Shadowing Practice: Why Electric Motorcycles Are Failing and Nobody Will Admit It - Learn English Speaking with Video

Creating lesson...
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Every major motorcycle brand on the planet told you the same story.
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Electric motorcycles were coming and they were going to change everything.
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Harley -Davidson poured hundreds of millions into it.
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Zero motorcycles raised over $600 million from investors.
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Italian supercar engineers at Energica poured a decade of their lives into building the perfect electric sport bike.
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Tech startups in Vancouver, Stockholm, and London raised hundreds of millions more from backers who were convinced this was the next Tesla moment for two wheels.
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And for a while, if you watched the press conferences and read the headlines, you might have believed it was actually happening.
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But here is what none of these companies will tell you publicly.
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The premium electric motorcycle market in North America and Europe is not struggling.
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It is not in a transitional period.
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It is collapsing.
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And the numbers are so bad
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that the companies involved frame everything around market share percentages and future potential because raw sales figures tell a much harsher story.
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This is the story of how an entire industry bet on premium electric motorcycles before there was evidence
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that premium motorcycle buyers actually wanted them.
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Let's start with the number that tells you everything you need to know.
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Livewire is Harley -Davidson's electric motorcycle brand.
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They spun it off into its own publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange in 2022.
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They brought in investors, built a leadership team, launched new models, and positioned themselves as the future of American motorcycling.
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Harley literally bet its reputation on this brand.
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In 2025, Livewire sold 653 motorcycles worldwide for the entire year.
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Let that land for a second.
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653. That is not a monthly number.
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It is not a quarterly number.
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That is every Livewire motorcycle purchased by every customer in every country on earth across all 12 months of 2025.
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And the really wild part is this: it was actually an improvement.
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In 2024, they sold 612.
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So the year -over -year growth that Livewire celebrated in their annual Jesus.
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Livewire will tell you, and they do tell you in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings,
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that they hold roughly 70 % of all retail sales of street -legal electric motorcycles with 50
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or more horsepower in the United States.
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That is technically true.
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But when you do the math,
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it means the entire American premium 50 -plus horsepower electric street bike segment, every in 2025.
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For context, Harley -Davidson alone shipped roughly 130 ,000 gas -powered motorcycles that same year.
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A single midsize Honda dealership probably moves more inventory in 12 months than the entire premium electric motorcycle segment combined.
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But the sales numbers, as ugly as they are, do not even tell you the worst part.
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The financial losses behind those sales are absolutely staggering.
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In the first quarter of 2025,
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Livewire sold exactly 33 motorcycles worldwide while posting a $20 million consolidated operating loss as a company.
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33 bikes, $20 million gone.
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That includes research and development, corporate overhead, platform development, all of it, but the mismatch between what they are spending and what they are selling is extraordinary.
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This is a company that went public at a valuation of $1 .77 billion just three years earlier.
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For the full year, Livewire posted $75 million in operating losses against just $6 .1 million in actual motorcycle revenue.
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And here is the detail that really shows how sideways things went.
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Most of the company's total revenue of $25 .7 million dollars did not come from electric motorcycles at all.
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It came from Stacey YC, their children's electric balance bike business.
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The kids bikes outsold the real motorcycles by a factor of more than 30 to 1.
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By the fourth quarter of 2025, Livewire was running fire sale promotions,
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slashing $4 ,000 off the S2 Alpinista to get its price down to $11 ,999.
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61 % of the year's sales happened in that final quarter, juiced by aggressive incentives.
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The company's own filings admitted the revenue decline was driven by
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the impact of new incentives introduced in the third quarter of 2025.
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That is corporate speak, for we could not give these things away until we started practically giving them away.
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If Livewire's collapse were an isolated case, you could chalk it up to bad management or bad timing.
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But it isn't isolated, not even close.
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Zero Motorcycles has been building electric bikes longer than anyone.
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Founded in a garage in Santa Cruz, California, they have been at this since 2006.
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They have raised over $620 million from investors, including major backing from private equity firm Invas.
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They were supposed to be the proof of concept for this entire category.
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Instead, Xero hit a peak of 3 ,979 global sales in 2022, and then watched that number fall off a cliff.
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By 2024, they were down to 2 ,114 units.
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Through the first nine months of 2025, they had moved just 1 ,944 bikes, barely crawling ahead of the prior year,
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despite launching new off -road and scooter products.
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The internal turmoil tells you even more.
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In early 2024, Xero laid off roughly 10 % of its entire workforce and shut down its California assembly line,
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moving most manufacturing to the Philippines and the Netherlands.
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former Kia executive named Pierre Martin Boss in what was announced on a Friday morning with no transition period.
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If you have ever followed corporate leadership changes, you know that a same -day Friday CEO swap is almost never a planned succession.
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That is a firing.
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Employee reviews on Glassdoor paint a brutal picture.
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Workers described annual January layoffs as routine, leadership as product.
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One reviewer mentioned annual lawsuits filed against the company for false advertising, repeated quality issues, and safety concerns.
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And Zero is one of the survivors.
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If you want to see what happened to the companies that did not make it, The list reads like a war memorial.
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Energica was the Italian electric motorcycle maker that built the official race bike for the FIM Moto E World Cup.
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For motorcycle enthusiasts, that was a serious stamp of credibility.
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They had been in business for a decade, backed by American investment group Ideanomics, and they were supposed to prove that European engineering could solve the electric motorcycle puzzle.
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On October 14, 2024, Energica filed for bankruptcy judicial liquidation.
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The company had already slashed its workforce from 150 employees down to about 45,
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with the remaining workers on solidarity contracts paid by the Italian government's social security system.
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explanation cited the crisis in the electric market and the decline in sector investments.
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A decade of engineering, tens of millions in investment, and they could not sell enough bikes to keep the lights on.
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Cake was a Swedish electric motorcycle startup that everyone in the design world loved.
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sleek Scandinavian aesthetics, glowing media coverage, and roughly $74 million raised from venture capital.
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At their peak, they were valued near a billion dollars.
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On February 1st, 2024, they filed for bankruptcy after a lead investor pulled out during a funding round.
