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[Alan Stewart]

I sure didn’t see this coming.

https://electrek.co/2018/03/01/harley-davidson-electric-motorcycle-startup-alta-motors/

[roma258]

Whoah...did not see that coming. Harley's track record outside of their core competency is....not stellar. Best case scenario- Alta squeezes a bunch of cash out of the for R&D investment and comes out smelling like roses (a la MV Agusta). Worst case scenario- Buell part 2.

[Richard230]

Whoah...did not see that coming. Harley's track record outside of their core competency is....not stellar. Best case scenario- Alta squeezes a bunch of cash out of the for R&D investment and comes out smelling like roses (a la MV Agusta). Worst case scenario- Buell part 2.

Good analysis.  I guess Zero was a larger bite of the EV market than they wanted to take. 

[JaimeC]

Wasn't the now-defunct "Mission Motors" the company that helped develop the Livewire?  Yeah... good track record there, Harley Davidson.  If you own stock in Alta, now might be a good time to dump it...

[Richard230]

Here are two more interesting articles regarding Alta Motors published by Revzilla:

https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/harley-davidson-and-alta-motors-will-build-electric-harleys

https://www.revzilla.com/common-tread/how-did-alta-motors-drop-its-price-by-30-percent

[wavelet]

Whoah...did not see that coming. Harley's track record outside of their core competency is....not stellar. Best case scenario- Alta squeezes a bunch of cash out of the for R&D investment and comes out smelling like roses (a la MV Agusta). Worst case scenario- Buell part 2.

I'm afraid of the latter... Recall, Buell was completely profitable when they killed it, a significant achievement given the range of bike types they made over not that many unit overall , and how well they managed to reuse the HD engines; the Blast was also a good beginner bike which Harley didn't make at the time.
Electric bikes will take longer to sell enough to show profits. Even Polaris, which had much more potential to develop Brammo post-acquisition and had existing electric vehicles ended up abandoning it.