When it comes to Italian electric motorcycles, Energica is the biggest game in town. And after opening its first ever pre-order program late last year, Energica is apparently rolling in cash now.

Energica unveiled its 2020 electric motorcycle lineup last November at the 2019 EICMA Milan Motorcycle Show.

I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at the presentation and got the first look at Energica’s eye-catching new electric motorcycles.

Perhaps the most impressive piece of news came in the form of Energica’s new battery packs. The new 21.5kWh battery packs represented a 60% increase over the company’s previous 13.4kWh packs.

Further advances helped Energica shave more weight off of the company’s bikes. Despite adding more battery capacity, the new Energica models were actually 5% lighter than in previous years.

The range figures for the bikes received a considerable bump, thanks to those big batteries. City ranges were expected to be in the 400 km (249 mi) neighborhood, with highway ranges at just under half of those figures.

Along with the new electric motorcycles came a new sales strategy for Energica. The company announced that it would start taking pre-orders for the 2020 model year bikes — a move it had never explored before.

And as it turns out, the popularity of the new models combined with the preorder structure resulted in a huge windfall for Energica.

According to Energica, it began 2020 with nearly half of the company’s 2019 year-end turnover, which came solely from the end-of-year preorder sales of 2020 model electric motorcycles.

To put that in cold hard numbers, Energica reported that it began 2020 with €1.4 million in pre-sales, compared to the €3.25 million in electric motorcycle sales the company made throughout all of 2019.

In response to the higher-than-expected demand, Energica is now focusing on increasing its rate of motorcycle production.

This comes as Energica has worked on continuing its expansion in the US as well as considered partnering with other companies to expand into smaller electric motorcycles.

Energica’s electric motorcycles are currently some of the only options for high-power electric sport bikes, at least until Lightning can ramp up its own production of the Lightning Strike electric motorcycle.

However, Zero Motorcycles has a new electric motorcycle debuting later this month, and the spy video we found of it makes it seem like there could be another high-powered electric sport bike on the road soon.

via: RoadRacingWorld, RideApart

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