Electric moto and e-bike builder FUELL has entered Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in the US.

The news broke on Elektrek, which published a letter from a lawyer representing FUELL in its bankruptcy proceedings. Here’s some of the pertinent information:

Management regrets the Company has been forced to take this path. Unfortunately, the Company lacks funds to pay for the labor costs and other required services necessary to assemble and ship products to its customers, and additional funds could not be raised to pay the Company’s outstanding current liabilities or to pay for the assembly and shipment of pre-ordered electric bicycles. I hasten to add that the Company has on hand what it believes to be the parts necessary for the assembly of the bulk of, if not all of the pre-ordered electric bicycles.

Elektrek published FUELL’s Chapter 7 bankruptcy notice here.

So: It appears FUELL took pre-order money to build bikes, and used the money from pre-orders to buy the components needed to build the bikes, but it does not have the money to pay staff to actually put the bikes together. They’re going to let bankruptcy court sort it out.

FUELL came to prominence because one of the founders was famous motorcycle designer Erik Buell. He helped design the future-focused Fllow electric motorcycle project a couple of years ago. That was supposed to be an urban runabout machine, but after bringing in $3.5M in funding, there was no actual motorcycle released to market, just a lot of marketeering.

Take a dive into this sub-Reddit and you’ll see that the customers aren’t happy. And with this news following close behind Energica’s high-profile bankruptcy, we are once again reminded that putting your money into a small electric motorcycle start-up is taking a significant risk. Only Zero Motorcycles has proved to have any staying power in the industry at this point.