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The chief executive officer admitted they needed annual sales of 7 ,500 to 10 ,000 units just to break even.
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In their entire history, they had sold around 6 ,000 bikes total.
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And then there is Damon Motorcycles.
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which might be the most painful story in this entire space.
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Damon was the flashy Canadian startup that promised a 200 horsepower and 200 mile range hypersport motorcycle.
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They went public on NASDAQ in late 2024, claimed over $100 million in pre -orders from more than 3 ,000 customers,
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and looked like they were about to deliver on the dream.
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Instead, their stock price collapsed to less than a penny.
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The chief technology officer publicly walked out in early 2025.
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Their co -founder, chief financial officer, and board members resigned one after another.
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Headcount reportedly dropped from a peak of about 200 employees to 13.
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Sometime around April of 2026, the Damon Motorcycles website itself went offline, replaced by a generic site not found error page.
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Years after its splashy launch, no confirmed series production hyper sport motorcycles had reached ordinary customers.
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Arc vehicle in the UK built a gorgeous $128 ,000 electric motorcycle called the Vector.
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They delivered exactly 11 of them before entering voluntary liquidation.
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One of those 11 went to Ryan Reynolds.
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fuel, The electric brand founded by motorcycle legend Eric Buell shut down in late 2024 with customers left holding worthless deposits.
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Sondors reportedly had thousands of finished motorcycles abandoned in a Chinese factory when the company evaporated in late 2023.
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So why is this happening?
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Why did electric cars become a genuine mass market product
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while electric motorcycles can barely sell a thousand units a year in the richest country on earth?
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The answer is something the industry has spent years dancing around,
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and it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of who buys motorcycles and why.
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Electric cars succeeded because For most people, A car is a tool.
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You need it to get to work, to drop off the kids, to run errands.
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If someone offers you a tool that is quieter, smoother, cheaper to fuel, and accelerates faster, you'll take it.
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The average car buyer is not emotionally attached to their engine note.
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They just want to get from A to B without stopping at a gas station.
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Motorcycle buyers are the opposite.
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In North America and Europe, the vast majority of motorcycle purchases are recreational.
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Most bikes are second or third vehicles in the household.
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These are not commuters looking for efficiency.
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These are enthusiasts who already own a car and chose to spend extra money on a louder,
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more dangerous, less practical vehicle because the experience is the entire point.
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The rumble of the engine, the vibration through the handlebars,
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the bark of the exhaust on a downshift, morning.
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That is not a feature to be upgraded.
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That is the product.
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And electric motorcycles replace almost everything many traditional riders say they love.
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The sensory experience that premium motorcycle buyers pay for gets stripped away when you swap in a battery and a motor.
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Harley Davidson, a company that literally tried to trademark the sound of their V -twin engine,
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built a motorcycle The irony of that would be funny if it had not cost shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars.
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But even if you could convince riders to give up the sound and the feel, the practical problems would still be deal breakers.
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Range on electric motorcycles is brutal compared to gas equivalents.
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A Livewire S2 Alpinista at $12 ,000 gets roughly 80 to 120 miles of realistic mixed riding,
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depending on how aggressive you are with the throttle.
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A comparably priced gas motorcycle covers 200 to 300 miles on a single tank
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and refuels in 3 minutes at any gas station.
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For touring riders, the people who historically spend the most money on premium motorcycles, this gap is disqualifying.
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Charging infrastructure is somehow even worse for motorcycles than for cars.
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Most public fast chargers are designed with car -sized bays and CCS or NACS plugs.
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Many electric motorcycles only support J1772 connections and cannot take advantage of fast charging.
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every available bay.
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There is essentially zero motorcycle specific charging infrastructure anywhere in North America.
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Weight is a real problem.
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Batteries are heavy and while electric bikes do carry that mass low in the frame,
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more than a hundred extra pounds are still harder to hide on a motorcycle than in a two -ton car.
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A Zero SRF weighs about 485 pounds.
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A Livewire 1 tips the scales at around 560 pounds.
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Comparable gas bikes come in significantly lighter.
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For nimble canyon riding or low speed maneuvering, that difference matters.
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Aftermarket options are basically non -existent.
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Gas motorcycles support an enormous ecosystem of customization,
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exhausts, intakes, ECU tunes, fairings, handlebars, seats.
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The entire culture of making a bike yours has no equivalent in the electric car.
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These bikes are sealed appliances.
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You ride them as delivered, or you do not ride them.
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Resale values are terrible and getting worse.
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Multiple electric motorcycle manufacturers have gone bankrupt, leaving existing owners stranded without parts, warranty support, or service.
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J .D.
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Power has refused to even publish used values for certain electric motorcycle brands, because the resale market is too thin to track.
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Meanwhile, the industry PR machine keeps spinning.
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Livewire's annual report leads with the fact
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that they are the number one seller of 50 plus horsepower electric motorcycles in the United States.
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That claim covers a total market smaller than a decent sized biker rally parking lot.
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Their press materials celebrate a 32 % reduction in operating losses.
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The underlying unit growth was 41 motorcycles.
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The honest truth, and this is the thing no sitting executive will say publicly, is that premium electric motorcycles do not have an engineering problem waiting for better batteries.
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They have a product market fit problem.
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The people who buy premium motorcycles in western markets want exactly the things that electric drivetrains either remove or make worse.
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Sound, feel, range, fast refueling, cheap entry prices, modification culture, and community built around mechanical machines.
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Until that gap closes, either through dramatic price drops, completely new battery chemistry, or a fundamental demographic shift in who buys motorcycles,
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the numbers are going to keep telling the same story they told in 2025.
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A rounding error inside an already struggling industry, kept alive by corporate subsidies and marketing language framed around future potential
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because present day sales numbers tell a story nobody wants to read out loud.
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And the companies building these bikes know it.
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They just won't say it out loud.
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If this breakdown surprised you, hit subscribe.
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We cover stories like this every week, digging into the industries and companies that nobody else is being honest about.
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Now check out this next video where we go even deeper on a story the industry does not want you to see.

