It’s been a wild few years at Land Energy. The Cleveland, Ohio-based electric motorcycle startup has been ambitious from the start. The company evolved from an electric bike project called Falcon, started by Cleveland Cycle Werks co-founder and eventual Land Energy founder Scott Colosimo. As of June 2023, it’s doubled its workforce and is also looking to ramp up production in its Cleveland facility by the end of this year.
As Colosimo explained in 2021, once he started getting into electrification with the Falcon project, he realized that he wanted to move forward doing only electric bikes. Cleveland Cycle Werks, meanwhile, was solidly based on combustion machines. So, he started Land Energy to manufacture and assemble electric motorcycles right in Cleveland, and began looking for a buyer for CCW. In 2022, Land Energy unleashed its flagship bike, the District. To kick the year off right in 2023, it released the District Scrambler in January.
Fast forward to June 2023, and Land Energy is growing both staffing and ambitions by leaps and bounds. “When I started here about four months ago, it was a team of five people, six people and now we’re up to fourteen people,” Land Energy production manager Chris Davis told local news station Cleveland 19. “We’ve gone from building about one bike every month to currently building three bikes a week. We’re going to be building thirty bikes a month in the next couple of months,” he said.
Gallery: Land Moto Goes Rugged With New District Scrambler Electric Bike
Both the District and the District Scrambler are configurable in multiple ways on the Land Energy website. The first choice a prospective buyer must make is the battery. A 2.1-max kilowatt hour unit is included in the base price, but riders can also choose a 4.2-max kWh or a 6.4-max kWh battery setup for an additional charge. The 4.2-max kWh battery runs $2,000 extra, and the 6.4-max kWh battery runs $3,600 extra at the time of writing on June 13, 2023.
Considering that the base District Scrambler starts at $7,800 and the base District starts at $8,200, the tally can quickly add up. Unlike some OEMs, the paint colors are all included. Silver or black alloy wheels are also included, but choosing the Aero disc wheels will cost an additional $200. Adding US Department of Transportation (DOT) approved lighting adds $600, and of course adding accessories like bash guards, rear racks, and top boxes also cost extra—as they do with most manufacturers.
So, what became of Cleveland Cycle Werks? According to the June 2023 iteration of the company, it “started off as a humble business in 2009 Ohio by Scott Colosimo, Jarrod Strength, and Curtis Ray, but now has corporation partners all over the world, including the UK, Switzerland, Poland, India, and Vietnam.” It goes on to define its mission statement as making “less expensive yet stylish” motorcycles that “break...the illusion that only the rich can buy them.”
Land Energy currently has a 60,000-square foot plant located in Cleveland, Ohio, which Davis says is possible in that city precisely because of Cleveland’s rich manufacturing history. The plan is to do all final assembly in Cleveland, and Colosimo envisions a future with 15,000 units built there a year, eventually ramping beyond that as well. They’re going to need more workers to do it, and they’re looking forward to breathing new life into the Comeback City.
