Maeving: Classic motorcycle style, modern innovation.

“By getting a bike I saved 26 days a year in commuting time.”

In this episode, we place a magnifying glass on the electrifying world of motorcycles, featuring the innovative Maeving Motorcycle Company and their latest model, the Maeving RM1S. The design takes inspiration from the 1920s and the café racer era of the 1960s and 70s.

We take a peak at where all the magic happens with Seb Inglis-Jones, co-founder of Maeving. He tells us all about the importance of the batteries being removable - providing riders with flexibility, having the freedom to charge whenever, wherever and catering to both urban commuters and long-distance travelers. It also offers double the power and top speed of 70 mph. 

Find out more about Maeving here.

Find out more about Windchill here and Creo here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena. Location recording by Helen Lennard. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Seb. I'm the co founder and co CEO of Maving. Welcome. So we are now in our factory in Coventry, where we hand build all of our bikes. We're Britain's first electric motorcycle manufacturer. And we're one of the only Western manufacturers making. Bikes with electric bikes with removable batteries.

This is where all the original British manufacturers would have been designing and manufacturing bikes since the end of the 19th century. The reason I originally bought a bike was because I started working in Slough and I had this horrendous commute that we was me bicycling to Paddington, train to Slough, company shuttle bus to the office.

Took me about an hour and a half. And I realized that by getting a bike, I would save 26 days a year. Let alone the cost and the enjoyment and all the other bits. And of course, in the UK we have slightly questionable weather, but actually most of the time. The weather is absolutely fine when it comes to writing, particularly when it's when you're talking about short distances in urban environments.

My co founder and I met at university and we became best mates there. And we actually decided within about six months of meeting each other that we wanted to start a business we wanted to make sure that it was doing something. To solve a problem that we cared about. And for us, that was climate change.

So all we knew back then was that that's what we were gonna be focused on. The plan was to go and make a little bit of headway in respective careers, me and marketing him and finance and then to Quit and to embark upon this journey of starting a company, we started looking at the ways in which we might contribute positively to climate change.

The electrification of transport was in some ways a more accessible area than some of the more complex challenges like carbon sequestering, for example and one of the things that we discovered when we looked at the electrification of transport was that China. Actually had the highest rates of electric adoption and that was in two wheelers.

I, so in China, when we started the business, there was about 300 electric motorcycles and scooters sold in total in the UK, just 300 the same year in China, it was about 22 million. 80 percent of riders out there ride electric scooters and motorcycles, and that's because they pioneered a removable battery technology.

The idea that the best way to charge a lightweight EV is to take the battery out and charge it at a standard socket, not to rely on charging infrastructure, on plugging in your EV, which of course you need when you've got bigger batteries. But when you're just covering 10, 20 miles a day, or 80 miles in a week, there's a very good argument that you should just be able to take your battery out and charge it as easily as you would do your phone or laptop.

Now we are walking towards our assembly line. So we have  a single four stage line where we, which we use to produce both of our models or you can hear right there, you've got our latest model, the Maving RM1S, which has just come out as of September last year and is about to hit the streets.

It is really the big brother to the RM1. And it's got twice the power, a higher top speed of 70 miles per hour. And so naturally it, whilst it's still focused on urban transport primarily, it is really built for those people whose commutes, whose journeys take them outside the city center who might need to go on A roads, brief motorway spells.

So our first model, the RM 1, It's equivalent to a 125 cc bike. It's got a top speed of 45 miles per hour and a range of 80 miles. So it's really been designed for purely urban riding with those specs, it's light, it's maneuverable, it's incredibly easy to use. It's a really good entry level bike for people who haven't ridden before.

The RM1S, S kind of standing for speed there, you'll notice it's very similar in style because people really really love the style of the RM1 so they didn't want us to change it too much, but it's got more than twice the power and a top speed of 70 miles per hour. We still very much have designed it with city riding in mind, but it makes sense for people who might live on the outskirts of cities or who have to cover a little bit of highway, A road riding.

