Harley Davidson CEO says the brand ‘will be all-electric’ in the future
Harley-Davidson was one of the first major motorcycle manufacturers to add electric motorcycles to its lineup last decade. It should come as no surprise then that the company’s CEO Jochen Zeitz is already saying that the brand’s future will be 100% electric.
It won’t happen overnight but rather is likely to take decades for the bar-and-shield motorcycle company to go fully-electric.
That’s how Zeitz described the transition in a recent interview with Dezeen.
“At some point in time, Harley Davidson will be all-electric,” he explained. “But that’s a long-term transition that needs to happen. It’s not something you do overnight.”
With its design heritage spanning well over a century, Harley-Davidson is of course best known for its loud, large displacement internal combustion engine (ICE)-powered motorcycles. But the company’s past was also defined by constant evolution, Zeitz continued.
“If you look at the past 120 years, the company has always evolved, never stood still,” he explained. “Now, like the founders did at the time by trying to reinvent or invent something unique, that’s obviously something that we as a company brand need to do as well. What we’re doing is celebrating our past but also evolving the brand at the same time. It’s a natural evolution that needed to happen.”
Zeitz isn’t afraid of making big changes, even for a brand with as rich of a legacy as Harley-Davidson.
“I believe in big transformational change for iconic brands, which is what I’ve always done in my life,” he said.
The first Harley-Davidson electric motorcycle, known as the LiveWire, first rolled into customer’s garages in 2019 after the bike’s 2018 EICMA debut.
Harley-Davidson then decided to spin out its electric motorcycle operations under a new sub-brand, also called LiveWire. The first model under LiveWire, the LiveWire One, was inherited from H-D’s first electric motorcycle and largely just rebadged under the new sub-brand.
Now LiveWire is in the process of bringing its second model to production, the LiveWire S2 Del Mar, which is designed to be a more mass market electric motorcycle intended to reach younger, more urban riders.
Electrek’s Take
As much as some diehard old school Harley-Davidson fans would like to protest it, the fact that the brand will eventually go all-electric is a foregone conclusion. Eventually it will either be go electric or go out of business. That’s not just the case for H-D, but also for all automakers that currently produce ICE-powered vehicles.
So it’s not like it’s a surprise that H-D has to go electric. What is more surprising is that the company is saying the quiet part out loud.
But Zeitz has been a champion of the brand’s electric aspirations since he took the reins as part of a company shakeup, and so he would be the one to speak directly without hiding behind vagueness and hyperbole.
However, if we accept the idea that electrification is an inevitability, even if it takes decades to arrive, what does that mean for Harley and its sub-brand LiveWire? Does Harley-Davidson cease to exist, with LiveWire taking over all of Harley’s operations? Does Harley-Davidson re-absorb LiveWire into the fold as if the spin-off never happened?
It will be an awkward day of reckoning when it arrives. But make no mistake, it will arrive.
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Saudi Aramco’s Ras Tanura oil refinery and oil terminal
Ahmed Jadallah | Reuters
Saudi state oil giant Aramco reported a 15.4% drop in net profit in the third-quarter on the back of “lower crude oil prices and weakening refining margins,” but maintained a 31.05 billion dividend.
The company reported net income of $27.56 billion in the July-September period, topping a company-provided estimate of $26.9 billion. The print is also a 5% drop from the previous quarter, which came in at $29.1 billion, as lower global oil prices, weaker demand and prolonged OPEC+ production cuts led by Saudi Arabia continue to impact crude prices.
The average selling price of oil for the second quarter of 2024 stood at $85 per barrel, but dropped to $78.7 per barrel during the third quarter, according to Saudi-based bank Al Rajhi capital, as non-OPEC supply volumes grew.
The oil firm said its year-on-year decline was partly offset by a “reduction in selling, administrative and general expenses primarily driven by a gain from derivative instruments, and a decrease in production royalties largely reflecting lower crude oil prices and a lower average effective royalty rate compared to the same quarter last year.”
Aramco’s dividend includes a base payout of $20.3 billion and an atypical performance-linked one of $10.8 billion. The Saudi government and the kingdom’s sovereign wealth vehicle, the Public Investment Fund, are the main beneficiaries of the dividend, holding stakes of roughly 81.5% and 16% in the company.
The remaining shareholding trades freely on Saudi Arabia’s Tadāwul stock exchange, with the company having finalized its second public share offering back in June.
