When he finally joined the industry, he came to a realisation. In automotive design, he says, “you're always thinking about what comes next. And there was this very strong sense that we were at the end of an era of 100 years of car dominance, and really now what we were doing was fiddling around the edges.”
Many automotive engineers and designers will have a different perspective. Of course, he says, electric cars and other new technologies are offering different formats, but he sees them as “sliding veneer-thin alternatives into a very crowded space”.
Morgan was determined, as he puts it, to think about what the next 100 years looks like. What he saw was the shift of populations into crowded cities, and transport systems becoming overwhelmed.
“This is just, I think, widely accepted,” he says. “Cities are three-dimensional, and the road network is two-dimensional. So if every single person is in a transport system that is like 30-times their size, it's going to end up overwhelmed.”
Public transport systems do a vital job, but adding capacity to the network can take many years and billions of pounds. Instead, Morgan asks, how can we work with existing infrastructure and increase capacity overnight? “Inevitably, you start looking at lightweight electric vehicles.”
A positive experience using scooters in Oslo solidified that thought and set him onto the path to get where he is now – co-founder and CEO of Bristol firm Bo, which launches its M model scooter next month. And while a vision of a ‘post-car’ world is the driving force behind the company, its founders’ automotive background – including work at WAE, Jaguar Land Rover, and the Bloodhound land speed record project – has meant a unique approach to scooter engineering.
Putting M through its paces
I meet Morgan on a muggy late-summer day on the edge of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London, a complex network of tree-lined walkways, wide concourses, canals and bike paths – a perfect spot, in other words, to put a pair of scooters through their paces. It is also private land, where we have permission to ride.
I first try out an earlier prototype before switching to the more powerful Bo M. Both are sleek, grey and futuristic, with built-in lights and a smooth aluminium chassis hiding any internal joints and mechanisms.
Scooting past sightseers and under the trailing branches of weeping willows, I get a feel for the ride. When you start on the power there are a few seconds of very gradual speed increase – “slug mode”, Morgan calls it – before it rapidly picks up pace. After you have done that and stabilised at a cruising speed, that very torquey acceleration is available with the slightest pressure on the throttle, something which takes a little bit of getting used to.
The same is true of the regenerative braking, which is so responsive as to be a bit jerky, especially when you are close to the 35km/h (22mph) maximum speed. This is likely related to the simplicity of the system, which spins the direct drive motor in reverse to recover energy. The sealed drum front brake offers a softer, and often more practical, option for decelerating.
The author tries out the Bo M scooter
Smoothing out the bumps
Steering, on the other hand, is an incredibly smooth experience thanks to Bo’s Safesteer technology. A new approach was needed because smaller scooter wheels have less of a centring effect than bicycle wheels, Morgan explains, and a bit less of a gyroscopic effect. Bumps are also proportionally bigger.
“All these things are conspiring to make you feel very uncomfortable,” says Morgan. “We realised fairly quickly that we could… reintroduce that same stability that you expect from a bike on one of these.”
Safesteer manages that with a dynamic system that stabilises and smooths steering using a pair of wound torsion springs, providing steering correction up to a 50º turn angle. By recreating the natural centring dynamic of a larger wheel, the technology provides an experience that is worlds away from the jumpy, unpredictable nature of some rental scooters.
“Suddenly that returns the safety factor in a big way,” Morgan says. “But more than that, it just makes it way more fun to ride, because suddenly you're not staring at the road and you're not clinging with a death grip, you can take your hand off, you can scratch your face, you can wave at people.”
This is a key aim of Bo – allowing the functions of the vehicle to “melt into the background”. It is the same reason why the company put so much effort into increasing the torque and efficiency on the Bo M, which easily tackles gradients that the earlier prototype struggles with.
“If you're having to think about a little hill when you want to climb it, it's now intruding into your journey,” says Morgan. Removing anxiety about power and range, he says, makes the user experience “totally delightful and unintrusive. And then you end up in a really great place.”
The ‘art’ of throttle mapping
We meet up again three weeks later for another ride, after some concerns from Bo about a lack of control on all the power in the new model. Further development of the controller focused on the throttle map, which Morgan describes as “kind of an art”.
“It's this very iterative process,” he says. “We found there's no equation to it, there's no code to it. You have to feel it through your feet, you have to feel it through the ride. It makes it quite a slow process.”
The result is a smoother ride, but still with more than enough power for any likely use case. The M is shipping with two self-explanatory performance modes – comfort and power. The first is calm and controlled, well-suited to a daily commute, while the latter offers quicker acceleration and better hill climbing performance.
Battery capacity of 655Wh offers 50km (31 miles) of range. An included fast charger will reportedly fill that to 80% in less than three hours.
‘Hardcore engineering’
Development of the M has involved “massive amounts” of simulation, and what Morgan calls “some really hardcore engineering” to reduce stress on the chassis, which uses the first aluminium monocoque in the scooter sector.
Engineered in the UK and built in East Asia, the Bo M seems destined to find most use in scooter-friendly countries such as France and Germany, thanks to legal restrictions in the domestic market which mean e-scooters can be used on private property but not on the roads.
The company was supported early on with innovation grant funding, and through those networks the team found itself in workshops discussing regulations. The Department for Transport has put together a “great programme” to identify correct regulations, Morgan says, and other countries have shown what does and does not work. The issue now is “pure political will”, he says.
For now, the company’s 22kg vehicle is compliant with regulations in other countries, Morgan says. “It meets the specification for Germany, France, Spain, for Australia, for America, so we're not reliant on the UK to survive, basically. In a way it's sad, it feels like it should be in the UK.”
Post-car vision
Delivering from February in the UK and select US and EU regions this summer, the Bo M costs £1,995 – very much at the high end of the price range for e-scooters, which typically cost £200-600.
The M’s high price reflects the company’s focus on a luxury user experience. While the company’s target is the ‘post-car’ world, it is very much informed by the car industry.
“One of the ways in which we're very unusual is that we really, really came from an automotive background on this,” Morgan says. “I think the automotive sector is incredibly special. It convinces people every three, four years to upgrade a perfectly good vehicle to a new one, because it creates a combination of emotion and functional excellence that people find extremely compelling.”
He adds: “Most of the vehicles in this space, they come from either the bike sector or the toy sector… you're upskilling from a toy to a vehicle. And for us, it was like we were trying to distil down everything we were doing in automotive. What that means in terms of the user, or in terms of our riders, is they should just have the best damn experience.”
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