You know, it's usually three times faster than using public transport, but if I'm honest, the most compelling reason for getting an electric motorbike, for me, is because it is fun. It turns commuting, which is something that people usually absolutely hate, into a genuinely enjoyable part of your day, every day.

I find that when I get up in the morning, My alarm goes off, I'm excited to ride my bike, and the same is true in the evening after work. So, so this is Andrew's one of our production guys, and he is at the moment on stage one, where you first affix the, the wheels to the, the frame. So this is the very first stage of production.

Again, for reference, you can see on that screen there this is called PivotWare. This is basically, lays out all of the different build, components of each stage. So it tells you exactly what to do next, which components to use, so on and so forth. On the RM 1, you have a battery, one battery in the tank, and one battery in that housing that sits below the tank.

With the RM 1S, we've moved both batteries into that bottom housing. It does actually have a little bit more capacity to achieve the same range with the higher top speed. So you'll notice there are a few things going on at the side of the assembly line here. We've got this section here with all our frames ready to be VIN stamped.

So that's the identification that denotes them to a particular customer. That's right at the beginning before build stage one. And you've got a few sub assembly areas where particularly complex parts of the bike are being put together ready to then be So, so basically everything is built to order. So we'll have a particular, customer who wants a green bike with a brown seat and upgraded suspension.

And there will be a sort of bill of materials for that customer. Their frame will be picked. The VIN will be stamped on the frame and from that moment, that VIN has been assigned to that customer. So each of these bikes is getting ready to go to a particular customer who's already ordered it. So this is where we ensure that all of our components, whether they are new and we're seeing them for the first time, or whether it's their latest batch, that a certain number of them are tested to make sure that they're within tolerance of the original design.

You can see there that as this gentleman over here is running the scanning arm around that component, it's appearing on the screen, so that basically creates a 3D replica of what you're, what you're seeing in front of you, what's being scanned, and we can see how close that is to the original drawing, the original component design, and that's within a fraction of a millimeter.

And that's really important because, basically, with every batch of components that comes in, you might, for example, scan 20 percent of them to make sure that every single one is perfect and the suppliers that you're working with are giving you really good quality components. Because if things are out by a fraction of a millimeter, then they might not fix together perfectly on the assembly line, there might be issues further down the line.

So that, yeah, that scanning arm is, that does a, a job that would have been incredibly difficult just, you know, 20 years ago, let alone 100 years ago. We're not really renowned for many things in terms of manufacturing, but we are still revered around the world for motorcycle design. So if you speak to great kind of motorcycle collectors around the world, celebrities, and you say, what's your favorite bike in your collection, quite often it'll be a British bike, a Triumph, or a Norton, or an old BSA, something like that.

So it is. Genuinely something that we're very good at. We, specifically with our motorbike design, really wanted to channel that. So, you'll, you may or may not notice that the, the kind of eras of design that we really champion are the 20s, but then also the 60s and 70s. The famous kind of cafe racer era of James Dean and Steve McQueen that is probably the kind of pin up for British motorcycles.

So this is when really the first production motorbikes And they were based on quite simple bicycle frames. So they were very slender, very stripped back and quite elegant and then we've got that 60s and 70s cafe racer era that I was talking about earlier. The sort of Steve McQueen, James Dean style.

And again, the thing that defines them is that really stripped back design. So no plastic all around the bike. You've got the exposed metal work. It's just the frame, the tank, and the wheels. You'll also notice there's not a big LCD screen on the front. We've got a good old traditional analog speedo and we painstakingly converted the digital signal into an analog one so that you could have that.

For us, it's about being at one with everything around you and not having technology bombard you. Cool, so if you want to come onto the other side, I will talk you through this. So now you are looking at the two removable batteries I've been talking about. That's the most important feature of the bike.

