Kiwi startup bringing style and affordability to electric motorbikes
Ispent last weekend with a group of motoring aficionados fettling their cars for the forthcoming Targa Rally. I tabled my longstanding aim to be the first person to race Targa in an electric car. A statement which led to a lot of mickey-taking about my limited driving ability and also some discussion about the sad fact that New Zealand isn’t going to come within a bull’s roar of meeting its EV target.
Set back in 2016, the Government’s stated aim is to have a combined EV and PHEV fleet of 64,000 vehicles by the end of 2021. Four months into 2021 and five years after the target was set, that number is sitting a little over 26,000.
My friend Marko summed it up: ‘‘The problem is that unless you’re talking about dropping a cool $200k on a Tesla Model X or a 918, then there’s not a lot of sexy electric cars out there.’’
And while beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it’s hard not to agree with him. Particularly when a large part of the country’s electric fleet are firstgeneration Nissan Leafs.
Which leads to the other factor that gets in the way of EV take-up, and that is cost. Vintage Japanese imported Leafs aside, most EVs are still considerably more expensive than internal combustion engine cars and come with a shorter shelf life.
A new Wellington company, FTN Motion, is about to take aim at both those issues with a new electric motorbike that is both stylish and affordable.
With an aesthetic halfway between a 1960s British cafe racer and Bert Munro’s ‘‘world’s fastest Indian’’, the FTN Motion Streetdog looks like no other electric motorbike.
As well as being chargeable from any wall socket, the retro-looking ride has 30 litres of internal storage space and features bodywork designed to be a blank canvas for customisation. This means each bike can be turned into a work of art, or bear a business logo.
The sucker punch here is that technically the Streetdog is a moped-class vehicle, which means it can be ridden by anyone with a car licence. So the barriers to riding are lower than for a normal motorcycle, and the cost of running a lot lower.
After being developed in one of Creative HQ’s incubation cohorts, FTN Motion created the first prototype during lockdown last year and officially opened its early adopter presales to the public in January.
It has sold more than a third of the first 100 bikes via an early adopter round, mainly through word of mouth and social media.
This week the company closed a fully subscribed $500,000 capital-raising.
This pre-seed capital will allow it to get its first hires on board, build 10 beta units, and start developing the business towards full production later in the year.
It will be interesting to see the extent to which its current advantages around style, advertising and brand will be able to be emulated by cheaper overseas manufacturers, but for now it’s quite a unique proposition.
What’s also interesting is that FTN Motion’s progress so far has been without any central government support.
While there are sporadic examples of subsidies for electric motorbikes in some sectors (and a bulk purchasing deal for public servants wanting an electric bicycle), it’s nowhere near as prevalent as the extensive set of EV car incentives implemented over the past five years.
These include no road user charges, special parking and road access rights and a contestable fund for support initiatives.
About the same time the FTN Motion capital raising closed, so did the submission process on the Climate Change Commission’s first report on reducing greenhouse gas emissions to help New Zealand meet the Paris Accord.
The report focuses on the slow uptake of electric vehicles, the increased generation of renewable energy, a phasing out of fossil fuels for heating and industry and increased use of biomass.
To move forward in a meaningful way, the commission recommends we ban imports of all fossil-fuel vehicles before 2035.
That’s an honourable, if aggressive target. It’s also one that might be more easily reached if decision-makers start realising that electric cars are only part of the solution to reducing carbon emissions as well as road congestion.
With a price point less than $8000, the likes of the Streetdog are already closer to the reach of everyday Kiwis. If the Government chose to subsidise the operating costs they would be even closer, as would the Climate Change Commission’s goals.
Mike ‘‘MOD’’ O’Donnell is a professional director, writer and strategy facilitator. His Twitter handle is @modsta and he has a habit of losing wheels in the Targa Rally.