The EV Hype vs. Engineering Reality
THOUGHTS. MAY. 2026
After years of watching the market, one thing becomes clear — the internal combustion show is far from over. In fact, it may even be going through another renaissance. As one of the founders of OMOTORI, I have to constantly follow everything happening across the electric motorcycle industry, technology, and mobility in general. It’s exhausting work, but necessary.
Not long ago, Damon was pushing hundreds of millions of dollars in pre-orders into the face of the industry, Energica was setting records, and Zero continues to impress investors with the scale of funding behind a platform that still raises questions in terms of fundamental efficiency. ...Maybe we simply don’t know something.
Today, investors are losing money, customers are losing faith in electrification, and many companies are losing their own identity. Politicians speak about decarbonization while simultaneously setting the oil and gas world on fire through geopolitical conflicts whose environmental consequences often do more damage than an old combustion engine mounted in a two-wheeled frame.
The market feels this contradiction. And because of that, it hesitates to turn toward solutions genuinely trying to create something new instead of repainting old ideas in green.
Ironically, the loud failures of electrification are now playing directly into the hands of major legacy brands and new industrial groups from China and India. The market is once again flooded with endless variations of combustion motorcycles — often technically mediocre, but visually packaged extremely well. Old brands are coming back to life through investment and nostalgia. Marketing is screaming. Instagram is overflowing with excitement. BMW unveils another object with six exhaust pipes and calls it innovation.
And in moments like these, it becomes especially difficult to explain even to ourselves why we continue moving toward the far more difficult path of engineering electric motorcycles for long-distance travel.
It really is a million-dollar question. But these are exactly the moments when the thoughts that keep a team moving forward become important. For us, there are three of them.
1. No one has truly solved the industry’s core problems yet. Energy efficiency at highway speeds. Long-distance travel. Weight. Battery degradation. Overall system efficiency. The in-dustry has learned how to make electric motorcycles look impressive. But it still hasn’t learned how to make them genuinely universal.
2. Too many brands have forgotten that function must come before image. Design has become a separate entity. Sometimes it feels as if engineering no longer serves as the foundation of the product, but merely as an accessory to visual impact. We still believe good design should be the result of proper engineering decisions — not the other way around.
3. The pursuit of rapid financial return is destroying long-term engineering logic. Minimal product changes are presented as technological revolutions. Marketing fog becomes denser than the technology itself. Companies release endless variations of the same solution, gradually wasting their own potential before they ever fully realize it.
These three things are exactly what continue driving OMOTORI forward. We see the company’s identity through the purity of engineering decisions at a system level, where design is required to follow function. Not because it sounds philosophically correct, but because we still don’t see another path toward meaningful technological progress. And perhaps the most interesting part is that the industry’s most important questions remain unanswered.
Which means — this is only the beginning.
Yuriy
OMOTORI Team
May 16, 2026
legal disclosure: All brands and trademarks mentioned in this article are the property of their respective owners. The views expressed are those of the author alone and are not intended to disparage or otherwise damage the reputation of any company mentioned.