Pi Mobility – An E-bike Design with — Get This — Nothing Wrong!

One of the lessons we learn as we go through life is how much tougher things actually are than they initially appear.  I was a reasonably athletic person as a young man, and I thought surfing might come easy.  Wrong.  Designing electric transportation might be an example of a subject that would certainly be a piece of cake.  What’s so hard?  You have a battery pack and an electric motor.  It has one moving part. Well…., no.

As you check out this electric bicycle, the Pi Cycle by Pi Mobility, think about a few of the design ideas that went into it.  While you’re doing that, think about all the ways this could be done wrong; i.e., the thousands of different ways that E-bikes can be made too heavy, too expensive, uncomfortable, dorky-looking, prone to failure, requiring constant upkeep, hard or pricey to repair, requiring hard-to-source parts, easy for thieves to disassemble and steal, quick to discharge, slow to charge, dangerous, dirty, counter-intuitive, or unergonomic.

That’s the beauty of the Pi-Cycle.  Nothing’s wrong!  It’s the perfect design.  When I met these folks at this year’s Clean Business Investment Summit, I knew I had a winner on my hands.  And when I had lunch with CEO Marcus Hays at his factory in Sausilito (Northern California) last week, I knew I was in the presence of one of the true greats in this exciting niche space.  He’s been hard at work creating the perfect e-bike design for over a decade.  And it shows.