If you were the slightest bit interested in motorcycles, technology, or both circa 2017 to 2019, then chances are good you've at least heard of Alta Motors. And if you were deeply interested, well, then you probably have certain feelings about Alta, its rise, and its subsequent (and very sad) demise.
Although Alta was primarily known and respected for its EV dirt bike development, it had much bigger plans that might sound kind of familiar with our 2025-level hindsight. But in looking at Alta's story, you have to keep in mind that the California-based EV startup was out there doing things (and making real bikes that riders loved, rather than hypothetical ones) well before most other names in the space you've heard, apart from Zero.
See, if Alta had its way, it wasn't going to stop with dirt bikes. Instead, the company wanted to make just about everything it possibly could, short of making electric cars. Street bikes. Scooters. Urban mobility of multiple shapes and sizes (well, on two wheels, anyway).
That's what drew the attention of the single biggest name in American motorcycle manufacturing: Harley-Davidson. And that, as most people familiar with the Alta story from the outside know, is where things distinctly took a turn for the worst. When Alta Motors ended up shut down, and BRP officially announced the acquisition of some of its intellectual property assets in 2019, there was more than enough heartbreak and anger to go around; particularly among fans and owners.
While people on the inside certainly knew what had happened, they weren't talking because they'd signed nondisclosure agreements. Now that they've expired, though, former Alta CEO Marc Fenigstein (who's now involved with Flux Performance) has a whole lot to say about the ignominious end of Alta.
If you spend much time on moto YouTube, you might be familiar with KRANKiT, a channel that often spends its time delving into undertold bits of motorcycle history. This is the first part of a two-part video that you'll definitely want to see if you want to hear the whole story from Fenigstein's perspective, as well as get insights from some other key players in the story.
On his LinkedIn, Fenigstein wrote of this series, "I've been sitting on this story for... almost 7 years. But confidentialities have expired, and an ambitious journalist, Tudor Stupariu, squeezed it out of me. Feels really good to finally share how and why Alta came to an abrupt end, especially at a moment when our product and brand were skyrocketing."
So Why Isn't There An Alta Motors Anymore?
The story is long, twisty, and involves both NDAs and tricky legal wrangling. To hit the highlights of what Fenigstein states happened, Harley became interested in working with Alta on development of Alta's Gen2 platform. The Redshift MX/R models were Gen 1 bikes, but the plan for Gen 2 was that there would first be Alta Motors versions, and then subsequent Harley versions to follow the first LiveWire.
According to Fenigstein, the initial terms of agreement looked like a win-win for everyone involved. Alta and Harley would split development costs right down the line; Alta would save money and get access to suppliers and materials through Harley, and Harley would save money on its development costs by effectively making Alta a supplier of its next platform.
There's a lot more to this story, and it's really best if you hear Fenigstein tell it in KRANKiT's excellent two-parter. If you watch both parts together, it's slightly over an hour long, but you'll probably want popcorn and it'll fly by if this is a story that's kept you up at night wondering what went wrong.
The second part just went up, by the way.
If you take a look at the comments, you'll find some people who claim to be former Alta staffers saying it's the first time they're getting closure on a story they didn't fully know, despite having lived through it. And if you've worked for any number of companies, chances are good that you'll find this sentiment extremely relatable, as most people outside the inner circle in any organization are often the last to know.
One crucial thing to understand, according to Fenigstein, is that Harley and Alta's agreement regarding the Gen 2 platform development stated that the IP for anything developed by Alta engineers using Alta's equipment would be owned by Alta outright, not Harley. And apparently, what was considered by most to be the most valuable of all Alta assets still sits in digital limbo with the liquidation firm that handled Alta's dissolution.
How do we know? Because Fenigstein asked the firm about the disposition of that Gen 2 IP in 2023, which wasn't included in the assets that BRP purchased after Alta went under (technically not a bankruptcy; a distinction explored in detail in this video series as well).
And what motivated Fenigstein to ask about the Gen 2 IP again after the dust had settled? The launch of the LiveWire S2 Del Mar. Here, I'll quote what Fenigstein had to say about it.
“This is where I have to be careful about how I phrase things. The Del Mar bears every resemblance to the bike that we were developing. It uses the battery architecture, it uses the physical battery architecture...it looks like...I can lay up our drawings, our engineering CAD and our concept sketches from early 2018, and it is almost one for one over the Del Mar. I do think they made some changes. I think our original bike had a smaller battery, and also had a vastly lighter weight.”
If that's what you saw when you looked at something, and your business relationship had previously imploded under acrimonious circumstances, then you'd probably do exactly what he did and ask the liquidation firm what happened. Wouldn't you?
To be clear, no one made any specific accusations here; just more along the lines of observations that "huh, thing A looks quite a bit like thing B." We certainly can't say either way, because we haven't seen the original Gen2 designs in question.
But in case I've been too subtle in telling you to go watch these videos, seriously, if you're at all interested in this story, you should probably go watch both of these videos as soon as you have time.
