all of the secured claims are paid or otherwise dealt with. A copy of the Notice of the Case is posted nearby.
Management regrets the Company has been forced to take this path. Unfortunately, the Company lacks funds to pay for the labor costs and other required services necessary to assemble and ship products to its customers, and additional funds could not be raised to pay the Company’s outstanding current liabilities or to pay for the assembly and shipment of pre-ordered electric bicycles. I hasten to add that the Company has on hand what it believes to be the parts necessary for the assembly of the bulk of, if not all of the pre-ordered electric bicycles.
After consultation, management has determined that a promptly filed chapter 7 was the best way to provide value for the significant assets held by the Company including, but not limited to, a purchase from the bankruptcy trustee of substantially all of the assets of Fuell Inc. by an interested party who may subsequently, with effort and negotiations, potentially restart the operations and move forward. Obviously, this is the route preferred by management, but it is complicated and fraught with risk. Any creditor or interested party that has such an interest should be contemplating retaining experienced bankruptcy counsel to negotiate with the Trustee for such a purchase.
As the Company has little to no funds, and no employees, it is unable to directly answer creditors’ questions concerning specific orders. Creditors may direct questions to the Trustee who will be apprised of the situation. Since there are no employees at the Company to respond to questions at this time, current inquiries to the company will go unanswered.
All known creditors will receive the notice of the bankruptcy filing and advised to file claims. If you have placed a deposit for the purchase of a product, your claim may be entitled to priority to an extent. You may want to consult with a lawyer on this issue.
Great effort is being made to provide enough information in the bankruptcy schedules so that there is at least a possibility that a potential purchaser of the assets may be able to restart the Company or otherwise redeploy the assets to produce the product intended. Current equity will lose everything that is been invested in the company through this chapter 7 bankruptcy filing.
We trust that this information may be of some cold comfort to you as a creditor of the Company and will certainly give you an idea of what you can expect in the immediate future. As indicated above, you will be notified of the bankruptcy filing as a creditor or other interested party.
If you have an interest in purchasing the assets through the bankruptcy process or know of anyone who may have such an interest, you may contact the Trustee or the undersigned to discuss potential avenues to accomplish that.
Sincerely,
PAUL G. SWANSON
Attorney at Law
Ouch. It’s a shame, because I’ve been following Erik Buell for years and was excited to ride the Fllow, even if Buell’s expectations for it were a bit too ambitious. Now, it’s gone. Unfortunately, the pain isn’t over for Fuell’s customers, either. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, anyone who put money into the Fuell project and got the shaft now has to chase Fuell into bankruptcy court to get their money back. The company no longer even has employees who could issue you a refund.
Then there’s the Italian electric motorcycle firm Energica. This company was known for making electric motorcycles with enough range and charging speed to complete actual cross-country trips. Unlike Fuell, Energica was not a crowdfunded startup. This company was founded in 2014 and had an established line of motorcycles. For example, an Energica Experia (below) had a chunky 19.6 kWh nominal battery, which gave the motorcycle 261 miles of city range and 130 miles of actual highway range.
Unfortunately, its focus on huge batteries and touring range also meant the company’s bikes were expensive. For example, the Experia was $23,250 before any options. Still, along with Zero, Energica was sometimes considered one of the closest brands the electric motorcycle world had to Tesla.
On October 15, Cycle News reported that it, too, had thrown in the towel. Energica first thought it could get through by shaving its workforce by 70 percent, but ultimately, it also decided that to completely shut down its operation. From Energica:
“Despite the efforts from the management in actively and extensively pursuing a search for new investors – always with the aim of preserving going concern in the best interest of creditors – it has become clear in the last few hours that these alternative options are no more viable, thus leaving the company with no other choice than resolving for the opening of a bankruptcy judicial liquidation.”
Yikes! Another known name in the electric motorcycle world that has failed is Sondors.
The makers of the futuristic Metacycle struggled almost from the beginning. Remember, the Metacycle was supposed to be a quick, highway-capable electric motorcycle for just $5,000. Unfortunately, it launched with specs roughly half that as promised, eventually with a higher price than advertised, and as Electrek reported, the motorcycles may not have even been actually road legal, anyway. That company went belly up in late 2023 with the fallout bleeding well into 2024, leaving existing owners without spare parts or any support. Like Fuell, Sondors was also sitting on a stack of money given to it by prospective customers.
Sondors was such a blunder that, as Electrek reported, thousands of bikes were abandoned in the company’s Chinese factory and bills went unpaid as the company effectively just vaporized. Fans and customers aren’t thrilled, to say the least. It’s believed Sondors may have sold perhaps “nearly 2,000” motorcycles. The company was founded in 2015, but didn’t start its first deliveries until late 2022. So, Sondors didn’t even really survive a full year on the market before failing.
Somehow the bloodbath continues.
Cake, the Swedish manufacturer of seriously cute electric motorcycles, filed for bankruptcy in February of this year after it too, couldn’t keep enough money to stay afloat. Cake was a startup that was founded in 2018 and its original mission involved the creation of lightweight minibike-like motorcycles. While the company never got big, it did become known enough to collaborate with the likes of Polestar.