Aramco’s earnings before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) came in at $51.45 billion in the third quarter, down 17% year-on-year. Aramco’s capital expenditure guidance was brought up 20% to $13.23 billion.
The company was trading at 27.45 riyals following the announcement, down 0.18% on the previous day.
The earnings align with a broader trend across oil majors, whose third-quarter profits have also suffered from declines in crude prices and refining margins. Aramco said it achieved average realized crude price of $79.3 per barrel in the third quarter, compared with $89.3 per barrel in the same period of last year.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter who produces roughly 9 million barrels per day of crude at present, serves as the de facto leader of the OPEC+ oil producers’ alliance, a subset of whom agreed over the weekend to delay a planned December output hike by one month.
“Aramco delivered robust net income and generated strong free cash flow during the third quarter, despite a lower oil price environment,” CEO Amin Nasser said in a statement. “We also progressed our upstream developments, strengthened our downstream value chain, and advanced our new energies program as we continue to invest through cycles.”
The revenues will be a boon to the Saudi economy, which is currently undergoing a diversification process under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s legacy Vision 2030 scheme spanning a slew of high-cost infrastructure “gigaprojects.”
Earlier this year, Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance cut the kingdom’s growth forecast to 0.8% in 2024, in a steep decline from a previous projection of 4.4%, and raised the outlook for the national budgetary shortfall to roughly 2.9% of GDP, from a prior indication of 1.9%.
On today’s episode of Quick Charge, Tesla’s Cybertruck is now available in Canada – and, like in the US, there’s no waiting! Plus, we’ve got an “actually” smart summon Tesla that’s actually stuck, GM reaches a sales milestone, and we get a brand-new title sponsor!
Today’s episode is the first with our new title sponsor, BLUETTI – a leading provider of portable power stations, solar generators, and energy storage systems.
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![This 'supercharger on wheels' brings fast charging to you [update]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2024/05/EV-mobile-charging-with-Yoshi-Mobility-3.jpg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Mobile car care company Yoshi Mobility launched a DC fast charging EV mobile unit that it likens to “a supercharger on wheels.”
November 4, 2024 update: Yoshi Mobility will only be charging EVs on the side of the road now – it announced today that it’s selling its fleet fueling operation to EZFill Holdings (Nasdaq: EZFL).
It was originally founded as a direct-to-consumer, mobile fueling business in 2016, but now it’s going to focus on mobile EV charging, virtual vehicle inspections for partners like Uber and Turo, and onsite preventative maintenance.
Bryan Frist, Yoshi Mobility’s CEO & cofounder, said, “By spinning off our fuel business and focusing all of our energy on solving hair-on-fire problems that fleet owners face, we are meeting the changing needs of enterprise customers while making the future of transportation safer, cleaner, and more sustainable.”
May 22, 2024: Yoshi Mobility saw that its existing customers needed mobile EV charging in places where infrastructure has yet to be installed, so the Nashville-based company decided to bring the mountain to Moses.
“We recognized a demand among our customers for convenient daily charging, reliable private charging networks, and proper charging infrastructure to support their fleet vehicles as they transition to electric,” said Dan Hunter, Yoshi Mobility’s chief EV officer and cofounder.
The company says its 240 kW mobile DC fast charger, which can turn “any EV” into a mobile charging unit, is the first fully electric mobile charger available. It can provide multiple charges in a single trip but doesn’t detail how they charge the DC fast charger or who manufactured it. (I asked for more details, and they replied that they won’t disclose client names or the manufacturer of its DC fast charger yet.)
Yoshi is launching its mobile charger on two GM BrightDrop Zevo 600s and will introduce additional vehicles throughout 2024. It aims for full commercialization by Q1 2025. (I wonder if the Zevo 600 ever charges itself? Yes, I asked that too.)
Yoshi Mobility says it’s already deployed its EV charging solutions to service “major OEMs, autonomous vehicle companies, and rideshare operators” across the US. Its initial customers are made up of large EV operators managing “hundreds” of light-duty vehicles requiring up to 1 megawatt of energy per day that don’t yet have grid-connected EV chargers. I’ve asked Yoshi for details of who it’s working with, and will update if they share that info.
The company says pricing is based on location and enterprise charging needs. Once under contract for service, the service will be deployed to US-based customers within 10 days.
To date, Yoshi Mobility has raised more than $60 million, with investments from GM Ventures, Bridgestone, ExxonMobil, and Y-Combinator in Silicon Valley.
Read more: Mercedes-Benz just opened more DC fast chargers at Buc-ee’s in Texas
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