Electric bikes aren’t new anymore. You can’t wow people by just being electric, you need to do better than that!
Matthew Waddick, engineer
The eSCRAMBLER is designed from scratch by ex-Yamaha Japan Advanced Labs Industrial Designer and former Danish Flat Tracking champion Michel Riis. Michel’s background in design as well as his hands-on experience of motorcycles – he’s been building and racing them since he was 12 – positioned him as the ideal candidate for this project.
The brief was for a mid-size motorcycle with a powerful mid-drive motor, belt drive, refined design and to be production-ready. The bike also needed to be able to handle high speeds and have a minimum 150km range per charge. These requirements meant that the eSCRAMBLER needed to be a new design developed from the ground up.
While there are hundreds of electric scooters, light electric motorcycles and expensive electric sports bikes, the market for high-level, custom-styled, mid-sized motorcycles is sparse at best. Switch puts this down to design challenges: making a bike look good while delivering speed and range at an acceptable price is even more difficult than it sounds.
The eSCRAMBLER’s mid-drive motor outputs a massive 50kW, catering to the performance side of things. As for aesthetics, Michel placed an emphasis on details. “I love to have small highlights show the lines I want people to notice,” says Michel, who was instrumental in designing a leather seat, controller cooling and electronics pan, CNCd foot pegs, foot levers, rear light and all sorts of mounts and brackets. What’s more, this extraordinary amount of details had to be reproducible for mass-production.
You’ll be glad to hear that testing is well underway and the Switch eSCRAMBLER is destined to hit the road in 2022.
For more information, visit Switch Motorcycles.
Photography courtesy of Switch Motorcycles.
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