05 February 2025

The first motorcycle in the world to feature Terrain Intelligence perception software met the world at the CES show earlier this month. The reveal follows a year-long partnership with motorcycle maker KTM and its parent group innovation arm Pierer Innovation, designed to realize a step-change in off-road and on-road performance.

The new year began with a bang at Potential, as we showcased our KTM prototype and partnership for the very first time.

We have been working with KTM and parent company’s innovation division Pierer Innovation since early 2024, exploring how Terrain Intelligence could dramatically improve performance and safety in motorcycles. The program included taking delivery of a 2024 KTM Super Adventure 1290 S motorcycle at our lab and proving grounds in Fredericton, Canada, which has become our test mule.

As members of the Connected Vehicle Alliance (COVESA), we were invited to showcase our KTM prototype at the CES expo in Las Vegas in January 2025. It’s no exaggeration to say that we had lines around the room, with industry leaders eager to explore Terrain Intelligence features and understand more about the benefits this perception platform can bring to motorcycles and other vehicles.

What is Terrain Intelligence?

Terrain Intelligence is our predictive software platform that reads the surface of the ground ahead of a vehicle. We’re looking at surface characteristics such as roughness, hardness and deformability, as well as slope changes and angles.

By delivering actionable insights ahead of obstacles and hazards, we provide time for vehicles to proactively self-select settings ahead of encountering these issues. The result is superior performance, safety and comfort – truly the next generation of ADAS.

Vehicle manufacturers can use Terrain Intelligence in two ways:

Modular. We can deliver modular outputs that can be combined with data points from other, pre-existing, conventional sensor arrays. In this way, control over changes to vehicle settings remains within existing decision architectures, which sometimes is an easier path to adoption for large, complex organisations such as global automotive OEMs.
End-to-end. Alternatively, Terrain Intelligence can deliver vehicle setting changes directly, making for a faster and more efficient decision-making method with fewer junction points. This enables the benefits of Terrain Intelligence to be realized even in vehicles without significant software capabilities.

(See the latest version of Terrain Intelligence making predictions on a motorcycle here, and on a side-by-side here. And read how we shrunk our 2024 models by 75% without sacrificing accuracy here.)

Incredible innovation with KTM

Our partnership with KTM and Pierer Innovations has involved working directly with their innovation teams, who are based in Austria. We conducted our own extensive testing with our test mule in North America, but also utilized KTM data from locations across Europe to train our AI models.

We installed a compute unit into the rear luggage box to mimic the type of processing capacity that KTM’s next-generation adventure motorcycle is likely to boast, while remaining easily-accessible to our engineers throughout the duration of the programme.

At the front of the bike, we added an automotive-grade forward-facing camera. Around the instrument binnacle, we added a custom-fabricated user interface for our test riders, allowing them to easily turn data logging on and off while on the move. A simple graphical display indicates to the rider when Terrain Intelligence registers obstacles ahead. These are captured as flags in the software and, on vehicles with more integration, can proactively inform changes to suspension, driveline and chassis settings.

All of this prototype hardware was built by our engineers in our lab, and fitted by us in our own vehicle workshop, both located at our HQ.

We have covered some 3,000 km in data collection, verification and testing over the course of the program, including multiple off-road and on-road environments, varied different surface types (including gravel trails, dusty lake beds, boulder fields, muddy tracks and soft sand dunes), and different weather conditions.

We’ve ridden the bike extensively in North America, through Canada and the US, and our CEO Sam Poirier even passed his motorcycle license so he could contribute to testing.

“One major advantage that our KTM programme benefits from is the extensive testing we’ve already conducted,” explains Bill Lamey, CTO at Potential.

“We were not starting from a blank page in understanding surfaces – we’ve got six years of development to build on, as well as ongoing development work on our parallel projects. Of course, how those surfaces and features interact with this motorcycle is different compared to the 12 other vehicle types we’ve tested with, but we see this as simply part of the tuning process which will be needed for every vehicle model that rolls off the production line with Terrain Intelligence on board.”

A big moment for Potential

“Nearly all of our partnerships are closely-guarded secrets,” says Sam Poirier, CEO at Potential.

That’s to be expected. Working with Potential offers clear evidence of how advanced a manufacturer is in adoption of software capabilities and off-road ability.

“So it’s not surprising that this is only the second time we have been able to disclose one of our partners, after announcing our work with powersports giant CFMOTO,” Sam continues. “It is an enormously exciting moment for the Potential team and the wider automotive sector.”

We believe that Terrain Intelligence delivers an enviable and unassailable competitive advantage to our customers, whether they are building side-by-sides, pick-up trucks, SUVs - or motorcycles.