So what happened to the Enertia

[Macosie]

I'm possibly moving back to Canada after 20 years in Asia. I was following Brammo up to the point Victory bought them. I was thinking to myself, that I could potentially get a 15 year old enertia and bring it to Canada, but I can't find any word on them that's reasonably recent. Is anyone still driving one? How have they aged?

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[Richard230]

Try here: http://brammoforum.com/index.php

The short answer is that you probably want to look elsewhere for a reliable electric motorcycle. That goes for Zeros of the same era, too. Neither model has aged well. (Good luck finding a 15-year old Enertia as they were first sold in the fall of 2009 at Best Buy.)

[Macosie]

For some reason I was thinking their first year was 2002. That said, it's near impossible to find anything older than a 2013 on line.
A bit disappointing to hear they haven't aged well. I expected a bit more sonce the zeros and brammos were American made.

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[Richard230]

My recollection is that Brammo updated the Enertia with a larger battery and a few other improvements sometime around 2013 and then contracted with a major industrial manufacturing company in Europe (I think in Poland) to build the new model, where it was distributed in Europe and perhaps other locations, such as India. The production of the updated Enertia didn't last much longer than a year before the deal fell through, production ceased, the company started to implode and things went downhill from there. So it is likely that you will not see any Enertia that is not a 2013 model if you are located anywhere outside the U.S.

[Ted Dillard]

Yup. In 2009 the Enertia went on sale at Best Buy. By Oct 2010 they announced the Enertia Plus, yet still had stock on floors of the Enertia, virtually freezing sales. They delivered the first Enertia Plus in January of 2013.

Read more here: https://evmc2.wordpress.com/2014/01/...ammo-timeline/ or buy the book.

[Macosie]

Thanks for the info everyone. Sad news for the industry.

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[Ted Dillard]

Thanks for the info everyone. Sad news for the industry.

Honestly, in my opinion (as a student of the History of Science and Technology etc) it's not really sad for the industry, it's just how things progress and are developed. I had an Enertia for a week and did a fairly detailed series of pieces on the bike, and honestly it wasn't a very good product. My son's comment after riding it was "I'm sorry, I know you're friends with the guys who designed this, but it's not like they even know what a motorcycle should be." I found that interesting - out of the mouths of babes, right?

Brammo tried a whole lot of things, with the approach that they had a clean slate to start from - much like Elon Musk's problem solving strategy. They accomplished a bunch of stuff, but also made a whole lot of mistakes. (Want me to tell you about the open cooling fan that will slice off a finger in a flash, if you're not careful? It always amazed me that they never got a lawsuit about that little trinket.) In a lot of ways, what the industry learned from them, and the early Zero bikes, resulted in products like Energica, today's Zero, Alta and a host of others currently in development. It's arguable that the Enertia, and any lessons learned from it, were vital to the industry.

Interestingly, the Enertia Plus came pretty much at the cusp of some significant developments in battery technology, but they (as well as Zero) were already on-board the older tech train. How do you obsolete a product that's tech is only a year old? That's the million dollar question for anyone building a brand at that time.

Wasn't it Edison who said "I haven't failed, I've simply found 10,000 things that don't work"?

The Brammo chapter in the book was probably the biggest personal challenge. Most of the people here know I have some fairly strong opinions about the moves the company made, but ultimately that was of more interest to people in business school, and had less to do with the development of the technology. Brammo fans, particularly those over on the Brammo Owners Forum, who don't want to hear any criticism of "their" brand, might be surprised to hear that I have a considerable amount of respect for what they accomplished, and most of the people who worked there.

[Stevo]

Last edited by Ted Dillard; 5 Hours Ago at 0447. Reason: I'm a writer. I edit stuff.

Wouldn't that make you an editor?

brammo.jpg

I dig the lines!

[Ted Dillard]

[SIZE=1]

Wouldn't that make you an editor?

lol

[SIZE=1]

brammo.jpg

I dig the lines!

Yeah, but that's an Empulse, not an Enertia.

[furyphoto]

The Empulse is a really good looking bike, the Enertia on the other hand had decidedly less dig-able lines. Looks like it was dreamed up by a toaster designer. The looks of the Enertia was one of my greatest disappointments when I was following the early elmoto industry.

enertia2.jpg
photo poached from Ted's site (unless Ted objects)(hi Ted)