Yet, like the brands above, Cakes were also premium machines, or at least had premium prices. It sold the Makka moped with a top speed of 15 mph for $3,800 and the tiny Bukk dirt bike for $9,470.
Weirdly, Cake didn’t stay dead. After Cake failed, its assets were scooped up by Norwegian car dealer Brages Holding AS, which plans an “ambitious quest to lead the premium electric two-wheeler segment in targeted markets.” That one’s a head-scratcher since, as you’ve read thus far and will read in a little bit, selling premium electric motorcycles is a struggle. But, we’ll see if Cake manages to stay alive this time.
If I keep naming dead brands this article will go on forever. Two more names that started the year alive but didn’t make it through 2024 are Arc Vector and Onyx Motorbikes. If you expand the list further to brands that died years ago, you’ll see Brammo, Mission, and Alta all on the list of failures.
Burning Cash
There are probably other dead motorcycle brands I’m missing here, but those are a handful of the bigger names. Sadly, we’re not done yet because there are still two companies out there that are alive, but are still struggling.
The first we’ll talk about is LiveWire, the Harley-Davidson-controlled spin-off electric motorcycle brand. The company keeps launching new models, but sales are slow. LiveWire sold 597 motorcycles in 2022 and just 660 motorcycles in 2023. The company says it lost $85 million in 2022 with the losses deepening to $125 million in 2023. How rough is it for LiveWire? The company sold exactly zero of its flagship LiveWire One motorcycles in 2023. LiveWire is expected to burn up to $115 million of Harley-Davidson’s money by the end of this year and still end up selling well under 1,000 motorcycles doing it.
According to LiveWire, the motorcycles aren’t even bringing in that much money. In the third quarter, LiveWire sold $3.2 million in children’s balance bikes compared to just $1.2 million made from selling 99 electric motorcycles.
Zero Motorcycles seems to be going through its own thing. Zero doesn’t have a big parent like Harley-Davidson to keep on giving it money, so it gets rounds of funding to support its projects. As Tech Crunch reports, Zero is currently in the process of closing a funding round of $120 million. That goes on top of another funding round of $107 million from back in 2022 in which it got money from Polaris Industries and Hero MotoCorp. The investors aren’t disclosed this time around, but Zero says it’ll use the money to fund expansion and the development of new motorcycles.
Zero does not release sales numbers, but in 2022, it did say that it sold over 20,000 vehicles since its founding in 2006. In 2020, the company reportedly sold 3,500 electric motorcycles.
Why Are These Brands Struggling?
Of course, this begs a big question: Why are electric motorcycle brands struggling? As a motorcyclist, there are a few factors that I think make electric motorcycles unattractive as compared to something like a Tesla.
Back in September, I chatted with engineers at Canada’s BRP. The powersports manufacturer is just now hitting the market with electric motorcycles right in the midst of this industry struggle. One of the concerns of the engineers was trying to find a perfect balance. BRP’s engineers told me that current battery technology limitations mean that they have only so many levers they can pull.
They could make a motorcycle with lots of range like an Energica, but the current way to do that would be to pile on the batteries. The result would be a heavy electric motorcycle with an extremely high price. They could make a motorcycle that is super lightweight and agile by taking batteries out. This would cut down both cost and weight, but nobody wants a motorcycle that can’t actually go anywhere. Unfortunately, until there’s a breakthrough in battery tech, this is what things are like.
So, BRP’s engineers found something sort of in the middle. The question now becomes if buyers would be willing to pay $13,999 for a motorcycle with 80 miles of combined range and 47 HP on tap.
Pretty much all of the world’s electric motorcycle manufacturers are pulling similar levers. Cheaper electric motorcycles tend to have bad range while the ones that have good range cost too much.
Take the 2023 Zero DSR/X that I’ve been testing for a year and four months now.
Zero says this electric adventure motorcycle costs $22,995 and in my experience, you can reliably get 120 miles of range out of it if you stay off of the highway. However, it takes nearly 3 hours to charge, if you can find a functional level 2 charger wherever you’re headed. As of right now, a BMW R 1300 GS has a starting price of $18,895, will go lots of miles on a highway, and takes less than 5 minutes to refuel to get you back onto a road or trail.
In other words, you really have to be into EV technology to want the Zero over the BMW.
Let’s pick another bike, the $6,495 Ryvid Anthem.
We love the Anthem for its trick technology, but there are compromises here, too. It gets 48 miles of combined highway range and the standard model makes 20 HP. A Honda Rebel 300 makes similar power for $4,849 and doesn’t have to stop every 48 miles during your commute.
This isn’t to say that the electric motorcycle market isn’t growing. Data shows that there’s still tons of interest out there. China and India both buy electric two-wheelers in the tens of millions of units. Here’s what it looked like in 2021, from McKinsey Insights:
In 2022, around half of the millions of motorcycles sold in China were electric.
