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.
