KTM’s been through the wringer recently, what with the bankruptcy and sales and rescue, but the Austrian company’s come out the other side with most of its parts intact. It’s still kicking, still making bikes, but comments from the company’s new CEO say that the oddest part of the company’s lineup may be due for the chopping block. The KTM X-Bow, its weird little solitary four-wheel road offering, may not be long for this world.
It was always sort of weird that KTM sold a car at all. Sure, the brand has that “Ready to Race” pedigree, but the X-Bow always had incredibly limited market appeal — at least a motorcycle can be practical, saving its user on cost relative to a car, but the X-Bow could never be an only vehicle. With the investments in storage, track time, and tires, the X-Bow would always be a tougher sell than a 790 Adventure.
The X-Bow was never a huge seller
It took KTM over a year to sell the first hundred X-Bow GT-XRs, and it’s tough to justify an entire wing of a company — KTM doesn’t make any other cars to split development costs with — for such a slow-selling vehicle unless the profit margins are truly massive. The company sold a mere 36 X-Bows in 2024, according to new CEO Gottfried Neumeister, which is simply not enough. In Neumeister’s words, “Again, a super project and we’ve proven what we are capable of and have one of the best engineers in the world. But the project does not help us to sell motorcycles.”
What remains to be seen now is what happens to the X-Bows already out there. Do their used-car values climb, since the supply becomes constrained, or do people shy away from a track-focused supercar from a manufacturer that no longer makes that product? Does KTM’s existing reputation, for products meant more for the good time than the long time, tip the needle? Am I just bringing these up in hopes that X-Bows get super cheap on Marketplace soon? Who’s to say.
