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General Category => Electric Motorcycle News => Topic started by: Alan Stewart on March 01, 2018, 10:20:09 PM

Title: Harley Davidson invests in Alta Motors
Post by: Alan Stewart on March 01, 2018, 10:20:09 PM: I sure didnâ€™t see this coming.

https://electrek.co/2018/03/01/harley-davidson-electric-motorcycle-startup-alta-motors/ (https://electrek.co/2018/03/01/harley-davidson-electric-motorcycle-startup-alta-motors/)
Title: Re: Harley Davidson invests in Alta Motors
Post by: roma258 on March 01, 2018, 10:43:55 PM: 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.
Title: Re: Harley Davidson invests in Alta Motors
Post by: Richard230 on March 01, 2018, 11:01:34 PM: Quote from: roma258 on March 01, 2018, 10:43:55 PM
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. ;)
Title: Re: Harley Davidson invests in Alta Motors
Post by: JaimeC on March 01, 2018, 11:26:06 PM: 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...
Title: Re: Harley Davidson invests in Alta Motors
Post by: Richard230 on March 05, 2018, 09:44:07 PM: 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
Title: Re: Harley Davidson invests in Alta Motors
Post by: wavelet on March 16, 2018, 03:21:17 AM: Quote from: roma258 on March 01, 2018, 10:43:55 PM
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.