Joerg Teuchert
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Copyright 2021, Roadracing World Publishing, Inc.
Respond to online news and comments from around the world,
Erik Buell emailed this note to Roadracing World Founder and Editor-in-Chief John Ulrich:
Hope all is well with you and your family. My family and I are fine, and I am
busy with FUELL and writing a lot of music (!?) in my free time! But i do
I miss getting involved in the running world and seeing you and my other friends.
Anyway, I’m writing because of this “new Buell stuff”. I wish
there was a way to clear things up about me personally around my
companies, past and present! We all see and laugh at fake news every
day, but when it is related to myself, it bothers me. I read everything since how
a lot of bankruptcies i have had, how involved i am again now, how much
it will be to see the new Buell products that I design. A few could be
malicious, but almost all come from bad information
repeated, possibly distorted and starting to become “real”. It gets worse as
time goes by. So I would like to clarify a few things.
As I know you know, damn few people, if any, have spent so much time and
personal money in American motorcycles. There are a lot of haters
there, which I just do not understand. So I’m not that kind of person. But for the
haters and those who hear them, since I started my first business
in 1977, during all my years of fighting, my businesses went through a
grand total of a receivership, which is essentially bankruptcy. A.
Buell existed from 1983 to 2009 without bankruptcy. It was closed
by HD in 2009 when the excesses and reckless choices of their current leadership
they almost bankrupted them and they made massive cuts. Buell had had his
best selling year ever just before but the situation was what it was because
HD decided to get rid of everything that was not part of its core business. I wish
this had not happened and I believe time has shown this to be a mistake, but
businesses do what they do.
After Buell left I started EBR with the money I saved on my payroll
and Buell Build Bonuses in HD. EBR was born from a start-up in
2010 as a company that KPMG valued at $ 50 million in 2013.
Our EBR grew faster than the growth finance we were working on allowed.
Lower than expected Superbike sales of 2014 meant we had more inventory
and coins that we could convert back to cash. In addition to our biggest
Customer Hero has decided to withdraw from the global expansion with the products
we were designing to focus on their domestic india market, so we expected
revenues from these projects have dried up. There is a misconception that they
have not paid their bills; this is not correct … they simply withdrew from
what we had assumed and planned.
As a result, our income was insufficient to keep up the pace, and we were unable to
negotiate late payments for the products and services we used for the
expected growth. It was this combination that drove EBR into receivership. I
I wish Hero had continued with these products, and thought they would
did even better if they had gone global, but they made a choice as
society, which was their right. I wish EBR had increased even more
more slowly and hadn’t grown too stretched out. I sometimes wish this little US
struggling businesses could get more government support, just like businesses
similar situations in other countries. But on the other hand, I don’t want to
great government, and face it, wishes do not mend the past. They are only
valuable as lessons for the future.
The assets of EBR were purchased by receivership by LAP of Michigan. I joined
briefly with LAP, but they didn’t need engineering services like they were
just sell parts and a few bikes built from what was left of the
EBR 1190 parts they had purchased.
So I started to co-start FUELL, because I saw a great need for
products and innovation in the motorcycle / electric bicycle world. That is to say
where I’ve been for over three years, and it’s very exciting to be
free to conceive of radical things. It’s a really serious little team that
represents a true technological start-up, with many patentable ideas. This
This is where the real discussion around Erik Buell and the team I work with should be
to be. We have a very exciting portfolio of new upcoming FUELL products that
be innovative even beyond what we did in previous companies.
I am not involved in the EBR or Buell brands, which are owned by
the folks at LAP from Michigan. We’ll see where they go, and I hope it is
everything is fine, but I am not participating at the moment. I would appreciate it if
LAP would stop using my personal name Erik Buell in their posts, but that
to do… Anyway if I can’t stop this, I just wish it was known
that I am not personally associated with a company where I do not have
involvement in business or engineering. The future of Erik Buell is with
FUELL.
All my wishes,
Erik
