This EV Company Wants You To Bring Your Gas Bike To Its Riding School

No EV? No problem. Ultraviolette wants you at its riding school anyway.

By: Enrico Punsalang

Aug 25, at 7:23am ET

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There are plenty of ways to sell motorcycles. You can run ads, hand bikes to influencers, sponsor racers, or bombard Instagram with enough slow-motion cornering shots to make every rider dream of becoming the next Rossi. Or, apparently, you can invite someone to bring a completely different manufacturer’s gas-powered motorcycle to your riding school.

That’s basically what Ultraviolette is doing with its new Riding Academy in India. The electric motorcycle maker has brought its "Track Attack" and "Into the Wild" programs under one umbrella, offering structured track and off-road training across three certification levels. The interesting bit isn’t necessarily the curriculum, though. It’s who’s allowed through the door. The academy isn’t exclusive to Ultraviolette owners, or even electric motorcycles. ICE bikes are welcome too.

Think about how weirdly clever that is for a second. Ultraviolette ultimately wants to sell electric motorcycles. That’s what motorcycle manufacturers tend to want to do. But instead of building a little EV-only clubhouse where everyone can congratulate each other about battery percentages, it’s inviting the exact riders it needs to win over. Bring your Duke, Ninja, Himalayan, MT, or whatever else you’ve got. Ultraviolette will happily teach you how to ride it better.

And there’s actual substance behind the idea. Track Attack covers racing lines, braking points, corner entry and exit, throttle control, body positioning, overtaking awareness, and track etiquette. Into the Wild tackles balance, body positioning, loose terrain, off-road cornering, obstacles, motorcycle recovery, and responsible trail riding. Both progress from Level 1 fundamentals through more advanced Level 2 and Level 3 instruction, with assessments required to move forward.

This is marketing, of course. Riding academies, owner events, track days, and adventure experiences are great ways for manufacturers to create stronger communities around their products. Strong communities create loyal customers, and loyal customers have a funny habit of buying more motorcycles. But opening the whole thing to ICE riders changes the equation. Ultraviolette isn’t just preaching to people who’ve already bought into electric motorcycles. It’s putting itself directly in front of people who haven’t.

Better yet, UV now has the motorcycles to make the whole exercise credible. Its F77 Mach 2 is very deliberately a small-displacement-equivalent performance machine, pumping out about 40 horsepower, and reaching roughly 96 miles per hour. Ultraviolette even calls its highest-performance riding mode Ballistic, because apparently “Sport” wasn’t sufficiently dramatic. Put that motorcycle around people learning performance riding on a racetrack, and the connection isn’t exactly difficult to make.

Then there’s the X-47 Crossover, which slots neatly into the other half of the academy. The X-47 Recon produces 40.2 horsepower, tops out at around 90 miles per hour, and offers traction control, multiple regenerative braking settings, and Glide, Combat, and Ballistic ride modes. It’s the kind of multi-terrain machine that gives Ultraviolette an obvious product connection to Into the Wild rather than making the off-road school look like an unrelated side quest.

What do you think?

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Perhaps that’s the smartest part of this whole thing. Ultraviolette isn’t asking gas-bike riders to renounce internal combustion, trade their exhaust systems for charging cables, and swear allegiance to the electric future. It’s just asking them to come ride motorcycles. And once they’re at the track or playing around in the dirt, they’re doing it inside an ecosystem built by an EV manufacturer. The guy who showed up on a KTM doesn’t need to leave wanting an electric motorcycle. He just needs to leave thinking Ultraviolette makes some pretty cool stuff.

Maybe that’s the lesson here. If you want motorcyclists to care about electric motorcycles, stop trying so hard to sell them on EVs. Sell them on actually riding instead.