By : RACHNA TYAGI
BENGALURU :
In this in-depth interview, Niraj Rajmohan, CTO & Co-Founder, Ultraviolette, discusses their newly launched F77 Mach 2 motorcycle, and sheds light on their comprehensive testing, design aspects, and pricing strategies. Excerpts from the interview…
TOS: What’s new on the F77 Mach 2 mechanically as compared to your first gen motorcycle launched last year?
NR: “We unveiled the first gen F77, last year, in 2023. When we started, there was no benchmark for us, we were the only product out there. Of course, there were electric motorcycles that were priced at $20,000 in other markets and all of that, but they were not really making a meaningful commercial impact and it wasn’t really competing with IC engines with prices 3X or 4X of the IC engine counterpart! One important thing that we did last year, when we launched our product, was [ensure that] the performance [was] bang on [and that] it met the expectations of mid-segment motorcycle in terms of upfront acceleration, top speed, [and] the available range. [For instance], with a full tank of petrol how much do you get and we tried to sort of get to that, or even outcompete it. And, we got all of those aspects right and that became the benchmark for us. Now, we had to outcompete ourselves. There is no other competition out there in the market and we went back to the drawing board and said which of these things continue to make sense, which don’t, and if we had to outcompete ourselves on every single parameter where would we be able to fare this year.”
“We also have the F99 project, a racing platform and we used references and technologies we’ve built for that and brought it back to the F77. There are 10 levels of regenerative braking that we have today on the F77 Mach 2 [that] actually came from the F99. That program… on the track, high levels of regen made sense and from there we adapted that, and now that is part of F77 Mach 2. Then there came the data which was coming from hundreds of vehicles on the road… two million kilometers of riding! Since we’ve never had this data before, with this data, a lot of meaningful insights came about. If we had to bump up the battery capacity, if we had to bump up the range how would it work? Are we being too optimistic, are we being too pessimistic or is our recommendation spot on? So, these improvements started to come in. Whether it is a vehicle control unit in terms of how we built the electronics there or whether it is power delivery, last year when we announced the motorcycle, we announced peak torque of 90 Nm from the motor, only the limited-edition spec had 100 Nm, now, that is available on the Mach 2 for everyone! What we learnt was how to use the motor and the mechanicals within the motor and optimize the wave form, how the electrical energies pulse stick to the motor to bring out that 100Nm of torque and do it in a manner which is still viable from a thermal point of view, from a mechanical point of view, [from] the gear point of view. Even the gear teeth…. imagine all the 100 Nm hitting the gear teeth… all in one shot, you don’t want wear and tear on that. Now, we have data from 100,000kms of actual riding. How’s the wear and tear on these parts? There is more wear and tear especially on an electric motorcycle because all that torque is directly available and going to the wheel. You gun it and it is there, even the tyres, for that matter. So, all of those learnings went back into our system and once we started to package together these learnings and insights and started putting it all together, at some point it became a big enough pile to say “Listen, the next generation is here!” The hardware improvements, the software, the performance, the technology, the sensors, the TPMS, the Violet AI which was never even part of the vehicle – it is all based on the data that was collected and even from a business point of view, the pricing, how could we make it better, how could we make it more accessible, everywhere we innovated and brought out the Mach 2.”
TOS: What is the feedback that you’ve received on pricing because it is not exactly cheap…
NR: “That was something that we had to deal with. There was still adoption. Whatever price any product is announced, I think, we are a very value conscious market. YouTube comments are not reality. For instance, on YouTube comments you see opinions flowing either way but in the real world a person who is riding a brand-new IC engine motorcycle which competes with us in this segment, they come and approach [us] and say things like “I bought this motorcycle but I should have probably bought that.” There is no hate, there is only love. I don’t see YouTube comments there! The virtual world is one thing and the real world is another. When people see the product in person, take a test ride, I think it’s a one-way transfer, it’s a one-way switch. There is no moving back, and if you see all our customers, they’re all in it. There’s no going back. I mean they may enjoy other motorcycles, but now, this has become a part of their fleet.”
