For years, hard enduro was considered the last stronghold where combustion power reigned unchallenged. Steep rock faces, technical climbs, and multi-hour races that punish machines and riders alike seemed like the perfect environment to expose the weaknesses of battery-powered motorcycles. This year has proven the opposite, with electric machines from Stark Future, RFN, Zero Motorcycles and even hard enduro legend Graham Jarvis himself racking up results against the best combustion riders and manufacturers in the sport.
Zero Motorcycles
It started back in March 2026 at the Grinding Stone Hard Enduro in Page, Arizona, widely considered the highest-consequence race in the sport, run across sandstone hills so steep and abrasive that even top pros admit to being scared of them.
Zero sent filmmaker and amateur racer Isaac Johnston out on a largely stock Zero XE, sprung for a rider 70 pounds lighter than him and set up with only days of testing. Starting dead last in row 293, Johnston crashed hard on the first lap, cartwheeling the bike down a rock face, bending the handlebars and shattering the rear fender. He kept going anyway. Battery swaps, at around 50 percent charge per lap, took roughly 30 seconds each, faster than the time he spent catching his breath and drinking water between laps. He finished 122nd overall, passing 171 riders, more than half the field, and logged the fastest time of any electric bike on the course, on a bike that had just been thrown down a mountain.
Stark Future
Eddie Karlsson
Sebastien Tortelli
At the Red Bull Erzbergrodeo in June, widely regarded as the toughest one-day hard enduro race in the world, Stark entered its Varg EX machines for the first time in the event’s history. Of 500 competitors, 23 rode Stark Vargs. The team opened the weekend by locking out the podium in the Remus Rocket Ride, with Racing Director Sebastien Tortelli taking the win after topping every qualifying heat. When it came to the brutal main event, only 15 of the 500 starters made it to the finish inside the time limit. Two of those finishers were on Stark Vargs. Eddie Karlsson crossed the line ninth overall despite destroying his rear brake in the opening turn and riding the rest of the race on front brake and regenerative braking alone. Teammate Toby Martyn finished twelfth.
JARV-E
Graham Jarvis
At the Red Bull Romaniacs in Sibiu, Romania at the end of July – in the Gold class, the event’s hardest route – 51-year-old hard enduro legend Graham Jarvis became the first rider ever to finish Romaniacs on an electric motorcycle, riding his own prototype, the Jarv-E, to 20th place. Jarvis has raced Romaniacs since 2008 and says he plans to keep developing the bike ahead of 2027. Manuel Lettenbichler won the rally outright on a KTM, equaling Jarvis’s own record of seven Romaniacs titles, and Romania’s eMoto class, raced on a shortened route to account for charging time, was topped by Germany’s Martin Dosch and Valentin Rehrl.
Red Bull Tennessee Knockout
Eddie Karlsson
Toby Martyn
Then came the Red Bull Tennessee Knockout in August, one of the most demanding hard enduro events in the United States, and the strongest showing yet for electric motorcycles at the front of the field. Eddie Karlsson finished fourth overall on the Stark Varg, ahead of established stars like Jonny Walker and Cody Webb, and only narrowly behind podium finisher Billy Bolt. Toby Martyn backed him up in seventh, meaning two electric motorcycles finished inside the top seven of the overall result against a stacked field of KTM, Husqvarna, Triumph and Yamaha factory riders. Only Manuel Lettenbichler and Trystan Hart, both on KTMs, finished ahead of Karlsson.
RFN
The same weekend, RFN delivered its own milestone. Adam Giles won the eMoto Sportsman Class outright aboard the RFN E15+, a bike that only launched in late 2025 and was already standing on the top step at TKO less than a year later. Conor Hennessy qualified fourth in the eMoto Pro Class Prologue on the E15+, just one second off the podium places, while junior rider Nathan Zhang finished fourth in the Sr 7-8 50cc and eMoto Class on the RFN E5.
LAND Energy
Tennessee Knockout also had an unlikely entrant. LAND Energy, the Cleveland-based electric brand, showed up with founder and CEO Scott Colosimo riding one of the company’s District models, a bike that was never designed as a hard enduro race machine. Colosimo pushed the platform to the extreme anyway, and by his own account had a great time doing it. It wasn’t a podium campaign, but it made a point of its own: even a bike built for a completely different purpose can be thrown at one of the toughest off-road tests in the country and come out the other side, further proof of how capable and adaptable electric platforms have become.
Put together, the message from this year of racing is clear. Electric motorcycles are no longer being tolerated at the margins of hard enduro as a curiosity or a marketing exercise. From a battered stock bike surviving the sandstone hills of Grinding Stone, to a 51-year-old legend proving an electric bike can finish the toughest rally on earth, to Stark’s factory Vargs trading blows with the sport’s biggest stars at Erzberg, Romaniacs and Tennessee Knockout, to RFN’s E15+ winning outright in its first year of racing, electric motorcycles are qualifying, finishing, and winning against the best combustion machinery and riders the sport has to offer, at the hardest events that exist. The doubts about range, durability, and rideability under real punishment are being answered one race at a time, and increasingly, the answer favors the electric motorbike.
What’s in the pipeline?
Dust Moto
The results on the racecourse are also pulling new hardware onto the market. In May 2026, LiveWire, the electric brand majority-owned by Harley-Davidson, acquired U.S. off-road startup Dust Moto, taking on its swappable-battery dirt bike platform and pushing it toward production. It’s LiveWire’s first acquisition and its first real move off-road, adding a dirt bike to a lineup that has so far been entirely street-focused, with a launch promised for the second half of 2026.
Dust Moto / LiveWire
Bonnell
Bonnell, the brand behind the EBMX mountain bike platform, is bringing its 805 RX into riders’ hands too. Built around a forged aluminum chassis, Sirris suspension, and a swappable battery system, the 805 RX is aimed squarely at the mid-size electric dirt bike category, with output in the 40 to 56 horsepower range depending on configuration and a claimed weight as low as 218 pounds.
Bonnell 805 RX
Radian
Dutch startup Radian has entered the field too, unveiling the EXR, an electric enduro machine it calls the first truly competition-ready platform of its kind, built by a team with roots in electric superbike racing, including a 2018 MotoE championship win through Electric Superbike Twente. The EXR pairs a 70-horsepower motor with a patent-pending InfiniPack battery system that allows a full swap in under 30 seconds without tools, directly targeting the two biggest obstacles that have held electric off-road bikes back: limited range and long charging times. Reservations are open in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, with deliveries planned for the end of 2027 and a broader European rollout to follow.
STRiX
And then there’s STRiX, the Slovenian brand that first built its Electric Hard Enduro as a military-grade platform, packing around 90 horsepower and close to 720 lb-ft of torque at the wheel into a machine weighing roughly 304 pounds. STRiX is now bringing that same tactical-grade powertrain to civilian riders, positioning the bike for hard enduro and even eyeing a run at the Dakar Rally’s Mission 1000 class. If a platform built to military spec can be tuned for the trail, it’s another sign of how far the ceiling on electric off-road performance really extends.
