If they've only made a few bikes, why can't they fess up to it?
I wonder why it is that some of their stuff is so interesting and other parts half-assed.
-Crissa
I've never had any direct-interaction with them, but from everything I've read (here, various facebook groups, journalist interviews, other wbe forums) it at least looks simple:
The owner/CEO doesn't really have the personality, skills or interest to run a business with retail customers.
While clearly he's interested in e-motorcycles, and has done a lot of development work on them, there's the problem of finding funding for it, whereas it's not a field with too much sponsorship money. Making
production consumer e-motorcycles for retail, which are pretty expensive and sold only to the higher end market, requires full attention.
I've no idea what Hatfield's funding sources have been up to now, but it can't have been retail customers in any major way.
I've scoured the web multiple times, and it appears very unlikely the company has sold more than a mid-two-digit number of bikes ever since 2014, and that includes one-off projects to racers. Certainly no real consumer bikes at all (like the one thatwas reviewed in the videos here).
So the company's communications are severely lacking -- one of the missing skills -- and this going off on tangents (like enclosed bikes, a completely different market) long before the existing products have been sorted technically as prototypes, let alone productized, is typical of someone who's an inventor type, not an entrepreneur.
I've known plenty of both, working at a VC, and someone who's solely an inventor will never found a successful business, unless there's a closely-associated entrepreneur.
Author
Topic: Whatever Happened to Lightning Motorcycles? (Read 9608 times)