There’s been a flurry of news articles lately about how sales of electric cars in the United States slowed during the second half of 2023. Will sales of electric motorcycles — already far less successful in the U.S. market than cars and commercial vehicles — take an even bigger hit?
We’ll find out more late this month, when Harley-Davidson announces quarterly financial results, which include the all-electric LiveWire spinoff company. It’s one of the few solid, public data points we get about the U.S. electric motorcycle market, and this is a particularly critical time for LiveWire, because sales were so dismal in its last report and this is the first one that will indicate whether its second model, the less expensive S2 Del Mar, is ramping up sales as it’s expected to. There are serious reasons to wonder.
EV sales: What we know, what we can speculate
To be clear, electric vehicle sales hit a new record in 2023 and will set another record in 2024. But various media have reported that sales weakened in the second half of 2023, falling short of the expected growth rate. Ford and GM scaled back EV production plans. Not everyone thinks its much to worry about, however. This analysis from Car and Driver considers the slower growth rate a temporary phenomenon mostly due to external factors such as interest rates and delays on bringing more affordable models to market.
What about the relatively tiny electric motorcycle market? Stuck between electric cars and electric bicycles, electric motorcycles in the United States are an insignificant blip. But I have reason to believe even those small sales numbers are hitting a wall and there may be less reason for optimism about a long-term rebound in sales.
As a privately held company, Zero Motorcycles, the largest electric motorcycle company in the United States, does not disclose sales figures, but anecdotal evidence suggests sales slowed in 2023, as happened on the car side. I see lots of new 2023 Zero models still for sale and the company is offering incentives ranging from $750 to $1,250 on those leftovers.
Meanwhile, LiveWire, when the company was spun off as a separate publicly traded entity, said it planned to sell 100,000 electric motorcycles a year worldwide by 2026. Instead, production of the S2 Del Mar was delayed and sales of the company’s only full-size motorcycle, the LiveWire ONE, dried up. So in the third quarter of 2023, LiveWire sold just 50 motorcycles, down from 206 in Q3 of 2022.
Sales of the $22,000 LiveWire ONE dried up in the second half of 2023, so the company is counting on the less expensive S2 Del Mar to rev up sales figures. LiveWire photo.
Here’s the speculation part: What this looks like to me is that all the early adopters have adopted. Harley-Davidson initially sold their flagship electric motorcycle as the Harley-Davidson LiveWire for around $30,000 to the earliest adopters. Then, after the spinoff, you could buy basically the same motorcycle, now called the LiveWire ONE, for about $22,000. My take is that everyone who wants one and can afford one now has one. All of this may be irrelevant if the Del Mar, as LiveWire hopes, expands the market by appealing to additional buyers with its price tag around $16,000. But if LiveWire hit a spot of weakness in the second half of 2023, like the EV car industry, that’s going to be extraordinarily bad timing, because the company really needs strong sales of Del Mars to show it’s not a one-trick pony that did its one trick and now is retired to pasture.
Yes, sales of electric cars will keep growing, though maybe not at the pace manufacturers or climate scientists would like. And sales in other parts of the world haven’t seen the same slow patch that we saw here in the U.S. market.
But electric motorcycles are a different story, and a much more uncertain one. As a transportation option, they face real challenges. You can only load so many heavy batteries into a motorcycle before it becomes unpleasant to ride, and for those who are just looking for local, urban transportation, electric bicycles are less expensive and don’t require a special license or registration.
Has the minimal demand for electric motorcycles in the U.S. market already dried up? We’ll find out more soon.
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