It’s still too cold and icy for the Milwaukee Missile to do anything but slumber at the back of the garage, hooked up to her battery tender and waiting for warmer days. All I can do is dream, and consume motorcycle news and stories with a mixture of jealous longing and growing anticipation. What should fall into my inbox today, but a press-release from Fuell (not a mis-spelling), formerly VanguardSpark, announcing their newest products!
I’ve been following Vanguard for a couple of years since they announced their flagship product, an aggressive looking motorcycle which seems to have never gotten past the prototype stage.
Now they seem to have either totally rebranded, or spun off a seperate company to focus on electric motorcycles, with their first two products, the FUELL Fluid and FUELL Flow slated for 2019 and 2021 releases, respectively.
Um, okay.
Look, I get it, everyone, including Harley-Davidson, is jumping on the electric bandwagon. And I will admit that if I were a city-dweller, particularly in a hilly area like Seattle, an electric bike would make perfect sense. Even now, considering that very few of my rides are more than fifty miles round trip, an electric motorcycle would make a lot of sense as a second ride. And, they have Eric Buell (hence the clever play on his last name as the company name) doing some of the design work. No denying, this is a great looking motorcycle and e-bike.
Of course, history is littered with great looking but underperforming machines. Still, an e-bike shouldn’t be that difficult to get right, one hopes, and the power specs on the motorcycle promise something equivalent to the 400-600cc range.
Maybe there’s a giant market there, ready to explode, for the right price. Personally, I think that price is somewhere under $10k for a brand new electric motorcycle, but Zero and Harley disagree. But for the price that The Motor Company plans on selling the LiveWire for, I’d much rather buy a brand new Electra Glide Standard, option it out with some tasteful engine upgrades, and cruise the highways.
Photo via https://fuell.us/
Fuell hasn’t announced pricing for either of their new creations yet, that will come with the full reveal next month. In the meantime, they’re welcoming serious media folks and investors to come up to New York and gaze longingly at the prototypes. No test rides yet, which kind of makes me consider them vaporware until I see some pictures of people actually riding them.
I’m pretty sure serious media folks doesn’t include a half-frozen small time blogger from fly-over country though. Oh well. Back to putting together imaginary Iron Butt routes for summer, and wondering if it’ll ever be possible to do an Iron Butt run on an electric machine.