Tuesday, October 15, 2013

Tesla Co-Founder Martin Eberhard Joins Board of BRD Electric Motorcycles

In 2002, when Martin Eberhard co-founded Tesla Motors, he had a dream to make the electric vehicle a world-wide success. Unfortunately, his dream was short-lived, with a lawsuit involving Elon Musk and an outing from the company in 2007.
Since then, he had a minor stint with Volkswagen, but has recently joined the board of up-and-coming electric motorcycle manufacturer BRD Motorcycles, a San Francisco-based outlet of electric two-wheelers.
Founded in 2010, BRD has been slowly but surely securing funds to build two of its first motorcycles: the MX and SM. It wasn’t until last year that they received the funding needed ($850,000) to begin production on each of their two vehicles. And this year marks the arrival of Eberhard to the board of directors.
According to the Wall Street Journal, BRD secured another $1M in funding and are already taking pre-orders on each of their two electric motorcycles. Making the switch from pouch cells to small format cells, much of the new engineering a mirror image of Tesla’s current battery technology. A fact that Eberhard is quite fond:
“They are not trying to cobble together parts or buy their tech from Chinese or Italian motor suppliers.” said Eberhard, “They have a world-class battery, one of the best I’ve seen. And they treat safety as a religion.”
BRD’s RedShift bike starts at an affordable $14,995, and can manage a 0-60 mph time of only 3.3 seconds. Only 1,000 units will be produced, beginning in 2014.

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