Yeah, I know what clickbait is. I'm a writer, remember? 
This ain't clickbait. It's actually a pretty concise call on where we're at, today, in the industry. It is the end of the "beginning". If you call a title that "makes you want to click" clickbait, you just called every title ever written on the web clickbait.
It's a great title, in fact. And a great piece.
The title isn't really clickbait, but that graphic (which is what appears if you share the article on a FB timeline) is misleading and sensationalist. In particular, here is what you see on a FB news feed:
80% Graphic with big red letters underneath it "PLUG-IN ELECTRIC MOTORCYCLES ARE A SCAM"
15% Text underneath that with the title of the article "The Electric Superbike - The End of the Beginning" (the title is in smaller font than the SCAM caption)
5% Text below that which appears to be a summary of the article: "Electric motorcycle companies are dying. Is the electric motorcycle a dead concept?"
All in all, when you see that, it comes across as just one step away from "AND YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT!" even though the article itself is nothing like those "WON'T BELIEVE" sites/articles.
In particular, when I first saw a pointer to this article on my FB feed I didn't click on it precisely because that graphic screamed "clickbait" to me - it gave me an expectation that the article was a general put-down of the concept of EV motorcycles using Mission as a trigger point by a writer who couldn't get attention any other way. While it was very critical of Mission, it was more about an industry evolution than an industry-wide scam. It wasn't until someone posted the link to the article here (with just the title) that I decided it was worth a read (and actually didn't even realize it was the same article that I had avoided due to the sensational graphic until I reached the page and saw the graphic there). I decided to read anyway because I was already there and it was being discussed here or I may have just closed the window.
Until I saw the name of the link here I thought that "Plug-in Electric Motorcycles Are A Scam" was the actual title of the article, and if nothing else, more of a barometer of what the article would be about.
Is that clickbait? I think that graphic and the summary, when compared to the actual direction that the article takes - is a form of clickbaiting. The contents of the graphic and the 2 sentences used to provide some idea of content are sensationalistic and misleading about what the article is going to be about - and in a way that will attract a lot of clicks from people who probably are looking more for some serious schadenfreude rather than a historical accounting and an industry analysis.
But, the purest form of clickbaiting - the robotically generated sites that tie into search engines and social media advertising with the "You'll never believe!" meme - the article is a long way from anything like that, but you wouldn't think it was very far from that just judging from what shows up on your FB feed...
