Lightning and the Vapourware Question: A Sit Down with CEO Richard Hatfield
- Buck City Biker
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Lightning Motorcycles has been an enigmatic presence in the electric motorcycle world for years. Everyone knows the name. The Lightning LS-218 claims, the Bonneville backstory, and the Pikes Peak win.
But riders keep asking the same question: where are the bikes?
Depending on who you ask, Lightning is either a pioneering electric superbike company pushing the technology forward, or a brand long on claims and short on bikes in the wild.
So we went straight to the source and sat down with Lightning CEO Richard Hatfield to talk about the scepticism, production reality, and where the company actually stands today.
Richard Hatfield: The Man Behind Lightning
Hatfield didn’t get into electric motorcycles because it was fashionable. He came through racing, engineering, and a lifelong obsession with building fast machines.
His riding roots go back to his teenage years, when he bought his first bike, a Ducati 200 Scrambler, after saving money from agricultural work. That led to a steady progression through classic hardware including a Ducati 250 Mark III café bike, a Norton Dunstall, and Kawasaki’s wild H2 triple.
“I’ve always had a passion not just for racing and driving, but for trying to build a better vehicle,” Hatfield said.
Alongside riding, Hatfield spent years around motorsports and amateur endurance racing. The real turning point came more than two decades ago when a friend invited him to help work on an electric race car, a converted Porsche 914 built for early EV competition. This engineering challenge hooked him.
“When you look at an electric drivetrain, there’s basically one moving part. There’s almost no friction compared to internal combustion, and that opens up a lot of potential for performance.”
Hatfield soon applied that thinking to motorcycles. Using a Yamaha R1 track bike with a blown engine as a donor chassis, he built what he believes was one of the first lithium-battery electric sport bikes more than 20 years ago.
Not long after, working with contacts connected to Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, he sourced drive components from the scrapped GM EV1 program to build another race bike. That machine went on to win the AMA Zero Emissions Road Racing Championship and set speed records at Bonneville. Lightning was born from that program.
Lightning LS-218: Hatfield’s Original Vision
Early electric motorcycles had a reputation problem.
“They were seen as novelty machines, basically a golf cart with two wheels.”
Lightning’s response was to build something that made performance arguments irrelevant. The result was the Lightning LS-218, named after its 218 mph top speed — still one of the most aspirational figures ever attached to a production motorcycle.
The finished bike didn’t just post numbers. Lightning took it racing, winning Pikes Peak overall against petrol bikes and competing in the FIM’s electric championship.
For Hatfield, the goal was always clear:
“If we were going to sit at the same table with gas-powered bikes, we needed to offer a riding experience and performance that was equal or better.”
Having spoken to several manufacturers across the segment, that mindset is a familiar one, particularly among those building halo products. In a young industry still proving itself, riders crave big numbers.
The Question Everyone Asks: Where Are the Bikes?
Lightning’s critics often point to one thing: visibility. You don’t see many of them on the road, and Hatfield doesn’t dispute that.
“Our production up to this point has only been low triple digits. We’ve not built a large number of bikes.”
Most of those bikes have stayed on the US West Coast near Lightning’s base in Hollister, California.
Instead of scaling aggressively, Lightning focused on developing technology while building small numbers of bikes and gathering rider feedback.
“We’re building bikes to order and target getting them shipped within ninety days.”
For European riders, the bikes are not currently homologated for the UK or EU. Hatfield says the key barrier is ABS certification, a regulatory point in Europe, and a costly process for small manufacturers. Though Lightning is currently developing its own system to address that.
Each machine is still heavily hand-built, with carbon fibre work, aluminium machining, battery packs, and wiring harnesses assembled in-house. That cautious approach to scaling has kept Lightning small but also alive in a brutal market.
How Lightning Avoided the EV Graveyard
Electric motorcycle history is littered with companies that raised huge funding rounds and disappeared just as quickly. Hatfield chose a different route.
Before founding Lightning, he ran companies involved in financing early-stage startups. That experience shaped the strategy from the start: stay lean and avoid burning through investor cash. According to Hatfield, much of Lightning’s capital has come directly from the management team itself.
It may not be the flashiest approach, but it could explain why Lightning is still here while better-funded rivals have faded away.
The Other Business Behind Lightning
Motorcycle sales haven’t been Lightning’s biggest revenue stream. While the company focuses on e-moto builds, much of its income has come from the engineering work behind them.
Lightning has developed electric systems for everything from boats and buses to aircraft and off-grid power. That experience is now being formalised through Lightning’s EDGE platform, a modular electric drivetrain other manufacturers can license.
The system is battery-chemistry agnostic and runs on Lightning’s famous 800-volt architecture, offering higher power density, faster charging, and improved efficiency.
The BCB Take - Motorcycles Still Come First
Despite expanding the EDGE platform into other sectors, Hatfield insists Lightning’s focus hasn’t shifted away from motorcycles.
“Our passion lies with motorcycles. We’re motorcyclists. We love pushing that forward.”
The company is currently pursuing a manufacturing partnership with an established OEM — something that could finally unlock real production scale without the eye-watering cost of building a full factory from scratch.
If that deal lands, and Lightning brings its in-house ABS system online for the European market, the visibility question around the company could change quickly.
For now, though, Lightning remains a rare breed in the electric motorcycle world: a small, engineer-led outfit that’s taken the slow road while others chased hype and funding rounds.
Small. Stubborn. Still chasing numbers most bikes can’t touch.
Ride safe, folks.
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