Raring to Indiegogo

Well, we are up and running with the electric sports-bike, crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Thank you to everyone who has supported us so far. We’ve still got a way to go but things are developing quickly.

The working prototype of Spark has been shown to a few people and the reaction has been very positive. We are committed to developing the adventure bike first and then moving swiftly to the Café Racer.

We have some novel ideas that we are developing for the power train and frame geometry which we hope to share in a future blog. Leeds University have signed up with a strong team of engineers who will be working with us to work up the preproduction bike designs.

The crowd funding has already generated some great contacts from the manufacturing technology sector and we hope to takes some of these forward. We are working with local bike groups to finalise the specifications and to sound them out on our design innovations. These are going to be bikes for bikers by bikers and they have to perform as well as look the part. We are keen to involve bikers who are never shy in liking or disliking designs. We include ourselves here at BR-E in this regard.

Battery and motor technologies are critical parts of the project and again we are establishing good links with prospective partners. Secondary funding has been secured but we need to complete the initial crowdfunding to make this happen at the desired pace. We would like to have preproduction units out around Easter time next year and follow these with the Café Racer designs. Our plan is to hold events where bikers can try them and in many cases ride an electric bike for the first time.

We ride off-road and superbikes and we were surprised by the different feel and response of the electric sports prototype. No wonder that speed records are held by electric bikes!

The challenge is to balance the three key elements of weight, endurance and performance. Typically you can easily achieve any two but all three are required to bring a sports bike to life.

We are working on a degree of interchangeability between the two extremes of adventure and sports road-bikes. We would even like to allow bikers to reconfigure their bikes easily to effectively get two styles in one. Time will tell if this goes as planned. We are hoping to announce some high profile backers shortly and we’d like to hear from you if you have an interest in helping us to make this happen.

You can help to back the campaign as an individual or corporate sponsor or take advantage of one of the offers via Indiegogo. Keep an eye on our progress on Indiegogo and we hope to see you at one of the launch events if we achieve the funding target.