The Era of Control

The EU wants zero road deaths by 2050. Motorcycles, which require human skill and human risk and human attention, do not survive that math. The custom builders who saw this coming have already started running.

Pemulis Water & Power • February 2026

The European Union's Vision Zero framework sets a target that sounds, in the abstract, like something no reasonable person could oppose: move as close as possible to zero fatalities in road transport by 2050, with an intermediate goal of cutting deaths and serious injuries by half before 2030. The mechanism for reaching that target involves mandatory anti-lock braking, intelligent speed assistance systems that use GPS and traffic sign recognition to limit engine output to the posted speed limit, connected vehicle technology that logs trip data and communicates with infrastructure, autonomous emergency braking, driver fatigue detection, lane-keeping assist, and the general premise that the future of transportation is a future in which the vehicle knows better than the person operating it and is empowered to override their decisions in the interest of their survival. For cars, most of this is already law — the ISA speed limiter has been mandatory on new European cars since 2024. For motorcycles, the technology hasn't been adapted yet. The word "yet" is doing significant work in that sentence.

Powered two-wheelers account for roughly two percent of total kilometers traveled on European roads. They account for seventeen percent of total road fatalities. Between 2000 and 2018, motorcycle deaths in the EU-28 dropped by twenty-six percent, which sounds like progress until you notice that car deaths dropped by sixty-two percent over the same period. The gap is not closing. Motorcycles are getting safer, but they are getting safer at a rate that is mathematically incompatible with reaching zero by 2050, and the reason is structural and unfixable: a motorcycle is an exposed vehicle that requires the operator's continuous physical engagement, cannot be meaningfully automated, cannot be enclosed in a protective shell without becoming a car, and transfers all consequences of error directly to the rider's body. You cannot engineer your way to zero motorcycle deaths without either making motorcycles dramatically less motorcycle-like or eliminating them from the road entirely. The EU's framework, followed to its logical conclusion, arrives at the second option.

"I'm very pessimistic. I see no hope for motorcycles and see them as an anachronistic glitch of the establishment. We live in the era of control and motorcycles don't abide."
— David Borras, El Solitario MC

What Custom Builders Are Losing

The regulation squeeze isn't theoretical and isn't coming — it's here, and it operates on the builders and the riders simultaneously. Euro 5 emissions standards became mandatory for all new motorcycles sold in Europe in January 2021, requiring onboard diagnostic systems, strict emissions thresholds, and catalyst durability testing. Euro 5+, which took effect in January 2025, tightened those requirements further: real-world mileage accumulation testing replaced mathematical estimates, OBD Phase 2 monitoring expanded, and the certification pathway for any motorcycle sold on European roads became incrementally more expensive, more complex, and more hostile to anyone operating outside the industrial scale of a major manufacturer.

For custom builders — people who modify existing motorcycles or build one-off machines in workshops and garages — the type approval system is becoming functionally impassable. A one-off custom motorcycle that does not match the homologation specifications of the donor bike requires re-certification to be legally ridden on public roads, and the re-certification process was designed for factories, not for a guy in Galicia with a welder and an idea. The cost, the paperwork, the testing requirements — none of it is calibrated to the scale at which custom motorcycles are built, and the cumulative effect is to make street-legal custom building progressively more difficult until it becomes, for practical purposes, impossible. This is not an accident. The regulatory apparatus does not distinguish between a mass-produced commuter motorcycle and a hand-built custom that will be ridden by one person on weekends. It applies the same standards to both, and the standards are set at a level that only the former can economically satisfy.

Motorcycle Is a Verb

David Borras trained as a lawyer and worked as a broker before he started building motorcycles out of his garage in Bergondo, Galicia, in 2009. The career trajectory sounds like a midlife crisis narrative — the professional who walks away from the desk to follow his passion — except that Borras doesn't talk about it that way, and the way he does talk about it is more interesting and more revealing. He treats "motorcycle" as a verb. Not a thing you own or a hobby you pursue but a way of being in the world, a mode of engagement that filters everything else through the experience of building, riding, and thinking about machines that require your full attention to operate and your full commitment to keep running. The motorcycle, in Borras's framework, is not an object. It is a practice. And practices, unlike objects, are difficult to regulate out of existence, because you can confiscate a machine but you cannot confiscate the disposition that built it.

El Solitario MC — the name means the Solitary One — has spent fifteen years building custom motorcycles that function as expressions of this philosophy, each one named like a character in a novel and each one designed to be ridden rather than displayed, and over the last several years the builds have shifted in a direction that maps precisely onto the regulatory landscape Borras sees closing in. The earlier projects were street machines: a 1947 Harley Knucklehead called the Winning Loser, a Sportster called Malo/Bueno, a BMW R nineT called the Impostor. The recent projects have moved off-road and electric. The Desert Wolves took three Harleys across the Sahara. The Commando was built on a Cake Kalk OR, a sixty-seven-kilogram Swedish electric off-road bike that produces no emissions, makes no noise, and requires no type approval for modifications because it isn't ridden on public roads. The shift is strategic and explicit: if the regulations are designed to make street-legal custom building impossible, you go where the regulations haven't followed.

"They want us gone, but they're slow, and although they're constantly legislating against us they still haven't figured out how to make it final."
— David Borras

The Prometeo Argument

At EICMA 2024, the Milan motorcycle show, El Solitario unveiled a build called the Prometeo — Prometheus, the titan punished for giving fire to humanity — and described it in terms that no other exhibitor at the show would have used: a requiem for freedom in a world eagerly surrendering to surveillance, control, and the suffocating promise of mandated safety. Built on a Royal Enfield Guerrilla 450 in collaboration with the lighting design studio Waldemeyer, the Prometeo is less a motorcycle than a statement about what motorcycles represent and what the world is in the process of losing. El Solitario positions 2050 — the Vision Zero target year — as the deadline, the point at which the regulatory apparatus finishes the job of eliminating the last uncontrolled vehicle from the road.

This is a pessimistic reading, and Borras would be the first to say so. He has described his outlook as very pessimistic, has said he sees no hope for motorcycles as a category, has called them an anachronistic glitch — a holdover from an era when personal risk was a permissible feature of public life, persisting into an era that has decided it isn't. The era of control, he calls it. And the motorcycle, which requires human skill and produces human risk and operates outside the connected-vehicle paradigm that is being built to manage everything else on the road, does not abide.

The question is whether that matters. Whether the practice of building and riding motorcycles — the verb, not the noun — can survive the elimination of the regulatory conditions that currently permit it, or whether it becomes something else, something necessarily underground or off-road or electric or all three, something that continues in the spaces the regulations haven't reached yet. El Solitario's recent work suggests Borras has already answered that question for himself: you build where you can, you ride where they let you, and when they stop letting you, you find somewhere else. The Sahara doesn't have type approval requirements. The dirt trails outside Bergondo don't have emissions monitors. The future of the custom motorcycle, if it has a future, might look less like a showroom and more like a garage in Galicia with a silent electric bike and a map of the places the rules don't apply.

"People don't like freedom and they get violent when they sit in front of it."
— David Borras

At El Solitario, only outlaws will be free. The rest of us pay shipping. We carry El Solitario MC riding gear and apparel at Pemulis Water & Power — built in the same garage, by the same people, with the same conviction that the practice matters more than the permission.

Explore more in our El Solitario collection with our Dirt Wolves T-Shirt and Wolf MX Jersey.