Planning production of electric scooter range

[pea]

By the way - I'm not ungrateful!

Thanks for those links and arguments. I welcome as much as possible, because as I said we are only at market research phase, and as much of this stuff that I can look into early on will help. The biggest question to answer for me is YES or NO - I am in no way committed to production yet. Just a plan at this stage.

[bogan]

To give you some idea of what I plan to build - definitely NOT mass-market. If this goes ahead we will be low-volume, unique (custom built) electric scooters and later, smaller vehicles (motorcycles, and 2-front-1-rear style vehicles). There are plenty of great brands that cater for other niches, but nothing like this is around. Think of a fusion between Aston Martin and Harley Davidson.

Personally, I'm not seeing a market for custom scooters, the scooter crowd are generally pretty utilitarian. Then again, maybe that sort of thinking is why nobody else has filled the niche

I don't know anything about the ORC for an electric motorbike, but surely the ORC for an electric motorbike wouldn't be more than a petrol motorbike? And if the ORC was no more expensive than the petrol version, there wouldn't be any additional rego to recoup?

They are the same, but an electric scoot is hardly going to replace your bike, it will be in addition to it as a second vehicle. Hence the extra cost.

[pea]

Personally, I'm not seeing a market for custom scooters

That's exactly why I'm performing market research first. If there is no market, I'm happy to keep making them for myself

If you have any more of those links, fire them through.

[avgas]

Ah I get where you coming from. And I do think there is potential..........but not in the way you do (well going off the images on your website).

Do some research on the custom Japanese Scooters - there are some big name builders out there building some fantastic stuff in the market. "Classic looking scooters" get drowned out an flood of Honda Jokers and Chinese "vespa-looking" scooters. This is also what has happened in Europe (which I am sure you research has found).

Where as the Japanese custom scooter market take the approach of building something completely new and different, not based of an old design but based of a new one.

There currently no custom scooter builders in Japan doing an electric variant (as far as I know). So you could head that off. But like I said.....its probably not what your used to..... here are a couple to start the gears turning..

[pea]

Ah fantastic! By far the closest to what I have in mind so far, but from an electric angle. Maybe I should be focussing on Japan rather than Europe? Maybe I should go for 'crazy' instead of 'eco' :P

The images on my website (www.velectric.co.nz) are just some I 'borrowed' from BMW. The disclaimer says 'Note: The scooters in the image are not ours. They are electric scooter concepts from MINI. Ours will be way cooler '. My initial build is on my blog site www.projectitis.com. The first production model will be way different to this again, but more along these lines (timber usage, etc). I'll have more pics in a week or so - I am currently varnishing the fairing and painting the freshly welded frame.

[avgas]

If you want to do low volume custom.......crazy is the only way.

[SMOKEU]

the power to take and dispose of vehicles and you can be compelled to help get extra evidence from your computer(s) [such as passwords, etc]! Cripes.

TrueCrypt. Problem solved.