Context & Background

In this enlightening video, the speaker dives deep into the struggles faced by the electric motorcycle industry, revealing a harsh reality that contrasts sharply with the optimistic projections made by major brands. With significant investments from renowned manufacturers, the promise of electric motorcycles seemed bright. However, the speaker articulates that the premium electric motorcycle market in North America and Europe is not simply in transition; it is in a state of collapse. The statistics presented, such as the abysmal sales figures of Harley-Davison’s electric motorcycle brand, shine a light on the disconnect between consumer desires and industry expectations. By listening to this discourse, learners can not only grasp complex vocabulary and expressions but also comprehend the nuances of market dynamics.

Top 5 Phrases for Daily Communication

  • "This is the story of how an entire industry bet on..." - A phrase useful for discussing investments and risks.
  • "Let that land for a second." - A conversational way to ask for reflection or consideration.
  • "That is not a monthly number." - Helpful in specifying timelines for various contexts.
  • "Year-over-year growth" - An essential term for discussing progress or trends over time.
  • "Running fire sale promotions" - Useful for describing urgent sales or discounts.

Step-by-step Shadowing Guide

To fully benefit from this video and improve your English speaking skills, follow this structured shadowing guide:

  1. Watch the entire video once to grasp the main ideas and context. Pay close attention to the tone and pace of the speaker.
  2. Listen to short segments of the transcript (like the phrases highlighted above). Replay each segment multiple times, focusing on intonation and pronunciation.
  3. Use a shadowing app to record your voice while mimicking the speaker. This will help you identify areas for improvement in fluency and accent.
  4. Review your recordings and compare them to the original audio. Take notes on areas where your rhythm and intonation differ from the speaker.
  5. Incorporate these phrases into your daily conversations. Practice using them in different contexts until you feel confident and comfortable.

By following this guide diligently, you are empowering your English skills through effective shadow speaking techniques. Enhance your language learning journey by utilizing YouTube as a fun and engaging educational tool. Remember, practice makes progress!

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.