I'm sorry, I don't mean to be a hater.
Honestly, I want to see LiveWire succeed. I really enjoyed my time on the first LiveWire, something I'm told is still offered by the company in the year 2025.
But the company is just, well, floundering. Sales are non-existent. It's losing money hand-over-fist. It's had to move back in with Harley-Davidson proper after it made a big stink of how the two companies were very much separate. It's "outsourced" its business operations to Harley-Davidson. And the marketing folks, who are probably doing the best they can, are turning out things that I just don't think entice either motorcyclists or even would-be motorcyclists. All that ends with a model range that's both blah and practically unintelligible, and that's coming from someone who gets paid to understand and cover this industry day in and day out.
Case in point, LiveWire's new S2 Alpinista, a motorcycle that, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why it actually exists or how it differs from the other S2 models.
Or why it even has that name?
So here are the details on the S2 Alpinista, but stop me if you've heard them before. Range? 120 city, 71 highway, and 89 combined. The battery is a 10.5 kWH pack, capable of charging to full in a little under two and a half hours via a Level 2 charger. 0 to 60 mph happens in just three seconds thanks to 84 horsepower and a whopping 194 pound-feet of torque.
If you're saying, "Hey, that all sounds an awful lot like the S2 Del Mar and S2 Mulholland," you'd be correct. Apart from having a slightly better 0-60—by .3 of a second—about the only thing that separates the three motorcycles from one another is the fork rakes, wheels, and the motorcycles' headlights. Everything else, yep, that's the same.
So what does this achieve for LiveWire's goals, i.e. not going the way of Alta? And that's where I'm stuck, as I have no clue.
Given each of the three S2 bikes is so similar, offering barely any real noticeable differences, what's the point in having all three? I'm no business person, but why not just offer more accessories for a single solitary model and just let consumers decide how they want to juzz-up their bikes like, say, I don't know, every damn Harley-Davidson ever made? It's what made Harley so much money in the past, so it feels especially antithetical to the idea that LiveWire is designed to actually make money.
And then there's the name: Alpinista.
LiveWire shot the promotional photography right near my house in Utah. They shot it on mountain roads I've run countless times, including a handful of electric bikes which absolutely didn't work there. Both the Zero DSR/X and FX ran out of juice after only a handful of runs. So the promise of its name, i.e. alpine rides, just doesn't gel with the Alpinista's range performance. But that's what you'd except to do, both based on the photos LiveWire released, and with its name. You expect to go into the mountains, break free of the city, and have an adventure.
That's just not feasible or even doable with the S2 platform, though. It doesn't have the range. You'd get up one side of the mountain and either has to get a pickup from a friend with a truck or coast all the way down with the bike fully off. Ask me how I know. I know because I've done those things with those other electric bikes. Other electric bikes which have better ranges than the LiveWire.
And so I'm stuck trying to figure out who this motorcycle is for?
Why was it made? What's its purpose? And why, oh why, did LiveWire give it that name? Because it doesn't do anything different from its siblings, it doesn't have any other defining characteristics, and the name implies a character that it absolutely can't back up. It's just...another motorcycle that LiveWire will fail to sell to the masses. What's the point?
