Buzz bikes without the noise
The quieter electric bikes offer a convenient way to get through the traffic
● It’s too early to tell how the latest electric vehicles (EVs), the buzz bikes (sans the “buzz”, of course) of the electric era, will appeal to SA consumers.
Electric mobility in Africa is in its infancy; sales on the continent are the lowest in the world. SA has the most advanced e-mobility market in Africa, with accelerator and pedal versions now being joined by the 125cc-capacity hand-throttle kind.
In the US the market for electric bikes has increased by just over 40% in a year. Last year about 790,000 were sold, up from 463,000 in 2020. With this huge disparity between the two countries, they are impossible to compare. Nicholas Hall, sales and marketing director of E Tron Electric Moto-Bikes, would be happy if the SA market for the electric motorbike mimicked the US even a little.
Hall picked up the idea of EV motorbikes from Singapore. He met someone from the island city-state who had designed a bike, and brought two models to SA. With his background in motoring and an understanding that the industry is moving in the EV direction, Hall stripped and redesigned every part, then found a partner who made horse trailers in China.
“We started the research & development and flew bikes back and forth,” Hall says. Costs started to mount quickly, but
Hall believes they were building “an urban transport solution” for SA’s congested traffic problem.
“We had to make sure the bike would be sustainable in SA,” he says. He found the local licensing and registration administration “a nightmare”.
“It took us 18 months just to get the bikes booked, submitted and certified, but eventually we got the National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications and the Electronic National Administration Traffic Information System to put their stamp of approval on the bikes.”
E Tron Electric Moto-Bikes are the only street-legal electric motorbikes in SA. They were launched in December 2019, and 70 were sold, but then Covid hit, and the factory closed in January 2021. If designing the bike and getting it accredited were hard, being in limbo and the uncertainty the pandemic brought about were even more difficult.
Hall also lost a partner and needed to find another. “Finding a backup is a different story. It’s an art,” he says. “You look around this country and think, right, this is easy. We already know what the landed cost is. We know it’s a very competitive product and we know that it does what it says on the tin. But [unlike in China] we can’t build 50 bikes at a time; it’s too expensive. You’ve got to have someone who can scale it.”
Hall says the business’s financial director, Chris Corns, “has a strong understanding of building bikes for the best possible price, as many as you can afford — enough to drive the cost of production down”.
Corns says: “It’s rare to be at the genesis of a new business. I was at the beginning of cellular when it came to SA, and that obviously had automatic acceptance — people use telephones. These bikes also have huge social acceptance in terms of what they deliver, but it’s a new business, and a pipeline has not been set up. That’s interesting territory — this socially conscious movement about zero emissions.”
A bike costs R95,000, with a battery and a motor imported from China. If the bike had to be made locally, the lithium-ion battery would cost about R47,000 and the rear hub motor and the engine management system as a combination R22,000, says Corns. Such costs would make the bikes uneconomical in SA, says Hall. “The things we can easily manufacture locally are frames, panels, lights, indicators, all of that stuff. It’s the big-cost technology that we can’t get here.”
The top speed of the bike is 90km/h. On one charge you can reach an average range of 90km. The onboard charger operates from any standard three-pin plug without the hassle of an external charger or a battery swap. There’s a dual USB port for onboard phone charging and a Bluetooth remote, which is designed to operate the unique E Tron Electric onboard audio system. This gives the rider the choice of riding in silence or switching to external audio, which can alert other road users to the bike via the onboard speakers.
The LED road and onboard lights draw only milliamps of power from the battery. The bikes have a three-stage ignition safety start, designed to prevent riders from accidentally engaging the instant highperformance 3,000W rearhub electric motor.