Rotax provided flights from San Francisco to Salz, Austria, and accommodation so Ars could visit its factory and ride some of its products. Ars does not accept paid editorial content.
"There was always a passion about motorbikes. But it's not only passion, it also needs to be a sustainable business model," Mario Gebetshuber, BRP-Rotax vice president of global sourcing and operations powertrain, told Ars Technica during a tour of the company's museum of motors over the decades.
Gebetshuber says the company wanted to return to the motorcycle market but knew that it was a highly competitive and extremely crowded market. The COVID-related motorcycle sales bump didn't last, and Rotax wasn't interested in what it anticipated would be a 5 percent market share battling against traditional companies like Kawasaki, Honda, Harley, BMW, and others. It's going electric with its bikes and something else—it's not saying what—in August.
"If we want to enter, we want to enter to be a player," Gebetshuber said. Electrification was where the company saw itself as able to move quickly. It could be Rotax's anchor and a way to jump ahead of the competition and grow.
The motor, and almost everything else, is made in-house. Credit: Rotax
Rotax has already introduced a Ski-Doo electric snowmobile, and the Can-Am Pulse and Origin electric motorcycles have quickly won over fans of traditional internal combustion engine-powered motorcycles. During my two times on the bikes—once in Texas in grueling heat and a second time in Austria ahead of my interview with Gebetshuber—I've watched people who review motorcycles quickly become enamored with the electric powertrain.
Make it in-house
At the heart of those Can-Am electric bikes is technology from BRP-Rotax. At its facility in Gunskirchen, Austria, Rotax designs, develops, and builds its family of internal combustion engines. These engines have not only ended up in BRP-Rotax machines but also in bikes from BMW, Aprilia, and others. Within that same facility, the company decided to go electric. It started with a snowmobile, took a weird turn with extremely fun electric karts (that you can't buy, but more on that later), and most recently ended up in the bikes that resurrected the Can-Am name. But Rotax isn't done. This August, a third consumer adventure vehicle will be outfitted with its electric REV Gen5 platform.