Siekon Motor showed an electric "Cruise Prince" touring motorcycle at the Canton Fair last week, and I stumbled upon it while walking the halls. It was all somewhat disarming really, because I've been writing about motorcycles for 50 years ... and I'd never heard of Siekon Motor.
The scene above greeted me as I wandered the world's biggest trade show and my initial thoughts were in trying to put it in perspective … the Canton Fair is a B2B trade show, aimed at transacting imports and exports between East and West. Finished goods get sold here.
The Cruise Prince would not have been out of place among the show bikes from the world’s established motorcycle manufacturers that are being shown at EICMA this week, but I hadn’t expected something as well put together, relevant to Western tastes and quite as impactful as this electric tourer.
Now the Canton Fair is where you’d expect to see a commercially ready motorcycle for the first time, but not one from a company you've never heard of, and clearly headed for production.
Hundreds of new models were displayed publicly for the first time at the Canton Fair this year, though most of them were Chinese brands seeking international partners for their mature, market-ready product ... but just as prototypes have been shown as concepts to judge market reaction for years, it's all speeding up in China and its trade fair was full of near-production concepts and prototypes.
The development of many motorcycles at seemingly every manufacturer on such a mass scale was almost overwhelming.
Personal transportation is evolving rapidly.
After decades of manufacturing parts, engines and entire motorcycles that have been sold under the logos of every "name" brand we know, China's QA is now as good as any, and innovation is in abundance. Once a curse, "Made in China" is now a feature ... and we're seeing just as much new thought as we are "tributes" to products we know.
There were some blatant copies of successful western motorcycles and brands, but the efficient new product development and manufacturing capabilities being created in China are already spawning new and different motorcycles, and my perception is that the percentage of original thought per machine is climbing rapidly.
There's also an "appetite for the game." Just as any sporting coach loves to see a young protégé with a love for the contest, there was a collective spirit of entrepreneurialism among the manufacturers and staff on display in Canton that was difficult to miss.
To me, after 50 years of writing about progress, I felt I'd had a small glimpse at the inner workings of world trade and the goods on display seemed every bit as exciting to me as the silk, sugar, gunpowder, spices, paper, porcelain and tea that were once on display at the end of the silk road. Here in Ghanghzou!
A perfect example is the Benda Napoleon Bob at the Canton Fair in Guanghzou, which then became one of the hits of EICMA the following week.
New thought and the cross-fertilization of ideas and techniques appears everywhere, though there will remain subtle differences in national psyches that require specialist communication and marketing skills. The wrong name can limit the potential of a product in a different marketplace.
But what's in a name anyway? The Chinese like to get straight to the point, and this literal bent can sometimes confuse the advertising agency brief with the campaign. A nicely crafted 800cc v-twin might do well in the Chinese marketplace, though I don't think I'd ride one to Sturgis.
Probably the most recognizable brand name to emerge for a motorcycle in recent times is the Jedi, and the first hero model carries the spirit of the Jedi quite nicely, though Steven Spielberg may see that differently.
The Jedi JD750 is a high-revving twin produced in several styles with a couple of really cute future-retro versions (see image gallery) and the pic of the litter is the sleek K750 version above. There's also an adventure version and a touring version of the same motorcycle.
The form factor of the motorcycle is still evolving
The world is nearing the point where half of humanity lives in an apartment.
Some countries, the United States and the United Kingdom in particular, don't like apartments, but many big countries have already passed the "tipping point."
Two thirds of people in Spain live in an apartment, Germany is close behind and China has just passed the 50% mark with around 40,000 people a day moving from rural to urban environs, and they're all going into apartments.
With three quarters of a billion apartment dwellers in the domestic market, it makes sense that personal transportation design will be influenced by this dramatic change.
Among China's vast army of motorcycle users, there's still a strong leaning towards electric motorcycles with swappable batteries, and there were numerous new models on display with the facility to swap batteries and refuel your electric bike far faster than at the gas pump.
Apartment dwellers are becoming a significant influence on the design of personal transport in China, where different storage and charging capabilities become critically important. Delivery riders and motorcycle taxi riders want to have one battery charging while they are plying their trade, so that no precious working time is lost during the lengthier recharging cycle of an in-situ battery. A battery swap can be achieved in pit stop fashion so that no earning-time is lost.
Electric bike heaven
Be of no doubt that the ebike market is going to begin to blend with the motorcycle market over the coming decade. The amount of new thought in lightweight design and high performance is putting motorcycle-like power in sub-50-kg packages of immense athletic ability. This is just a sample of the hundreds of designs I saw.
