Electric motorcycle startup backed by Tesla founders delivers its first bike to customers: the Redshift [Gallery]

Fred Lambert | Dec 18 2015 - 5:19 pm PT

Alta Motors, formerly known as BRD Motorcycles, announced having delivered the first all-electric Redshift to customers this week.

The first lucky owners are Eric Gauthier and Jeannine Smith, who own and operate Suspension Performance in Mountain View, CA.

San Francisco-based Alta Motors was founded in 2007 by co-founders CTO Derek Dorresteyn (former President of Moss Machine), CEO Marc Fenigstein (former designer at Frog Design) and CDO Jeff Sand (former President of Sutro Vision).

The company attracted several high-profile investors during its latest round of financing in late 2014, including Tesla Motors co-founders Marc Tarpenning and Martin Eberhard. The Series A round raised $4.5 million.

Tarpenning and Eberhard left Tesla not long after Eberhard was ousted as CEO of the company and Elon Musk took over two more CEOs later. You can read our story on the Tesla founding members here: Tesla’s original team, where are they now?

Alta Motors started making waves last month after its Redshift SM won the IMS Sacramento round of the Supermoto USA race series:

“Alta Motors technician and pro racer Kevin Butler took the Redshift from the last place on the grid to first across the finish line in his first-ever supermoto race. The victory also marks the first time an unmodified, production electric motorcycle triumphed over gas-powered competitors.”

The company is making the Redshift from the ground up and says that “every part was created, tuned and tested for pure performance on-road and off”.

Alta aims at making a high performance bike requiring as little maintenance as possible, which is often a problem with motorcycles. The company says that the Redshift should require maintenance at intervals of 1000-hour.

The estimated retail price of the bike is ~$15,000, placing it in competition with the higher-end of Zero Motorcycles’ lineup.