Keep an eye out for the Mantis

  Orxa Energies unveiled India's first fully electric naked sports motorcycle, Mantis, at India Bike Week, in Goa, recently. From building battery packs to designing it, everything has been done in-house by their young team members and the bike sure has turned out to be a headturner.  TOS: Tell us about the Airbus Biz Lab Program and about graduating from it.  Ranjita Ravi: Airbus Bizlabs is the accelerator program of the global Aerospace giant. They have four centers across the world and Bangalore, India, is one of them. We got selected in 2017 for Season 3 of the program, and we graduated in 2018. We’re currently working on an advanced R&D project with the Airbus team. For us, the experience of working with such a prestigious firm has been great – we are excited about our R&D project as well. There are strong synergies between Aerospace and Motorcycling – volume constraints, weight constraints and of course, strong emphasis on high performance. We’ve translated these synergies between our work in Aerospace and our development for the Mantis and our battery packs.  How did the name Mantis come about? Dr. Sabnis: The vehicle is inspired by the Stealth Predator, the Mantis. Our first prototype was the Mantis Trike, with 2 wheels in