The resurgence of the Monocycle
The modern self-balancing monocycle is making a huge a resurgence as a legitimate, comfortable and efficient form of personal transport in China. Even when walking, it simply powers itself and rolls alongside, it's no more intrusive than a suitcase on public transport, and predictably, there are also high-powered models that will thrill and challenge a new generation of adolescents who grow up in concrete forests. Cheap to buy and run, the monocycle is also easily stowable in an apartment.
Monocycles with sophisticated software appeared en masse at the Canton Fair and one of the toys on the Kingsong stand caught my eye, because it looked like a soccer ball sitting amongst the array of grown up monocycles.
An attendant saw me looking at it, and demonstrated how you fold out the footpegs and it turns into a bonsai self-balancing monocycle. When I asked if I could get on it, though it seemed unfeasibly small, I was advised, "It is for children, and it is ... errr ... very difficult."
Powered In-line skates set for a role in the personal urban transportation mosaic
In a land of flat hard surfaces and concrete jungles, there will inevitably be new transportation appliances that emerge, and powered in-line skates could be one of them. Like riding a bike, once you've become competent with in-line skates, you never forget.
In spartan form (sans electrical assist), in-line skates offer a challenging cardiovascular workout, but you can cover miles pretty quickly once you are fit. A stiff tailwind behind unpowered blades can make you feel superhuman, but a stiff headwind can quickly make you feel like you are swimming against the tide.
If you are less than fit, inline skates will find you out.
If you're not fit, then 400 W per boot will help a lot.
A healthy fit human being can produce about 250 watts of output pedaling hard on a bicycle and 250 W is the legal limit for an e-bike in many countries. So, in classic Chinese understatement, 400 watts per boot should be more than enough.
Powered skates have been around in different forms for the entire life of this publication (23 years). There will be more and they will get better with software.
Manufacturing in bulk offers advantages, and the wholesale price of these 20-km/h skates was US$200 a pair – that's ex-China and the costs of freight, tariffs, taxes, retail margins, profit and substantial public liability insurance will add to that before you see them on shelves, but when China has a billion people living in apartments (by 2030 or thereabouts), powered skates might be a more viable form of personal transport than using valuable living space for something bigger.
They might be fun too. You strap into them in your normal shoes and there's a hand-held controller and ... they're clearly not for the feint of heart, but if you did master them, they'd offer wickedly quick inner urban personal transport.
As motorized skates continue to become more powerful and affordable, the only barrier to usage might be common sense, and there isn't a lot of it about ... being confronted by platoons of sightless phone-staring zombies while walking on a footpath is one thing ... but an 80-kg human bearing down at 20 km/h on the same footpath might be a different matter.
Your personal tank - the ETV
The most adventurous products are always the most interesting at these shows and there were some fascinating developments for those who don't mind tackling something a bit different.
The ETV Tank is best described as a miniature electric tank you stand on to ride, and in the beginning it was seen as 100% recreational and aimed at those of an adventurous bent, but it found traction as a tool in a host of industrial applications and by reconfiguring it slightly to make a second model with a seat and a steering wheel, sales increased without diminishing the existing audience.
All terrain vehicles are also clearly evolving into niches, and the ETV Tank has some distinct benefits in hostile conditions and it apparently delivers a ripsnorting ride when the full 20-kW, 106-Nm and 32-km/h top speed are used.
The Tank as a product is also seemingly evolving in real time, and it now looks to have great potential as a robotic pack mule.
The emergence of commercially ready follow-me and autonomous navigation means the platform is now under consideration as an outdoor robotic platform for schlepping things to out-of-the-way places – hence it might have application in agriculture and mining.
What began as an off-road hooligan device with enough performance for plenty of go-anywhere tank track adventure, might find commercial success in a different field altogether.
Powered children's toys
As more technologies emerge to commercial readiness (e.g. but not confined to autonomous driving, artificial intelligence and robotics), it is increasingly common to encounter motorcycle manufacturers with substantial experience in adjacent industries, such as the design and manufacture of service and carer robots.
Gyroor's range of hoverboards, scooters, powered skateboards and smart transportation wagons also includes hospital delivery robots and the Movpak (above and below) which caused quite a sensation on Indiegogo a few years back.
The Movpak is a backpack that includes a foldable 15-mph electric skateboard with a 9-mile range. Again, a product which attracted a lot of attention from American readers on a crowdfunding platform eight years ago, is seen as a handy personal transport option in China today.