However, look at how small the numbers are for North America and Europe. One thing to remember is that in America, motorcycles tend to be more for leisure than for transportation. Someone in China or India may buy an electric motorcycle as their daily driver to scoot through their congested city. Range doesn’t really matter as much for that use case. In addition to that, electric motorcycles out there tend to be dirt cheap. But here in America, motorcyclists like to go on long rides across vast expanses of places where charging infrastructure sucks.
I still cannot do my favorite local ride on the DSR/X press bike because it can’t do the trip without charging at least three times, taking up at least 6 hours in charging alone. That’s just not something a cheaper gas bike will a problem with.
So, at least here in North America, I’m not sure the troubled seas will calm soon. BRP appears to be banking on a battery breakthrough that will allow it to offer more range for a cheaper price. Maybe that’s the future. Or, maybe there are just too many startup companies competing in a market that’s not large enough to support them yet. Either way, all of this is a darn shame because electric motorcycles are awesome. But, maybe something needs to change.
(Images: Manufacturers, unless otherwise noted.)
IMO, only Ryvid and Livewire currently hit the sweet-spot for price vs performance. Electric motorcycles are a challenging problem to solve because batteries are so expensive, and the pandemic really hurt pricing there. You really want at least 15kwh for a daily driver motorcycle, and there aren’t many of those in existence, let alone at a reasonable price.
OTOH, for a fun weekend toy, anything above 10k will have a really tough market, and the more expensive you get the harder it is to justify vs other things. Rivian a $6.5k is pricey, but I wouldn’t feel ripped off for what I got. If they survive long enough for the next generation of batteries to hit mass production (circa 2028), I think they’ll do gangbusters. Right now, they just have to do alright enough to be around then.
Hot, Simple Take: Nobody wants these because they’re useless.
Aside from “Its Electric!” what’s the value prop that offsets the charging complications?
I feel like around here in MN I see a non trivial amount of Surrons. Maybe it’s inconsequential numbers but I suspect ebikes and ebike straddlers like Surron, Super 73 etc are the culprit here.
Not Energica! Guess that means the electric motorcycle race series is dead.
Electric bicycles make sense. Pop down to the corner store for a snack? Perfect. Commuting? Maybe, only if you’re in a pretty urban environment or are commuting to a pretty close location from home in the suburbs.
Electric motorcycles? Nah, not in the US market. The motorcycle market is, as mentioned, a toy market. Very few full time commuters on bikes. The toy owners, they actually like their engines. It’s kind of the point. You’re a body clinging to an engine connected to 2 wheels. They’re the anti- appliance vehicle. Additionally, they’re so fuel efficient anyway, the perk of zero fuel expense is kind of moot, especially when you consider how cheap used motorcycles are compared to new electric. In other countries where a majority of people do commute on bikes through heavily congested urban areas, they may make a lot more sense. They do make a lot of sense, actually.
I’d ride an electric bicycle in a heart beat for trails, running to my neighbor’s place down the street, etc. My R-bike is at no risk of being replaced by a LiveWire, though.
This is it. Surrons style straddlers and Moped Style ebikes like super 73s are eating the actual meat and bones for motorcycle sales.
Yeah, when it comes to urban environments electric bikes are far more useful than electric motorcyles. They’re far cheaper than electric motorcycles; they can typically get up to 25 or 30 mph with very little peddling effort, which is more than enough for congested city traffic; and they usually have a range of 50 to 100 miles; and you can charge them in your house. So for the city, I think e-bikes currently beat electric motorcycles.
And then when it comes to highway cruising, like Mercedes pointed out ICE is so vastly superior to ev propulsion right now. The use-case for electric motorcycles just seems too small, until solid state batteries become a realistic option.
The use case for highway cruising motorcycles where i live in MN is about the same venn diagram circle as the use case for a RV.
Cake forgot that you can’t have your cake and eat it too
Electric motorcycles are pointless. Gas models can get amazing MPGs, and e-bikes have the urban/last mile commute on lock down
“Cheaper electric motorcycles tend to have bad range while the ones that have good range cost too much.”
Yep right here. Most bikers I know don’t want to won a bike that’s only good for a commute. Why own 2 bikes when one will commute well and is fun to ride on the weekends for a better price.
Here in the U.S. at least electric bikes are a answer to a question that no one asked.
Electric bikes are a product with no market, imo. Seems to me, someone who mostly doesn’t know what they’re talking about…
There are two types of people in the places these are sold: bike riders and non-bike riders. There’s a small fraction of the non-bike riders that are circumstantially non-bike, but other than that there’s little to no conversion from non-rider to rider.
Among the bike riders there’s two types of people: those willing to spend over $10/20/30k for a bike and those who are not. The high rollers are buying Harleys, fully loaded tourers, and scary fast sport bikes. These electrics aren’t scratching the itch of any of those people, and the people who might find them attractive aren’t paying those prices.
So who’s left that might buy these? Folks with enough disposable income they don’t have to think about spending this kind of money on something just because they find it curious or interesting, and bike riders in areas with the weather and standard of living high enough these can be primary transportation/commuter. That’s not a big enough group to even call it a “market segment”, much less build a business around.
50 bucks says Bill Melvin buys all of Fuell’s assets and patents, any takers?