“There was always a passion about motorbikes. But it’s not only passion, it also needs to be a sustainable business model,” Mario Gebetshuber, BRP-Rotax vice president of global sourcing and operations powertrain, told Ars Technica during a tour of the company’s museum of motors over the decades.
Gebetshuber says the company wanted to return to the motorcycle market but knew that it was a highly competitive and extremely crowded market. The COVID-related motorcycle sales bump didn’t last, and Rotax wasn’t interested in what it anticipated would be a 5 percent market share battling against traditional companies like Kawasaki, Honda, Harley, BMW, and others. It’s going electric with its bikes and something else—it’s not saying what—in August.
“If we want to enter, we want to enter to be a player,” Gebetshuber said. Electrification was where the company saw itself as able to move quickly. It could be Rotax’s anchor and a way to jump ahead of the competition and grow.