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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EV sales kept up their momentum in December 2024, with incentives playing a big role, according to the latest Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book report.
December’s strong EV sales saw an average transaction price (ATP) of $55,544, which helped push the industry-wide ATP higher, according to Kelley Blue Book. The December ATP for an EV was higher year-over-year by 0.8%, slightly below the industry average, and higher month-over-month by 1.1%. Tesla ATPs were higher year-over-year by 10.5%.
Incentives for EVs remained elevated in December, although they were slightly lower month-over-month at 14.3% of ATP, down from 14.7% in November.
EV incentives were higher by an impressive 41% year-over-year and have been above 12% of ATP for six consecutive months. Strong sales incentives, which averaged more than $6,700 per sale in 2024, were one reason EV sales surpassed 1.3 million units last year, according to Cox Automotive, a new record for volume and share.
(My colleague Jameson Dow reported yesterday, “In 2024, the world sold 3.5 million more EVs than it did in the previous year … This increase is larger than the 3.2 million increase in EV sales from the previous year – meaning that EV sales aren’t just up, but that the rate of growth is itself increasing.”)
Kelley Blue Book estimated that in December, approximately 84,000 vehicles – or 5.6% of total sales – transacted at prices higher than $80,000 – the highest volume ever. KBB lumps gas cars and EVs together into this luxury vehicle category, so this is where Tesla Cybertruck is slotted.
However, Tesla bundles sales figures of Cybertruck with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi(!) into a category it calls “other models,” so we don’t know for sure exactly how many Cybertrucks Tesla sold in Q4, much less in December. However, Electrek‘s Fred Lambert estimates between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks were sold in Q4, and that’s not a stellar sales figure.
What will January bring when it comes to EV ATPs? What about tax credits? Check back in a month and I’ll fill you in.
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Tesla is now claiming that Cybertruck was the ‘best-selling electric pickup in US’ last year despite not even reporting the number of deliveries.
There’s a lot of context needed here.
As we often highlighted, Tesla is sadly one of, if not the most, opaque automakers regarding sales reports.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model or even region.
For comparison, here’s Ford’s Q4 2024 sales report compared to Tesla’s:
You could argue that Tesla has fewer models than Ford, and that’s true, but Tesla’s report literally has two lines despite having six different models.
There’s no reason not to offer a complete breakdown like all other automakers other than trying to make it hard to verify the health of each vehicle program.
This has been the case with the Cybertruck. Tesla is bundling its Cybertruck deliveries with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi deliveries.
Despite this lack of disclosure, Tesla has been able to claim that the Cybertruck has become “the best-selling electric pickup truck” in the US in 2024:
It very well might be true. Ford disclosed 33,510 F-150 Lightning truck deliveries in the US in 2024 while most estimates are putting Cybertruck deliveries at around 40,000 units.
Those are global deliveries, but Tesla only delivered the Cybertruck in the US, Canada, and Mexico in 2024, and most of the deliveries are believed to be in the US.
However, there’s essential context needed here, as we highlighted in our recent ‘Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous‘ article.
First off, Tesla had a backlog of over 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck that it has been building since 2019. This led many to believe Tesla already had years of demand baked in for the truck and that production would be the constraint.
However, based on estimates, again, because Tesla refuses to disclose the data, Cybertruck deliveries were either flat or down in Q4 versus Q3 despite Tesla introducing cheaper versions of the vehicle and ramping up production.
Again, that’s after just about 40,000 deliveries.
Furthermore, with almost 11,000 deliveries in Q4 in the US, Ford more likely than not outsold Cybertruck with the F-150 Lightning in Q4.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is in damage control here. There’s no doubt that it is having issues selling the Cybertruck.
Inventory is full of Cybertrucks and Tesla is now discounting them and offering free lifetime Supercharging.
Tesla is great at ramping up production, and it’s clear the Cybertruck is not production-constrained anymore. It is demand-constrained despite having over 1 million reservations.
Again, those reservations were made before Tesla unveiled the production version, which happened to have less range and cost significantly more.
The upcoming cheaper single motor version should help with demand, but I have serious doubts Tesla can ramp this program up to more than 100,000 units in the US.
As a reminder, Tesla installed a production capacity of 250,000 units annually and Musk said he could see Tesla selling 500,000 Cybertrucks per year.
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