The idea that you can take this battery out and charge it at a standard socket as you would do your phone. Because that's what enables, that basically overcomes the biggest challenge for EV adoption which is poor charging infrastructure. So this kind of range anxiety that everyone talks about, it's not really about how many miles a particular vehicle.

Can cover. It's about how infrequent the opportunity to charge is and how long it takes to charge. Whereas if you can take the batteries out and charge, charge 'em at a stand standard, if you can take the batteries out and charge 'em at a standard socket, basically turns every 13 amp socket into a charging port.

So that's the whole game changer. You can either take the batteries out and charge, charge 'em with a standard socket, so that's great If you live in a small flat in London or if you have a garage, for example, you can lift up. This flap here and charge the bike directly or from using an adapter from a type two charger

there's no doubt that the the problem that we wanted to solve was the electrification of transport and Realizing that most people I think it's 82 percent of Brits live in urban and suburban Areas the average commute is under seven miles and the vast majority of trips are done solo So most of us most of the time You Do not need an electric car.

The fact that I grew up as a passionate petrolhead who loves cars and bikes meant that when I considered this whole question of electric motorbikes, I jumped on it and convinced my co founder and, and you know, with all of the enthusiasm as someone who really cares about bikes. So that's where that comes in is, you know, the passion for cars and bikes that supersedes, That problem and that consideration about transport.

I think we have two customers that are quite distinct. So the first is your traditional motorcyclists. He wouldn't necessarily expect would be into electric. They might be a little bit older. They might have multiple bikes. They might have an adventure bike for riding on the weekends. They might have a sports bike.

And for them, this is a very sensible, City commuter, which is very simple, reliable, you know, it's very mechanically simple. So it doesn't have a lot of maintenance associated with it. Tthe second customer that we have, who is, I guess, in some ways, the really interesting one is your. Is someone who has never ever ridden a motorcycle before they perhaps weren't that enamored by the whole petrol motorcycle world They would have loved a Tesla but it doesn't make any sense because they live in a small apartment in the city and they see this is actually a really sensible for them to get around town a Genuinely viable more affordable more fun alternative to the London tube For example, because there's a lot more fun riding this into work than it is being, you know, stuffed up in someone's armpit on a tube.

In terms of specific people riding our bikes at the moment and the picture that it paints about the use cases, just as an example, we've got the great celebrity chef, Tom Brown. He's currently riding one of our bikes and he has two Restaurants that are based in different parts of London and he uses them to get quickly between them, which he wouldn't actually be able to do in the same way if it wasn't for this bike And because he spends all of his time his days in a very frenetic loud noisy kitchen Being on a kind of silent bike just with his own thoughts moving between those restaurants.

He actually finds that very calming Experience by contrast with his with his crazy work life. We also got somebody more recently Ashley Walters. He's the lead actor in Top Boy And is incredibly popular at the moment a really nice guy he again He's someone I think he's doing a lot of film directing at the moment and he has quite hectic days and I think He uses it as a as a relaxing way to kind of blow off some steam in the evening or you know on the weekends Riding again on this kind of silent bike.

He finds it a contrastingly peaceful experience. So there are definitely people who find the kind of quietness, of an electric vehicle contrastingly peaceful versus the old model where someone would be, you know, riding out on the weekend on an incredibly loud v twin bike making a complete racket in the countryside.

In the future we'd love to explore a fully bespoke or a more bespoke solution. At the moment you go on our website and you can choose between a range of colors for things like the tank, you can choose whether with the mudguards you want black mudguards or carbon fiber, whether you want nice carbon fiber inlays.

So there's quite a few choices and quite a few different configurations that you can make, but it's not a fully bespoke system in that you can't have a custom tank, for example, at the moment. You know, the electric two wheeler market is growing very quickly, but it's still relatively small and you know, we're talking sort of tens of thousands of, of, of electric bikes at this stage in many European countries, not hundreds of thousands.

So we're very much growing with that market.