I am sorry, I do not imply to be a hater.
Truthfully, I need to see LiveWire succeed. I actually loved my time on the first LiveWire, one thing I am informed continues to be supplied by the corporate within the 12 months 2025.
However the firm is simply, effectively, floundering. Sales are non-existent. It is dropping cash hand-over-fist. It is needed to move back in with Harley-Davidson proper after it made an enormous stink of how the 2 corporations had been very a lot separate. It is “outsourced” its business operations to Harley-Davidson. And the advertising people, who’re most likely doing the perfect they’ll, are turning out issues that I simply do not assume entice both motorcyclists and even would-be motorcyclists. All that ends with a mannequin vary that is each blah and virtually unintelligible, and that is coming from somebody who will get paid to grasp and canopy this business day in and time out.
Living proof, LiveWire’s new S2 Alpinista, a motorbike that, for the lifetime of me, I can’t work out why it truly exists or the way it differs from the opposite S2 fashions.
Or why it even has that identify?
Photograph by: LiveWire
Photograph by: LiveWire
Photograph by: LiveWire
So listed here are the main points on the S2 Alpinista, however cease me if you happen to’ve heard them earlier than. Vary? 120 metropolis, 71 freeway, and 89 mixed. The battery is a ten.5 kWH pack, able to charging to full in a little bit below two and a half hours by way of a Stage 2 charger. 0 to 60 mph occurs in simply three seconds due to 84 horsepower and a whopping 194 pound-feet of torque.
If you happen to’re saying, “Hey, that each one sounds an terrible lot just like the S2 Del Mar and S2 Mulholland,” you would be right. Aside from having a barely higher 0-60—by .3 of a second—about the one factor that separates the three bikes from each other is the fork rakes, wheels, and the bikes’ headlights. All the pieces else, yep, that is the identical.
So what does this obtain for LiveWire’s objectives, i.e. not going the way in which of Alta? And that is the place I am caught, as I’ve no clue.
Given every of the three S2 bikes is so comparable, providing barely any actual noticeable variations, what is the level in having all three? I am no enterprise particular person, however why not simply supply extra equipment for a single solitary mannequin and simply let customers resolve how they need to juzz-up their bikes like, say, I do not know, each rattling Harley-Davidson ever made? It is what made Harley a lot cash up to now, so it feels particularly antithetical to the concept LiveWire is designed to really generate profits.
Photograph by: LiveWire
After which there’s the identify: Alpinista.
LiveWire shot the promotional pictures proper close to my home in Utah. They shot it on mountain roads I’ve run numerous instances, together with a handful of electrical bikes which completely did not work there. Each the Zero DSR/X and FX ran out of juice after solely a handful of runs. So the promise of its identify, i.e. alpine rides, simply does not gel with the Alpinista’s vary efficiency. However that is what you’d besides to do, each primarily based on the images LiveWire launched, and with its identify. You count on to enter the mountains, break freed from town, and have an journey.
That is simply not possible and even doable with the S2 platform, although. It does not have the vary. You’d rise up one aspect of the mountain and both has to get a pickup from a good friend with a truck or coast all the way in which down with the bike totally off. Ask me how I do know. I do know as a result of I’ve achieved these issues with these different electrical bikes. Different electrical bikes which have higher ranges than the LiveWire.
And so I am caught making an attempt to determine who this motorbike is for?
Why was it made? What’s its goal? And why, oh why, did LiveWire give it that identify? As a result of it does not do something totally different from its siblings, it does not have another defining traits, and the identify implies a personality that it completely cannot again up. It is simply…one other motorbike that LiveWire will fail to promote to the lots. What is the level?
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