Terra Motors And Asia’s Electric Motorbike Horizons

I love the feature-length documentary Revenge of the Electric Car, which centers around the return of electric cars, as seen with Tesla. So when I met Shingo Hayashi, I was delighted. He’s the general director in Vietnam for Terra Motors.

Terra Motors manufactures luxury and mainstream electric motorbikes for Asian markets. Mostly centered in Japan, the Philippines, thusand recently Vietnam.

The company was started in April 2010 by Toru Tokushige. After working in Silicon Valley, he returned to Japan with the dream of building a startup that would go global, as happened to major technology manufacturing companies like Sony and Yamaha. Armed with $8 million to start, he hired young energetic members like Hayashi, and experienced engineers from Honda, Suzuki, and Yamaha. He also gathered around him major shareholders like a former Apple VP, a Sony CEO, a Google Japan CEO, and a McKinsey partner. With these men around him, how could Terra Motors fail?

But it’s passion that really lead to success. When showing off his tiny Tokyo office packed with the only 15 employees in the company, Tokushige says:

We do not pay for a large office, instead we spend money on bike development.

Terra Motors’ tiny office.

Hayashi says he used to sleep on the floor in that same office, and the team worked really hard on sales. Well, it’s paid off. By 2011, Terra Motors was already the market leader in the e-bike market in Japan and by 2012, it held 40 percent of the market. Those 15 employees? They’re in a company that manufactures 1,000 e-bikes per month.

By mid-2012, Tokushige sent two of his staff into the Philippines and Vietnam.

In the Philippines, Terra Motors is working with the Philippines government to produce 100,000 units in the next five years. Five years ago, Filipino authorities were jazzed about a new cheap Chinese electric tricycle that would replace their smoky tuk-tuks. Within months, the e-trikes broke down. Terra Motors is now coming in to manufacture quality tricycles for the Filipino government. Hayashi draws parallels with Vietnam, where the company plans to open a factory in Vietnam in September this year:

In Vietnam, a similar situation occurred with Chinese e-bikes. In 2006, e-bikes experienced a huge jump in sales. They were cheap, $300 to $500. But customers, mostly students, quickly realized that the batteries got old and you couldn’t safely fit two people on the e-bikes. Effectively, after a few months, the e-bikes would become bicycles as consumers kept using them with their dead batteries.