“Coming to pricing, there was a need for us to also relook at a lot of these things. We also realized that there were certain benefits such as subsidies that were available to other EVs that were never available to us. It was not that we expected them; they have been capped at [INR] 1.5 lakh but think about any motorcycle, not EV… how many motorcycles are sold within [INR] 1.5 lakh… at that price point? You’ll barely find any! Anything 200cc and more are past that point. We knew that we were operating in spaces where subsidies are not available, so we had to look at it and say “if we had to plan something for this segment, how do we do it in a manner that is sustainable for the company which means at least, a breakeven point on the vehicle [and] which means no heavy dependence on investors. Doing that kind of thing was never a long-term viable solution and so, we had to balance these things out, and with supply chain improvements also coming in, with our suppliers improving the quality of the parts, the lower rejection ratio, all these things came together and finally it came out at an equal and amazing new price point which is more accessible.”
TOS: At a time when most young entrepreneurs, especially here in Bengaluru, were building an electric scooter quite literally in their backyards, you guys were thinking about an electric motorcycle… what was the thought behind that?
NR: “It was very clear to us in 2015-2016….it felt like everyone was after this Goldrush… any one could put together a kit, buy it from whichever part of the world, and you could get an EV with a 3 to 7kW peak power, 3 to 4kW battery pack, you could put it in whatever form and shape, whether it was a scooter or a motorcycle. However, it wasn’t really solving anything and there was no differentiation also between one product and another, maybe aesthetically slightly different. We saw this as far back as 2015 and thought that if there was so much competition in that space, it may not make [for] a viable business. It may not make sense to compete in a space where there is no clear benefit. I mean customers benefit, they get so many options to choose from, but as a business it may not make sense. And for us, as people, who like design and tech, again, there was no room to innovate… you’re just going after reducing every paisa on the materials and that is not our core strength. Our core strength is design and tech, we love doing that. So, if you draw this Venn diagram, it will have so many circles, [and] in the middle is this place where we found our love. So, it is all the fun stuff that you get to do… and build a company… and it is sustainable… and people like it… and it is exciting… and it is performance…”
TOS: Tell us about the design of the F77 Mach 2…
NR: “I will tell you from an outside-in perspective. I’m an Electronics Computer Science Engineer, I did my Masters in Business and all of that but I have been very closely watching what is happening. For me, tech is my area and as an engineer, it is a very quantitative solving thing, but I have been watching these guys and I’m always there in the room when these guys come up with 100 designs, and they choose a particular one. They see the feedback from a set of customers. What was interesting to me, and I did not realize this through my journey, is that this process of design is a very logical thing. It always felt very creative, but what I learnt was [that] they would have these mood boards and all of that, and they would try to evoke a particular emotion when a person looks at that vehicle and when a person sits on that vehicle and for the other person sitting on that vehicle. Three different perspectives are trying to be matched. A Lamborghini appears aggressive but a Bentley appears sophisticated and royal. And now, we started mapping back to what is it that a sports motorcycle should look like? What emotion should it evoke? Where should the lines be drawn, what is the shape that it should take? How should it mesh with a human being who is riding it, how does man and machine become one, how are the dynamics of the motorcycle… as you get on to it you need to feel confident, you need to feel like you’re looking cool and you actually have to be one with that machine.
TOS: The design is brilliant and it is bound to win hearts internationally…
NR: We had planned for this, for different nationalities, different heights, all of that was pre-planned [and] intentional. In that way, I think from a design perspective, it has been fun to watch the team… the rate at which progress happens… they come up with these amazing designs. Narayan Subramaniam, CEO & Co-Founder, Ultraviolette, leads the entire team, he has got a whole team of designers. What is fascinating to me is that they put in so much effort. Imagine a board full of designs – concepts [and] sketches and they would throw all but one away and they would do a 100 more of that one. I have seen this happen over years and this is the final result.
TOS: Tell us about the instrument cluster on your motorcycle, it looks gorgeous…
NR: “We looked at all the existing motorcycles out there, looked at all the clusters and said “our phones are better.” I’m not talking about touch and all of that. You have this layer of the screen which is one level below and then you have the outer layer and they are optically bonded together and finding the right supplier for that optical bonding so that you don’t have internal reflections, and what you see is what you know the screen is producing… that was a challenge. It is only done for phones, and we wanted it for an automotive part and we insisted and pushed people. So, now it is done by quite a large automotive display supplier but even then, it took quite a bit of a push. The first prototype didn’t look anything like this, and then, we wanted the telltales around it, we wanted the screen to appear seamless, the same shade of black had to continue. We get into these things which initially feel like we’re the only ones doing it and the suppliers tell us why we are being so hard to work with, but I think, it is all a result of that process that now comes together… the brightness, the contrast, and then comes optimizing, the actual graphics within it. The response time of when I click a button, how do the animations transform, is it visible while I’m riding the motorcycle and looking at the road, even without looking down am I able to get a sense of the display? That’s where the lines on the side come in; you don’t actually have to look at the display. In your peripheral vision is it possible to get a sense of it? These kinds of things all came together. So, it is a combination of design, UIUX, software development for the response times for the interactions, the hardware team, the suppliers, our supply chain team, our materials sanction team, the reflections, the coatings and it has all come together.”
