The car designer who wants you to commute on an electric bike

The morning commute. Photo credit: Tom Hilton.

With so many electric car startups popping up these days, particularly ones reliant on Chinese money, you might have expected Chen Tengjiao to be working on one of his own when he left Infiniti, Nissan’s spin-off luxury brand, in late 2014.

But the Beijing-based car designer had two-wheelers in mind.

“I lived near the Lufthansa Shopping Center and needed to go to the 798 Art District for work. It was a 6-kilometer journey. But I was stuck on the road for 40 or 50 minutes as I drove to work each day,” says Tengjiao of his old commute in the Chinese capital.

“It started to dawn on me that the auto industry where I worked did not offer much value to society and that there was no way for it to create a better life for others. Later, I tried the bus and the bike, but the experience was very poor in both cases. I then started to wonder whether I could create a new kind of transport vehicle to provide an easy commute experience for urban white-collar workers,” says Tengjiao to Tech in Asia.

Green alternative

With Tsinova, he came out with a series of lightweight electric bikes. Like this one:

The Tsinova TS01, which costs US$1,699, shown off at the Beijing mall designed by Zaha Hadid. Photo credit: Tsinova.

It’s not exactly a radical idea. China has already cycled through push-bikes and e-bikes – those electric scooters that are so common that they’re sold in some supermarkets – before the swelling middle class switched to cars. That soon resulted in insane traffic jams in some Chinese cities, particularly in Beijing with its population of just over 20 million.

The auto industry … did not offer much value to society.

Tengjiao – who worked as an exterior designer at Infiniti in China – is doing things differently by making his electric bike a lot lighter than the old e-bikes that so many Chinese are now getting rid of. “And people can bring it into the home or office easily,” he adds.

His target market for the Tsinova bikes is not the same, either. “Traditional e-bikes are heavy, bad looking, and mainly made for people who can’t afford cars. Their users are couriers, security staff, and so on. [Our smart bike] is made for middle classes who usually already own cars in big cities.”

There is, almost inevitably, a companion app for the bike, which shows the owner details of each ride and also the bike’s battery level.