Four Catalan brands unite to create an urban electric motorcycle

The Catalan motorcycle industry has entered into an ambitious project to build a 100% electric motorcycle. Four companies, previously competitors, will collaborate on the project. Rieju, Torrot, Scutum, and Volta will create an industrial consortium and will work together to develop and sell an electric scooter model from 2017. The project will be financed with a participatory loan of three million euros from the Generalitat and with the shares that each of the four brands will contribute, which are valued at an additional seven million euros.

The future motorcycle will also involve a chain of suppliers to produce a "100% Catalan" vehicle, according to what Felip Puig, Catalan Minister for Business and Employment, explained on Wednesday. The business leaders explained that by uniting they hope to boost sales and have an increased capacity to provide a greater stimulus to a market that is still very marginal. Of the 300,000 motorcycles that are owned privately in Barcelona not even 1% are electric.

The new motorcycle will be developed throughout next year and will be sold at a retail price of 4,000 euros. Subsidies which could be in place by the rollout date might bring down this price. The vehicle wants to attack the market for individual buyers as well as company fleets.

All four manufacturers will set up a new company in the next month and will share the ownership, which will depend on the amount that each company brings to the project. Rieju, which is the manufacturer with the highest production capacity, will initially contribute the manufacturing plant for the new model, according to its CEO, Jordi Riera. The production capacity will be 10,000 units annually, and the project will create 30 new jobs, according to the companies’ estimations.

Could it be the start of a merger? The CEO of Scutum, Carlos Sotelo, was the most daring in his response: "The merger of all four into one company would be the ideal to achieve, but at the moment each of us is working at a different pace". Others, like Torrot, assured that they are very open to future scenarios once the project takes shape.

The brands have stated that, for the moment, they have not set aside the plans that they are working on separately, but are rather hoping that the future motorcycle will broaden the market and everyone will benefit eventually. "There is always a complaint that the companies are too small, so it's important to give value to this project and see it as an opportunity, not a threat", said Minister Puig.

The precedent of the Rieju MIUS

The Catalan electric motorcycle project has a precedent set by Rieju in 2011. The Rieju MIUS, which the manufacture still sells, has enjoyed limited success. Neither the circumstances --with the recession-- nor the administrations --with policies supporting the electric motorcycle-- ended up helping the electric scooter project like the brand had hoped, but today they trust that this has changed: "We encountered huge difficulties, but now we see a change in mentality and the administrations needs to apply real pressure", said the Rieju CEO.

Rieju brings veteran leadership to the project, as the Girona-based company has been making scooters, motorcycles, and race motorbikes for over 80 years. The rest of the partners are newer, as is the case of Scutum, a company partly owned by LaCaixa and Repsol, that just launched its first electric scooter model.

Torrot is in a similar situation, with its first urban electric motorcycle model in the final phases for launch next year. The manufacturer also just acquired GasGas and saved the brand of off-road motorcycles from extinction. Volta also is a company founded just four years ago that has just rolled out its first model, in this case of a sports style and focused on a higher-end 100% electric product.