The first "smart" electric scooter that is 100 pct Greek-made could be making its first appearance on the roads by next summer, if all goes well. According to its designers, the co-founders of the Greek company Give, the i.lektra project is now in its final stages and virtually all that remains to be done is to find a brand name for the new scooter.
The company was set up by Ilias Nasiopoulos, Lefteris Kozas, Asteris Apostolidis and Sevastianos Mail when Nasiopoulos returned from England four years ago, after working for eight years as a senior mechanic on the Force India Formula 1 team at Prodrive and the Nissan Research and Development Centre in Europe, to devote himself to his vision.
Talking to the Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA), Nasiopoulos outlined what this was: "Give was set up with electromobility as the vision and the goal of innovating in the area of urban mobility. We started out, however, with services to third parties to generate capital that we could then invest in our own vision."
The company's services mainly concern computer engineering for the automotive industry, from resilience analysis to liquid mechanics, aerodynamics and electromagnetic analysis. It is currently collaborating with a Chinese auto industry, UK's Prodrive and other smaller firms.
The idea for a scooter dates back to the foundation of the company, alongside more ambitious plans for vehicle production, and its design started in 2017. "We now have the prototypes ready, we are testing at the Demokritos park and the goal now is to start the certification process and then go to an assembly line. It is a difficult stage, financially, but we are optimistic," Nasiopoulos said.
He said the company had adjusted its vision to the realities of the Greek market and planned to start small, with about 200-300 units in the first year and then rise to 1000 in the following years.
The scooter that will hit the roads in the summer of 2021 will be an environmentally-friendly electric motorbike with a top speed of 85 km/ hour and a range of 180 km with one charge, provided by three detachable batteries. It will also have a digital-screen dashboard and navigator. In addition, it will be one of the first vehicles worldwide that can be activated by a mobile phone, which will also double as an alarm in cases of attempted theft.
Source: Athens-Macedonian News Agency (ANA)
