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Vasily Shkondin must
have had a lot of free time when he commanded a Red Army
radar station in East Germany back in the 1980s. Between
shifts spent watching for the first blips of World War
Three, he sketched out plans for a new kind of electric
motor. The NATO bombers never did strike, but inspiration
did.
Nearly two decades
later, Mr. Shkondin's idea for a thin electric motor is the
flag¬ship product of Ultra Motor, a British company with
designs on an emerging and undefined market that stretches
from commuters in Zurich to rickshaw drivers in Calcutta.
The company's
motor—which is about the size of two dinner plates 4
centimeters apart—fits into the hub of any wheel, whether
it's attached to a bicvcle or a car. Ultra Motor plans to
blanket the globe with fleets of electric bikes,
motorcycles, motor-scooters, wheelchairs, and cars.
While hub-mounted
electric motors aren't new, Ultra Motor claims its design
allows for much higher torque than conventional hub-type
motors without the need for gears, belts, or chains,
allowing it to match the performance of pricey com¬petitors
at a fraction of the cost. "When it comes to daily travel
within the world's cities, vehicles powered by our motor
will be all you need," says Ultra Motor chief executive Paul
Dyson.
A lot of money
awaits Mr. Dyson if he's right. The global market segment
for two- and three-wheeled electric vehicles is expected to
grow from $75 million in 2005 to $11 billion by 2015,
according to Cambridge, U.K.-based IDTechEX, an independent
market research and consultancy firm that monitors all types
of electric vehicles.
Ultra Motor has
raised $3.25 million from Moscow-based VC firm Russian
Technology Limited
and the U.K.'s Flintstone Technologies, a publicly traded
incubator focused on Russian-originated technologies. The
company now is looking to close an additional $4-million
Series В fundraising in the coming
months.
The future may be
promising for electric vehicles, but the sector's history is
littered with the wrecks of reinvented wheels that never
rolled. Remember the Segway? In 2001, veteran venture
capitalist John Doerr, a Segway investor, described it as
being potentially bigger than the Internet and predicted the
company would be the fastest tech company ever to generate
sales of $1 billion.
But the Segway ended
up as a niche, rather than a mass-market, product. Price was
a problem. Segways cost thousands of dollars, too much for
most U.S. consumers and completely out of reach for the
majority of the population in India |
