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Lon Nordbye has joined the awardwinning Electrify Expo (" North America ' s largest Electric Vehicle Festival ") as Business Development and Sponsorship Executive . Nordbye most recently served as VP of Strategy & Commercial Development at the Sturgis Buffalo Chip . " Featuring the world ' s leading brands in e- mobility " Electrify Expo is a weekend festival concept that takes place multiple times per year - Southern California , Miami and Austin in 2021 , with additional venues planned for 2022 . www . electrifyexpo . com

If Honda can enter the space industry , then why not Sony Corp in the EV market ? Sony has created a new division to " explore entering " the market and unveiled an Electric SUV prototype - Sony ' s Vision-S sport utility vehicle - at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January . Sony unveiled a prototype electric vehicle called the Vision-S sedan two years ago . This was viewed mainly as a way to promote the batteries and sensors the group sells to other car manufacturers . The Vision-S has been road tested in Europe since 2020 . If or when the project matures , it is unclear as to whether Sony plans to do the manufacturing themselves or outsource the construction of Sony designs to a third party .

Ford has doubled its production target for the electric model of its top-selling F-150 Lightning pickups to 150,000 units a year in an " all-in " test for EV demand . " Sales of the F-150 Lightning truck will be a barometer of the success of electric vehicles in the US ," according to Bloomberg . This is the second increase , having initially targeted 40,000 a year , the F-150 is regarded as a bellwether - the trucks will be made at Ford ' s factory in Dearborn , Michigan , with customer deliveries to begin in spring 2022 . So far EVs account for about 3 percent of sales of cars and trucks in the US - less than in Europe and China - with Tesla holding a big lead over Ford and GM . Some 200,000 consumers are said to have reserved the F-150 Lightning , at a starting price of about $ 40,000 . Ford has committed to building a " mega campus " in Tennessee that will include an assembly factory to build the Lightning , and CEO Jim Farley is targeting 600,000 battery vehicles a year globally by the end of 2023 . That LiveWire forecast of 100,000 units by 2026 still looks ambitious though .

testimony to the fact that its private equity ownership cartel had finally got the right man . At the time of his appointment , Greg Etheridge , the then Chairman of the company ' s ownership group and a former Chairman of the MAG Board , cited McAllister ' s " tremendous experience in powersports and in driving business growth ," admitting that " that ' s what we need at Tucker right now ." How right he was , and how right for the role McAllister has proven to be . Fast forward through what has turned out to have been a way more difficult 24 months than anybody could have foreseen , and with the industry looking for " proof of life " ( both in

Tucker and AIMExpo terms ,) we got it . The decision to return to the traditional three-day trade-only format and partnering with an " anchor tenant " such as Tucker just may have finally rescued it . In doing so , it may also have recused the industry ' s last best hope of having an independent business nexus to complement the distributor dealer events that have filled the vacuum since ' Indy ' and ' Cinci ' went south . In terms of dealer attendees and exhibitors , the numbers for AIMExpo weren ' t spectacular , the show didn ' t " knock it out of the park ," but they didn ' t need to be . What the industry needed to see was evidence that the show could demonstrate some kind of pulse and that the concept of an independent dealer expo could be nurtured back off of life support . And the industry certainly got that . Though unable to make the trip ourselves in the end , we here at AMD

have had enough industry feedback to be able to attest to the show having " done its job ." As one sage industry veteran said - " there was business being done ." For a market that no longer has the luxury of waiting for the " good old days " to return ( they never will and generally were a child of their times anyway ), the cojoining of AIMExpo with Tucker ( even if it proves to have been a one-off ) may yet prove to have been exactly the defibrillator that the

powersports expo landscape needed . As to the changes that McAllister has implemented , in vendor and product terms , the two most striking have been the decision that the ownership group took in 2021 to fold the hitherto standalone Kuryakyn business into Tucker as an in-house brand . That was a decision that created ripples when it was announced , but , in reality , it was as creative as it was bold for a longstanding industry brand that might otherwise have become an