VOLUME 56 ISSUE 42 OCTOBER 22, 2019 P121
I think perhaps that's the
outside view for reasons I under-
stand, but internally we are at the
leading edge of electro-mobility.
At KTM we slowed down for two
reasons. First of all, integrating
Husqvarna, because to as-
similate such a big brand took
time, so that instead of 6000
bikes a year we're now doing
50,000, and doing so profitably.
The second is that we wanted
a good margin of profit in de-
livering E-bikes to the market,
compared to at the beginning of
electro-mobility, when especially
high-voltage concepts were not
profitable. If you look back at
the past 10 years of the dawn
of electro-mobility, the Vectrix
which came first was also the
first bankruptcy—everybody has
just been burning money. What
we learned out of our experience
is to focus on low voltage models
with 48-volt motors, which don't
impose big safety requirements in
terms of logistics and the dealer
network, which means you can
cover a performance range from
the E-bicycle up to the A1 mo-
torcycle class—it's around 10kW,
and that you can cover with
48-volt motors. So in the next two
years you'll see a huge variety of
E-products from all our brands—
KTM, Husqvarna, GasGas,
Bajaj, whatever. That's because
together with Bajaj we've devel-
oped a range of engine platforms
between 3kW and 10kW, which
are air cooled or water cooled
depending on the concept, and
these will now be industrialized
in India, like our single-cylinder
four-stroke engine platforms, and
they'll be the powertrain for a
huge variety of products.
Motorcycles and scooters?
Both. See, in the beginning
everybody thought it's very easy
to have an electric product, just
take the motor from a genera-
tor or whatever. We developed
a kids' bike, which I can tell you
was a difficult task, partnered
with a highly skilled Swiss com-
pany, but despite that, the motor
was not what I expected. So that
led us to the decision to do our
own together with Bajaj, indus-
trializing it in India, so we can
work out the production costs,
and then we are ahead of China.
Because in India, there's a huge
pressure on electro-mobility
since Modi told everyone we
have to go electric in 2020—it's
crazy, but the pressure is really
there.
This obviously then pre-sup-
poses, will you ship the Bajaj-
produced electric product to
China for CFMoto to assemble
and sell?
That won't happen in the next
couple of years, because we are
focusing on the developing E-
markets. China is a huge electric
vehicle market, but in the begin-
ning for sure we want to serve
India, and I think the developed
markets are ready to create
serious margins so that you can
finally earn money from E-bikes.
Will you be going to the USA
with this, which of course is a
huge developing E-market?
We already stepped in last
year with electric bicycles under
"AMERICA IS
STILL OUR
BIGGEST
MARKET
WITH 20%
OF OUR
PRODUCTION
GOING
THERE."
KTM continues
its productive
relationship
with China's
CFMoto.
