"They didn't fail because they had a bad product." Stark Future CEO on ALTAS demise - Gypsy Tales

i met a gypsy so you said before um that altar when alta failed you kind of asked why so i guess there's two ways that you could look at that particular situation one person could look at it and say oh well that's a sign that there isn't an interest in electric bikes it's not viable you know you could basically just pick all the negatives out of it but it seems like you actually looked at ulta leaving as an opportunity rather than a negative is that sort of fair to say yeah i think there are many companies that have proved that you know electric technology is possible i mean uh of course tesla is a huge inspiration but mcalde also proved that you could build a capable bike yeah and you know you can have a theory but they were the first ones to prove it was possible um and then you know i i think well you know there were several things that i think could be done even better both from a product perspective but also how you know they worked commercially i mean of course i don't know exactly yeah company but just for what you can see from the outside that seems to be a lot of interest and uh i just think you need to go big you cannot produce you know five bikes per day that's not possible you need to think large-scale production uh you need to think i mean it's global sales i mean and yeah i i think it was clear it for me it's very very clear that you know electric is the future the question is only when it's going to take over and if you can launch an electric vehicle in a category where there is no competition and it's better than gas it's gonna succeed yeah you can only fail for internal reasons that if you fail in um you know sales is not because of interest you know for sure there will be interest there is interest in every vehicle category yeah you can fail in the marketing if you do a really bad job in showing your product but you know we just need to show it it's not so we're not selling t-shirts that's much more difficult we have an interesting product so we just need to show that and i mean then you can say fail in production but we have built a team of people who knows how to build motorcycle factories so if if you have if someone has built several motorcycle factories before successfully you know it's a quite high chance that they can do without the gun yeah and so uh from the outside i'd be interested to hear your thoughts on why you think alta did fail because for from all accounts they they definitely like the second iteration of the red hawk was a much better uh motorcycle than the first one uh but what what are your thoughts around that i don't think they failed because the product wasn't good enough i think the product could have been made better every product can of course but it was good enough i think you know for the market you can see that from the alt owners uh today that you speak to i mean when i talk to are super happy with the bike then you know everyone has ideas how we can make it even better you know make it a little bit lighter and more range the weight distribution things like that um but i think they failed for business reasons that is what i would assume of course they had this deal with harley davidson i don't know the specifics but it seems they didn't there was a plan that didn't go through i don't know exactly what the plan was and what they didn't go through it's hard to say why um harley davidson had a focus to build electric bikes they went with live wire instead which hasn't really succeeded i i mean they're not not really succeeding with that um commercially at least yeah and uh you know then they failed to raise capital uh fail i think if they could have scaled production faster i don't know you could also maybe that was not possible because of you know their financial situation i don't know but you know they seem to and maybe they weren't i don't know how good they were in sourcing because you know that's also one aspect the pro the product was rather expensive and obviously they were losing money since they went bankrupt but if you don't make a company profitable it will fail you have to make it profitable the question is only when so yeah you know maybe maybe they had challenges in sourcing in production and financials but it's very hard from outside to say exactly what happened there i mean i'm sure the guys that were there knows uh much better um and i mean i've been speaking to a few people that were there that you know seem to be really really good people so uh but yeah it seems to be more business reasons why why it failed yeah yeah and and that would make sense because yeah i mean everybody that i know that's either got one or spent time on one um did say how good they were but i think that was i think that was probably the most striking thing from when i spoke to josh after he was in spain with you guys is that he's owned the alta motorcycles and he's really been the pioneer of like being the best guy in the world to ride those bikes and kind of show what they're capable of um and then that conversation that i had with him like that he's not a guy that would me like we're just generally friends you know and he said how much better that bike was i think that was you know that was one of the uh the big things for me with this project but yeah it's not like ulta made a bad motorcycle like hill already liked it and was you know pumped on it um so yeah it would make sense that it was more like a commercial thing yeah i think so you need to do everything right that's the hard thing if you enjoyed this content please like and subscribe and to listen to the full 3r podcast search gypsy tales in your favorite podcast platform or click the link in the description below gypsy gang

Channel: GYPSY TALES

Views: 30,997

Keywords: Electric Dirtbike, Dirtbike, Motocross, Supercross, ama supercross, Electric, Stark Varg, Stark Future, Enduro, Ktm, Yamaha, Honda, 2 stroke dirtbike, 2 Stroke, Gypsy Tales, Alta

Id: 1JFR9E50EBk

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 15 2022