Ecosse The Heretic - Specifications & Review

Company History

Ecosse Moto Works operates where motorcycles overlap with haute horlogerie—limited-series machines crafted with obsessive attention to materials, machining, and finish. Founded by Donald Atchison in Colorado, the company became known for the Heretic and later Titanium models, which married thundering American V-twin character to chassis precision and metalwork that reads like sculpture. The brand’s signature is disciplined extravagance: beautifully surfaced billet components, titanium welds that seem drawn with a compass, and ergonomics tailored to owners who participate in the build process. Performance is real—stout brakes and high-spec suspension—but Ecosse’s proposition is broader: to create heirloom motorcycles that reward close inspection as much as fast riding. Production volumes are tiny by design, allowing the team to iterate details that larger OEMs would freeze for cost reasons—fastener choices, surface textures, even the way light moves across a tank seam. Historically, Ecosse helped codify an American idiom of luxury motorcycling distinct from European boutiques: big-twin heartbeat, artisanal fabrication, and a customer relationship that feels like commissioning a tailored suit. Critics call the prices stratospheric; collectors counter that the bikes are functional metal art with genuine road manners. Either way, the brand proves that, even in an era of mass-optimized competence, there is enduring appetite for the hand-made and the particular—the machine that speaks quietly of craft every time it rolls out of a sunlit garage.