Originally Posted by
Scott
Those are things they'd need eventually, and those are things they could have been working on over the space of a solid 3 year plan, but except for dealers, none of those things needed to happen urgently.
For EBR to have been viable, they should have been looking at a 3 year plan something like this:
2016 - Sell 120 bikes in the United States
2017 - Sell 240 bikes in the United States
2018 - Sell 360 bikes in the United States
2019 - Start expanding to Non-US markets
If they could get roughly $10,000 per bike, that would have been revenue of $1.2 million in 2016, $2.4 million in 2017 and $3.6 million in 2018. Not crazy amounts of cash, but enough to keep a very small operation running (particularly when they already had enough parts in house to build through 2018 without buying a single component).
By 2019, they'd be on their feet and ready to become a more serious contender, but somebody would have to be willing to keep them going until that point. LAP said they would, but they didn't.
There are approximately 15 million bikes sold in the US every year. 120 bikes is (are you ready for this) 0.0008% of the US market. There's no reason that the only sport-bike maker in the US led by somebody who most motorcycle enthusiasts know couldn't have sold that tiny, tiny number of bikes on their way to becoming a more serious manufacturer. You don't need a world-beater to sell 0.0008 % of the US market. You just need a fun, interesting, unique bike that knows its place. Harley Davidson doesn't build world-beaters, but they do okay for themselves.
But LAP pushed. They didn't go slow and wait for consumers to ask for the bikes. They made bikes that people weren't ready for and they flooded the market. They didn't make a long-term commitment and follow a real plan. They pretty much continued where Hero left off and then quit after 10 months.