【China Startup】The Tesla of bicycles | 单车携“自动挡”杀回主流市场？

轻客势界

2016-03-18

导读：Two-wheeled car is amazing.

There was a time when Beijing was seen as a city of bicycles. But with rapid development and population expansion, the bicycles have thinned out and what the city is now perhaps famous for are terrible traffic jams.

However, inspired by the use of pedelec in Japan and Germany, Chen Tengjiao, a 26-year-old entrepreneur, is hoping to once again rekindle the city’s love for bicycles. Chen - a car designer by training - along with a handful of friends, founded TSINOVA in 2014.

The company specializes in manufacturing electric-powered pedelecs using automotive technology. A pedelec is a bicycle where the rider’s pedaling is assisted by a small electric motor.

“We see this, as the Tesla of bicycles… there is a shift in the auto industry towards making smaller and easier to drive vehicles. People are tired of traffic jams, and (we believe) that smart pedelec will become mainstream in the future,” Chen said to us as we sat down for a conversation about TSINOVA’s journey so far and his future plans.

Q1: How did you go about setting up TSINOVA?

Chen Tengjiao: We started out as three or four classmates in October 2014. It was really difficult during the early days. We worked out of a small classroom inside the Seiko Century Center, which is part of Tsinghua University. But we managed to get angel investment pretty quickly. Following that, we set up a formal team. Although we faced a number of stumbling blocks, everything came through. In 2015, we also got Series A financing.

Q2: Describe for us how it was to actually set up a team and begin manufacturing the bikes?

Chen Tengjiao: I didn’t expect that process (of running a company) to be very simple. I felt it was difficult to run a company; so read many business reports. But when I started my company, I found that running a company was not as difficult as I had earlier imagined. What I realized was that enhancing the efficiency of my enterprise was the most important thing. In contrast, I thought manufacturing the bike would be easier to do. It took us five or six months to confirm that we could actually build the bikes, and that’s when I realized how difficult that process is.

Because I had to end up dealing with a number of factories and faced tremendous resistance. For instance, we needed to find an automotive belt manufacturer who would customize the strength and length of the belt, which is the key to our product, to meet our requirements. At first, we found a factory, but given the limited quantity of our order, they chose to delay work on it in favor of larger orders. That meant that we had to spend a lot of time to find a suitable manufacturing partner and that too within a reasonable distance. It took time, but today we have a high quality design and better production efficiency, based on our own innovative research. These help us lower the cost, while maintaining performance quality. This is not easy to accomplish in a developing market. I think this is valuable.

Q3: So, how does the bike work?

Chen Tengjiao: The TSINOVA Smart pedelec doesn’t look like your grandparents’ bicycle.

Our bikes are equipped with a smart drive system that is powered by automotive technology capable of understanding the driver’s intentions.

The system, called VeloUP, is fitted with a torque sensor, pedaling frequency sensor and speed sensor. These sensors help understand the driver’s intentions and detect road conditions; accordingly, the system estimates the power requirement. Apart from this, the driver can use an onboard USB port to charge smartphones while pedaling.

With regard to security, when a driver parks, he or she can lock the rear wheel via a keypad embedded in the frame. If a thief carts off a parked vehicle, the bike sends a text alert to the owner’s phone. An in-built GPS tracking system displays the bike’s location.

The bike can travel up to 50-70 kilometers on a single charge, and the detachable battery can be easily taken off and put in a simple backpack.

Q4:How much does the TSINOVA Smart pedelec cost?

Chen Tengjiao: The bike’s retail sale price is 3580 yuan.

Q5: Isn’t that really expensive for the average consumer?

Chen Tengjiao: Twenty years ago, a bike would cost around 100-200 yuan. And although the Chinese economy and market have changed over the past two or three decades, it seems that people still tend to think that bikes should cost around the same. This is wrong. Our target customers are primarily the new elite class, such as a middle or senior manager from a foreign company or state-owned enterprise or small business owners. As this new elite class grows more affluent, they are demanding better lifestyles.

Q6: What’s your vision for the future?

Chen Tengjiao: With traffic worsening in cities, we believe that people are looking for solutions in terms of small and environmentally friendly transport options. If you look at Europe and Japan, the use of smart pedelec has grown significantly. Although this is a rising global trend, the industry is still at a nascent stage in China, which means that there is plenty of room for growth. That is why we are extremely confident going forward. Every step of the way, it feels like you are innovating. That’s the advantage of working in a sector that is in its early stages. What we’ve therefore managed to do is find ways to adapt technologies and features used in cars for our smart pedelecs. This has been a difficult process, but we are very proud of what we have achieved.

This episode is reported by Zeng Yu, Lin Yingying, from International Multimedia Journalism program, BFSU.