Brixton Electric Scooter Patented

Admin · February 17, 2022

Brixton’s latest designs show the firm working on a low-cost electric scooter likely aimed at urban commuters. (Brixton/)

There’s a sense that today’s motorcycle firms are slightly lost when it comes to finding a direction in the seemingly inevitable electric-powered age that’s nearly upon us. Some are reaching for high tech, packing their designs with gadgets to help justify the hefty cost of long-range batteries and high-performance motors, but others are taking a completely different route and opting for simplicity above all else.

It looks like Brixton, owned by Austrian firm KSR, but with bikes made by Gaokin in China, is out to take the latter option, having filed design patents for one of the simplest-looking, street-legal electric scooters we’ve seen.

Related: 2022 Brixton Motorcycles Cromwell 1200 First Look

An über-simple frame carries the battery and electronics down low. An upside-down fork provides the damping up front. (Brixton/)

The designs are actually rather elegant, not unlike the electric scooter design that Harley-Davidson proposed back in 2018, but Brixton’s is stripped back even further to create a machine that could turn out to be one of the cheapest ways onto a street-legal, powered two-wheeler. The frame is only a short step up from a bicycle design, adding a dual cradle element underneath to carry the battery pack and electronics, but featuring a hardtail rear end. For comfort, there’s only a sprung seat rather than any form of rear suspension.

Up front we see a motorcycle-style upside-down fork but—at least on this design—no sign of brakes. That’s more likely to be an oversight in the creation of the design images than a direction a production machine would take, and there are brake levers on both the right and left bars, suggesting the front stoppers will make a return should the design be taken forward.

A hub-mounted motor, solo seat, and hardtail rear all point to this bike falling into the street-legal moped class. (Brixton/)

Power appears to come from a hub-mounted motor set into the rear wheel. That’s likely to double as the rear brake, regenerating power as you slow. This sort of hub-motor arrangement is already commonplace in China, where power units are available off-the-shelf from a variety of manufacturers for minimal cost.

The presence of a license plate and turn signals show that the design has performance that’s a step up from the sort of electric rental scooters that already appear everywhere. In Europe, where this machine was designed, those are generally limited to around 12 mph, while street-legal mopeds—the class that this bike is likely to fall into—are allowed to reach 30 mph to keep up with urban traffic. The single seat also fits with the moped rules, as these are generally not allowed to carry passengers.

X marks the spot, or at least is a recurring design element in many of Brixton’s previous bikes. Sole instrumentation appears to be a single dial set atop the handlebar. (Brixton/)

Up front, the headlight very much falls into Brixton’s design theme, with a bold “X” in the center of the lamp, matching the firm’s logo and mimicking the design seen on several of its current gas-powered bikes. Hoops integrated into the frame—four at the front and four at the rear—are presumably intended to be used with straps to lash down luggage that’s carried on top of the battery box between the rider’s feet. Meanwhile, the only instrument appears to be a small, circular gauge—presumably a speedometer—on top of the bars.

Related: Brixton’s 1200 Model Edges Closer to Production

The hardtail rear end also underscores the likelihood that this will be a lower-cost model. (Brixton/)

Having shown its largest-ever bike late last year in the form of the Cromwell 1200, a 1,222cc parallel twin with 80 hp designed as a cut-price rival to Triumph’s Bonneville, Brixton is clearly making a move to become a more significant player in the European motorcycle market. Adding a low-cost electric model to its lineup won’t hurt its progress to that goal in the slightest. At the moment Brixton’s bikes aren’t sold in the USA, but that’s sure to change as the brand’s profile rises.

Top view of the new Brixton electric scooter. (Brixton/)