TOS: How have you achieved this marvelous feat of not having a single visible nut or bolt on your motorcycle?
NR: “There is a benchmark set in the rest of the world; you take out your Macbook, you take out your iPhone, you take out your iPad, [and] you can see from the very first generation, when that product came into existence, that there is a certain level of finesse, a certain level of sophistication that has come through. We saw that lacking on two-wheelers, in general. Of course, all motorcycles are amazing over the decades, the Japanese companies, the European companies have been amazing, but this is also a tech product, so how do we infuse those qualities of a simple, beautiful technology into this [and also] minimize things, and at the same time deal with challenges of putting it together on the assembly line. You shouldn’t have technicians using weird shaped tools and [we shouldn’t] make their lives difficult. So, we had to plan for it, for assembly, for service, for frequently replaced parts, in case there is a fall, in case there is a crack, in case there is a scratch, how do we replace those parts? From the perspective of someone looking at the product, it should feel like I have never seen something like this before. If you put all these three requirements together it makes it quite challenging. I’d say the best way to explain is using one of the devices you already have at home probably that’s never come into automotive, I mean it is not come into motorcycles… some of the newer cars are starting to get that finish. You see the top line electric vehicles that are now starting to come in, you see that kind of sophistication. It’s not just sophistication, it is also going back to why those things were there. There was a certain user serviceability requirement in some cases, so a lot of DIY used to happen. In these cases, it is a solid-state machine. Rannvijay Singha said it on the stage… the only thing [that] he has done in the last one year is dust the charging flap! That is the only thing he has done… [our motorcycles] don’t require maintenance of that level.”
TOS: What are Ultraviolette’s plans for international markets?
NR: “Since 2019 when we started, there has been a lot of international interest and we are not doing any marketing. Now, some of these things have started but there has been interest from 190 countries! Some 60,000-odd registrations! We obviously couldn’t take money from these guys, [because] then it becomes a sort of commercial expectation, but all of this was word of mouth. We did not actively push it and what we started to see was that if one person in one location, state or country registered, within a couple of weeks there were 20 more there or 50 more there and it started growing like that. So, we knew that there is something going on, people were telling their friends about it, that kind of thing started to happen. In fact, we also know that it is going to be hard to cater to 190 countries, there are only 195 countries [afterall], but our plan is to target the ones that make more sense. Initially, it was like where is the market, where are the numbers, but then very quickly we realized how much of it was addressable. Do we have strong partners there, are they long term aligned? This is not about a single transaction, it is a growing relationship, it takes time to build all this. So, we went back and started talking to the entities and we saw there is a certain level of maturity with certain partners and that is where certain markets are moving faster than the others. The product has always been built for international markets so it was always planned, it was never that we’ll do this and then make this change. The only changes really needed are the license plates may be different, the colour or size, that’s pretty much it. Otherwise, the product from the very beginning was being planned for global markets. So, certain variations for Japan, for Eurasia…”
TOS: Is there a big difference on motorcycles made for the domestic market as compared to the ones for made for international markets?
NR: “I’d say it is just to do with numberplates and certain signage markings those kinds of things. Like you need the seal marking or you need certain things in terms of recyclability of parts. You need documentation, which frankly, working with Indian suppliers… the push has been from our side… to get that amount of documentation in terms of the quality of the materials used, but we have always been planning for this. So, I think that way we are covered. Then comes the operational parts which is going through hundreds of hours of testing at labs, going through the grind.”
TOS: Where does testing for your motorcycle happen and what does it entail?
NR: “It happens in different labs. For India it is at ARAI, then there is GARC, then there is WIPRO lab and the TUV lab in Bengaluru. Different tests are done in different labs. Sometimes observers come from the regulatory authority to these labs and they are able to do the tests there as well. So, it is a whole sequence of tests. For example, for this battery we received ISO certification in November 2023 that is a mandatory requirement for international sales. We got the UN 38.3 battery certification in February 2024. The UN 38.3 battery certification allows us to ship these batteries internationally. Now, the vehicle certification is going on for Europe, US will be a separate activity. So, this is an ongoing, intensive process.”
