If you've been following the LiveWire saga for a good amount of time, you might recall that when parent company Harley-Davidson spun it off into its own entity, the newly-fledged EV bike maker simultaneously announced a partnership deal with Kymco. The formal announcement came at the end of 2021, and the SPAC merger that brought LiveWire into its own closed in the first half of 2022.
For those unfamiliar with Kymco, it's a massive Taiwanese motorbike manufacturer, and although its presence in the US is minimal as compared to, say, Harley-Davidson, it's enormous in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. It's known primarily for making a wide variety of ICE scooters, and in recent years started its own EV two-wheeler arm, Ionex, prior to entering a manufacturing partnership with LiveWire.
When LiveWire further elaborated on its future EV motorcycle plans, it spelled out distinct phases of bikes that were on the table. The LiveWire One kicked it all off, first with a Harley-Davidson badge and then as the first bike to roll out under the LiveWire brand. Then came the S2 Del Mar and S2 Mulholland.
Further down the line, the plans said, there would be smaller S3 commuter bikes produced in cooperation with Kymco. And eventually, if it all worked out as planned, they'd come back to revisit the idea of full-size electric cruisers, a la their parent company, with S4. All the way back in 2022, I asked whether this partnership might be how we finally saw the Kymco RevoNEX EV concept bike finally make it to American shores. And now, at EICMA 2024, it's looking distinctly like more of a possibility, as both LiveWire CEO Karim Donnez and Kymco CEO Allen Ko took to the stage to share that they've just signed a new agreement to deepen their partnership.
Among other things, this will result in not only a production Kymco RevoNEX, based on the S2 LiveWire platform, but also a LiveWire-branded electric scooter made by Kymco. Here, take a look at the design concepts for both machines.
Now, in announcing this partnership to the assembled global moto industry crowd at EICMA, the pair didn't get into the granular details of when and where these models would be rolling out. But given how strong the push for EVs has been in Asian and European countries, it's reasonable to infer that these LiveWire scooters will be how LiveWire pushes into markets it hasn't previously established a presence in.
Scooters are, far and away, the most popular form of two-wheeled transportation across most Asian countries. There are motorcycles as well, but mostly of the small-displacement variety. That's because people are more likely to use them for daily commuting and transportation purposes. Europe loves scooters too (although probably not quite as much), so it seems a likely bet that they'll show up in European markets as well.
Gallery: LiveWire and Kymco - Maxi Scooter and RevoNEX
What's less clear is whether LiveWire scooters will make the scene in the US, a country not historically super fond of larger-displacement scooters. It's also not clear whether the Kymco RevoNEX will come here; although Kymco already has a distribution network in the US, its previous attempts at marketing small-displacement ICE motorcycles (as opposed to its scooters) haven't lit the sales charts up.
In the case of both the LiveWire EV scooters and the Kymco RevoNEX, appropriate pricing will be key. I'm starting to sound a bit like a broken record here, and I'm sorry for that, but the EV-curious will jump back from OEMs like they just accidentally grabbed a hot pan if the prices aren't what they're willing to pay, plain and simple.
Kymco knows how to offer good value for money, but can it bring that know-how to this EV partnership? And in the course of so doing, can it help expand and turn LiveWire's fortunes around?
Only time will tell.
