Greetings and welcome back to the InsightEV Weekender. Here, I like to focus on things we did not cover during the week.
Stark Shows What is Possible
…when you do things right, that is.
This week was all about Spain-based Stark Future’s quarterly results. For Q2 2025, the Barcelona-based company reported revenue of EUR 47m and EBITDA of EUR 4.5m.
That’s hardly eight years of the bike manufacturer’s existence. As the media pointed out, Stark has achieved in less than half the time what took Tesla 17 years.
Importantly, Stark achieved this mostly with just the Varg, a non-street legal high-performance, premium motocross. The street-legal EX has recently joined the range.
This is a shot in the arm for the entire electric motorcycle industry as it solidifies the potential of electric motorcycles, if the product market fit is worked out well.
India-based Royal Enfield had invested in Stark Future in December 2022 at a near EUR 500m valuation. The Indians put EUR 50m in Stark at that time, and Siddarth Lal, the Chairman of Eicher Motors (RE’s parent company), also sits on Stark’s board.
That investment seems like a good bet now.
SOL is Coming
Through our years of following electric two-wheelers, we have come to find many interesting product ideas that show up, create a buzz, win a couple of Red Dots, and then become vaporware.
Frankly, we thought SOL was one of those. Mea Culpa!
Now, Micah Toll of Electrek reports that the SOL pocket rocket is headed for production and will be hitting the streets soon.
On the face of it, the SOL is a strange-looking but surprisingly simple look at packaging all the elements of an electric motorcycle within a compact frame. The battery and electronics go inside the main tubular structure, which also serves as the saddle mount with the headlamp and tail-lamp mounted at both ends.
It looks strange, but it works.
There are two variants planned – 45 kph and 85 kph.
Energica is coming back
High-performance electric motorcycle brand Energica went bust last year.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
Over the last few months, the courts have tried to auction the assets multiple times but with little success.
Now, media reports indicate that a group of Singapore-based investors has stepped in to take control.
More details will become clear in the near future, though it is likely that Energica’s core team will be at the helm.
Most importantly, once the restructuring process is completed, it would be interesting to see if Energica has a new product strategy.
Hanoi to ban ICE two-wheelers
Hanoi, one of the most crowded cities in Asia, is set to ban ICE two-wheelers. The ban is less than a year away, being enforced from July 1st, 2026. Post that, ICE two-wheelers would not be allowed in the central districts.
That’s welcome news for electric two-wheeler manufacturers in Vietnam. However, that industry is still fledgling and nowhere near capable of meeting the demand that this may generate.
Ola Electric Q1 FY 2025 Results Throw More Questions
Ola Electric announced their quarterly results this week, and while the India-based manufacturer would like to paint them positively by twisting statistics on a quarter-on-quarter comparison, we found not much to cheer about.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
On an annual comparison, EBITDA (loss) has deteriorated from INR (650) million to INR (960) million. EBITDA margin has also deteriorated from -6.8% to -11.6%. This was on the back of revenues declining from INR 16,440 million in Q1 FY 2024 to INR 8,260 million in Q1 FY 2025.
However, even more concerning was Ola revising all previous numbers.
The numbers reported in the shareholders’ letter for Q1 FY 2025 had all been revised for both revenues and EBITDA. In some cases, especially EBITDA, the variation was more than 70% in certain quarters.
We did send a query to the company, but received no response or explanation.
In certain cases, audited results tend to vary from unaudited ones to some extent, with the margins within 5%. Such wide variations are unprecedented.
Honda Needs to Course-Correct in India
In our weekly analysis this week, we looked at Honda’s lukewarm impact in India. It is still early days, but we are not getting confidence from Honda’s product fit and pricing strategy.
Honda is still the market leader by far in the ICE scooter space, even with products that are outmatched by the competition. However, it is the electric scooter segment where Honda is lagging and may have gotten its pricing strategy wrong.
That’s a wrap for today. This newsletter will be back next Sunday. The posts on the website are more frequent. This is your editor, and you may view my LinkedIn profile here.