Harley-Davidson’s Spinoff Has Two Affordable Electric Motorcycles Coming This Summer And They Look Like A Barrel Of Fun

Electric motorcycles are such a great way to enjoy life on two wheels. They’re quiet, powerful, and emit no fumes. But electric motorcycles are often prohibitively expensive. LiveWire, Harley-Davidson’s electric motorcycle spinoff, wants to change that. This summer, it’s launching two electric mini motorcycles that should perform similarly to a Honda Grom, but also be affordable. Meet the LiveWire Honcho, the little electric cutie that LiveWire has finally revealed more information about.

As I have written several times in the past, electric motorcycle adoption has faced a bumpy road in America. One of the ways that motorcycle manufacturers get more range out of their ‘lectro steeds is by loading them down with batteries. This works, but it also results in heavier motorcycles that might cost $15,000 or even sometimes twice that. The American motorcycle market is usually seen as one that favors riding for pleasure rather than primary transportation. Thus far, more than one company has found it hard to sell the American biker on a pricy electric motorcycle, especially since some of these expensive bikes will see their range drop below 100 miles when ridden on a highway.

Many companies are pivoting to selling cheaper, more affordable motorcycles. One of them is Harley-Davidson’s electric spinoff, LiveWire. As of the time of publishing, LiveWire does not sell a current model year motorcycle that’s cheaper than $11,999. Last year, LiveWire’s cheapest bike was $9,999. Even Harley-Davidson itself has a bike that’s $2,000 cheaper than that, and the Motor Company is not exactly known for affordability.

To illustrate the state of electric motorcycles in America, our friends at RideApart cite the Motorcycle Industry Council in saying that LiveWire is the number one seller of electric motorcycles with 50 HP or greater in America. The twist? LiveWire sold 653 electric motorcycles in 2025, only 41 more units than in 2024. LiveWire has long had a plan to make itself more accessible, and it’s by producing a line of smaller, more affordable motorcycles. Now, we’re finally getting to see them take shape.

Small Is The New Big

When I first wrote about the minibikes last year, they did not have a name or really any hard information to go with it. LiveWire just rolled out the prototypes and told the world that we’d get one trail bike and one street bike, both with roughly 125cc-like performance.

Late last year, LiveWire confirmed that the bikes would fall under the name of “Honcho” and be the company’s first motorcycles to ride on its S4 platform. This was fascinating news for a number of reasons. Back when LiveWire was spun off into its own company in 2021, it announced a scalable architecture called Arrow. The idea was that LiveWire’s engineers could take the same bones and stretch them out or minimize them to create a whole lineup of motorcycles. The benefit of the Arrow was that it had fewer parts than the Harley-Davidson LiveWire and could be built 44 percent faster.

LiveWire said that its Arrow derivatives would be the S1, the S2, the S3, and the S4. The LiveWire One is considered to be an S1 “premium” bike. The S2s, which currently consist of the Del Mar tracker, the Mulholland cruiser, and the Alpinista sport standard, are middleweights. The S3 bikes are meant to be lightweight machines developed in partnership with Kymco. Finally, there was the S4, which LiveWire said was the designation for a heavyweight flagship.

Well, the S4 Honcho is neither big nor heavy, but maybe LiveWire sees it as a kind of halo model. The term “Honcho” is derived from the Japanese term 班長 (hanchō), which roughly translates to “group leader.” So, these are small bikes with big names.

Some of what we learned last year hasn’t changed since my last report. LiveWire intends to sell the bikes as the S4 Honcho Street and the S4 Honcho Trail. Both bikes have tubular frames and use their battery boxes as structural members. They also have the same hydraulic disc brakes that have their functions linked and are activated with a left and right lever, no foot pedal.

Power comes from a pair of swappable batteries that weigh 40 pounds each. LiveWire has not said anything about charge times or capacities, but did say that the prototype Honchos have batteries from Kymco. At the very least, having swappable batteries means you can own a Honcho without having a garage. You’ll just have to get used to lugging up to 80 pounds of batteries into your apartment.

While unconfirmed, the fact that the batteries of the prototypes were made by Kymco suggests Kymco might have had a hand in some of the design. Here’s what I wrote about LiveWire’s relationship with Kymco last year:

Back in 2022, LiveWire partnered up with Taiwanese scooter giant Kymco, with both companies throwing a ton of money and technology at each other. Kymco gets to play with the Arrow architecture while LiveWire gets to borrow Kymco’s scooter expertise. In 2023, RideApart reported that Kymco’s Ionex EV platform, which features swappable batteries, will be shared with LiveWire. Cycle World reported in 2024 that Kymco was also leading the development of LiveWire’s Arrow-based lightweight S3 platform.

The differences between the Street and the Trail are few, but important. The Street has a telescopic fork up front, a monoshock in the rear, 12-inch wheels, street tires, and a 30.5-inch seat height. It also has all of the lighting, turn indicators, and mirrors to make it street-legal.

The Trail does away with all of the street-legal stuff and trades the street-friendly suspension for a taller fork and a taller rear shock. The Trail version’s off-road tires have meaty lugs, and the seat height is a slightly taller 32 inches. The Trail version even has a reverse mode. It’s said that the Honchos are sized to be bigger than a pit bike, but not full-size. So, about on par with 125cc gasoline-powered bikes.

LiveWire’s marketing shows models enjoying the S4 Honcho Street like you would a Honda Grom and the S4 Honcho Trail like you would something like a Coleman minibike. Apparently, this marketing might not be incidental. Cycle World has reported that, at shows, they’ve heard the Honcho unofficially called an “electric Grom” and LiveWire’s website describes the Honchos as “mini-motos.”

This, I think, is good. The Honda Grom is a great benchmark for a 125cc-style motorcycle, and I hope the Honchos are just as fun. LiveWire hasn’t published the final specs yet, but the specs from the prototypes were promising. LiveWire said the prototypes could go up to 100 miles on a charge, had a top speed of 53 mph, and could accelerate to 30 mph in three seconds. I would expect to see in the ballpark of 12 HP to 15 HP. LiveWire also said that the prototype Honchos weighed “around 250 pounds,” which would make them a little heavier than the Grom, but not by much.

Of course, the 100-mile range figure is optimistic and likely assumes rolling slowly around a city. But even if you got 50 miles of range ripping around the Trail version, that’s some good off-road fun right there!

All of that assumes that LiveWire can nail the price down. A Grom-like bike should have a Grom-like price. Sadly, LiveWire has not revealed pricing either. The S4 Honchos were also supposed to come out this spring, but LiveWire delayed the launch to likely sometime this summer. I hope that, whenever these do come out, they have a price far below $10,000 or even far below $7,000. You can get a Honda Grom for $3,899, including destination charge, and that kind of low price is going to be hard to beat.

I think these little bikes could be winners if LiveWire doesn’t screw up the price. I could see the Honcho Trail being a cool little ride you put into your truck bed and use for a weekend of hunting. The Honcho Street can be a fun, cheap-to-run urban ride. It’ll be even more appealing if it can do stunts like a Grom can. I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

Top graphic image: Harley-Davidson/LiveWire