BRD set out to build an electric vehicle with appeal beyond environmentalists and early adopters, to skeptics who have every reason to reject electric drivetrains. Every component of the vehicle drivetrain and chassis was designed from a clean slate with the focused intent of being faster and more beautiful than anything else in the space. The resulting RedShift electric motocrosser is the first production electric vehicle to outperform the gas equivalents on their own turf, and has garnered rave reviews from an industry renowned for its love of noise and smoke.

Consumers have been slow to adopt electric vehicles because the electric options to date have been inferior to gas options by the metrics most customers use: value, performance, and aesthetics. For an electric vehicle to succeed it needs to be more than a better electric, it needs to be a better vehicle. The challenge is that today’s batteries are far heavier, larger, and more expensive than a tank of gasoline or diesel, making it extremely difficult for electric vehicles to exceed the performance or value of gas options. As long as this is true, consumers will continue to prefer petroleum to electrons.

First, BRD selected a market segment where electric had the potential to exceed gas on the key purchase metric, speed. Motocross motorcycles which are top-speed limited by their off-road environment have very high demands for power:weight ratio, but very low demands for energy/fuel, typically carrying only 1.5 gallons of gasoline. Because of this electrics can achieve similar or better power to weight ratios and still have sufficient range to compete in conventional races.

Second, BRD was careful to apply context and maintain humility in approaching the market space. The gasoline options are extremely refined and advanced, and the customers in this space are conservative and skeptical. BRD needed to develop a product that capitalized on the decades of chassis development in gasoline motorcycles, and respected the history and established aesthetic of the space, while still being authentic to an electric drivetrain.

Perhaps most importantly, the BRD team is populated with designers, engineers and business strategists with a long history within, and deep respect for, the gasoline-based competition. This informed all aspects of research and design.

The team began with deep research into the state of the art including product teardowns, 3D scans, and CAD modelling of gasoline motorcycles. This was further supplemented with interviews and collaborative sessions with outside engineers, technicians, mechanics, riders, and dealers to understand the subtleties of the full product lifecycle.

The BRD electric drivetrain was then architected and engineered from a clean slate to achieve unprecedented levels of power and energy density within the specified packaging size. Uniquely, the entire drivetrain was designed at a system level and in concert with the proprietary chassis design. It was also designed from the outset for manufacture, allowing the team to skip typical test mule and aesthetic modelling stages, moving directly to a fully functional and fully aesthetic first prototype built largely with production or near-production methodologies. This first prototype exceeded the performance of the gas benchmark in all testing formats, even under outside journalists. Additionally, it garnered rave reviews from the mainstream motorcycle audience for it’s purposeful and familiar, but subtly differentiated design.

Motorcycles are the tool much of the world uses to get around. There are nearly as many motorcycles on the road (50M) as cars (60M), globally. As the world urbanizes and population densities increase, motorcycles will represent an even larger proportion of personal transportation. Shifting this space to electric will have a massive global impact on carbon emissions, as well as air quality, as gas motorcycles produce drastically more pollutants per mile than automobiles due to more lenient regulation. In California alone, motorcycles produce 10% of air pollutants though they represent only 3% of miles driven.

Winning over the insulated and fractional segments of environmentalists or early adopters isn’t enough to change markets. For better or worse, the bulk of the transportation market cares little about clean – to move the majority, an electric product needs to appeal for more reasons than simply being electric. In many cases it needs to appeal in spite of being electric. The BRD RedShift has broken through this barrier, with proven desire not just from the mainstream but the typically hostile skeptics. It marks the turning point in the transition from petroleum based transportation to electric transportation.