The electric bubble, at least for two-wheeled vehicles, doesn’t seem to be as strong as it used to be, with electric vehicle sales slowing down in 2023 compared to previous years. Four-wheeled EV sales are stronger, but the growth has shown signs of slowing down in certain months of 2023.
However, this doesn’t seem to discourage car manufacturer Tata, which, along with the British government, announced the opening of a new factory in England. It is also worth noting that the electric vehicle market, both for motorcycles and cars, is currently evolving, but it may not always be this way. So, where will the batteries go?
JLR (formerly Jaguar Land Rover) must have enough appetite for batteries for four-wheeled electric vehicles to keep the lights on, and with Mini producing electric vehicles at the Oxford factory, the demand should be sufficient. But with the factory building batteries for both two-wheeled and four-wheeled electric vehicles, it is not clear where the batteries for motorcycles will end up.
In order for domestic battery production to be financially profitable for the motorcycle industry, the demand for electric motorcycles will have to increase significantly. Given the decrease in sales of larger electric motorcycles at the moment, we are far from that.
Currently, the only large-scale motorcycle manufacturers in the UK that could use them are Triumph (which still produces some motorcycles at the Hinckley factory) and Norton, neither of which currently have an electric model in their range. It is true that Triumph has already worked on an electric machine, the TE-1 project, now archived, but with the electric motorcycle market facing difficulties, it is difficult to predict the direction the sector will take in the coming years. Maeving, which manufactures its RM1 and RM1S in Coventry, may also take advantage of domestic battery production.
Other motorcycle manufacturers that are much further along the path of electrification, such as Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki, and others, are all in more advanced stages of producing a fully electric or hybrid model – Kawasaki debuted its first electric models last year, in the form of the E-1 and Z E-1. But motorcycles from all these brands will be produced overseas and therefore will use more local battery production sources.
The new £4 billion factory is expected to be built near Bridgewater Somerset and will begin construction in 2026, before reaching full capacity in the 2030s, by which time the electric vehicle market may have moved away from its current difficulties. The project is said to create about 4,000 jobs in the region.