It was in this environment, where I felt like a big kid in the world's biggest toy shop, that I spied the Zilink H880. Remember that name, because you will hear it again.
Zilink is one of several companies with the wherewithal to create the world's first practical personal eVTOL, and we probably won't have to wait long because it will be part of the 3D Economy unfolding at present in China.
The Zilink H880 is a fold-up, easily-transportable hybrid fuel-electric eVTOL meant as an all-purpose, long duration tool for agriculture, and it is capable of carrying 70 kg for 30 minutes. Hence it can loiter and observe and inspect and the H880 is not even the top of the range.
The H880 is a single deck eight-rotor UAV, and is capable of flying 70 kg for 30 minutes, 60 kg for an hour or 50 kg for 90 minutes. There's an even bigger 12-rotor UAV (the Zilink D12110 Lifting Transportation model), that can carry 95 kg for 30 minutes and 65 kg for an hour and a half.
The hobby stage that these toys will go through, getting hacked, hotted up and made infinitely more lethal, well ... more details in the image gallery
When I said every conceivable form factor for a motorized transportation device was represented at the fair, there are many more miniature cars and electric skateboards and e-trikes and e-tuktuks, and many workaday convenient micro trucks and vending vans of countless origin.
If you work in any link of the transportation industry chain, seeing the magnitude and innovation of world trade in one place is at least a step towards commercial enlightenment – it's worth a visit . It's an experience worth having.
Back to the Siekon Cruise Prince
So that was the environment in which I found the Siekon Electric Cruise Prince. Apologies for the meandering path to this point in the article, but the context is important.
After a close inspection of the Cruise Prince, I took a quick pic of the placard accompanying the Cruise Prince, and sat back and watched.
Now the most mature and competitive export machinery on the stand was unquestionably a pair of 250cc sports bikes – one a DOHC, four-valve 250cc twin, the other an electric bike with similar horsepower specs and a purpose-built 144-V, 73-Ah battery pack with 10.5 kWh of capacity.
Siekon was taking orders and discussing prices on the fully compliant (EU and USA) export models and the looming presence of the Cruise Prince was clearly helping set the tone … the huge touring bike on the stand certainly signified Siekon as credible and ambitious … and although the company wasn't selling the Cruise Prince yet names were certainly being taken for the near future based on the Prince as it was presented, complete with the rather anemic 20-kW horsepower figure and modest range.
The company was very helpful, supplied me with pics of one of the company’s test bikes but made it clear that the current focus was on the new 250-class bikes which it expected would be keenly priced and more than competitive with existing mature market 250 class bikes.
Clearly Siekon is seeking international partners for its new range of motorcycles at the same time as assessing the potential of this product on the global stage. Its target markets for the range to date have been America, Canada, Europe and Australia. It intends to compete on a global stage but it intends to compete in the massive Chinese domestic marketplace too, and that's where it should prove competitive.
As the story of Siekon began to emerge, the credibility of the project took on new proportions.
Siekon Motors' parent company (Siekon) has a record of high achievement. It began as a high tech innovation company in 2003, with the intention of rapidly developing new technologies for sunrise and near-sunrise industries.
It invested heavily in rechargeable battery technologies at the right time, and became hyper successful commercially with its LiFePO4 batteries.
Siekon’s world-leading battery technologies matured just as the world’s personal electronics boom of the last two decades created an almost insatiable demand for lightweight rechargeable batteries, so Siekon is hence cashed-up and seeking to play a significant role in the emerging new-energy transportation economies.
Its foundational innovation roots now mean it has plenty of R&D budget for forging into multiple new fields simultaneously and the company openly boasts it has more than 100 separate R&D teams working on strategically adjacent technologies.
Siekon’s track record suggests these are not empty boasts, but the sign of great potential through synergy.
The roadmap for Siekon’s growth into the new energy vehicle sector appears to have included every form of electric vehicle for quite some time, because alongside the Siekon Motor clean sheet start-up in September 2020, Siekon also spawned at least three other clean-sheet start-up companies in the semiconductor, automotive transmission and medical industries, and it split off Siekon Energy too.
It all adds up to a heady cocktail of adjacent and highly relevant new technologies in multiple sunrise industries (Guanghzou will be the first pilot city deploying China’s planned 3D economy i.e. electric flying cars), and Siekon's semiconductor start-up is undoubtedly working hard on the alternative energy storage solutions and solid state batteries which promise so much over the next 3-5 years … and would transform the Cruise Prince into a vastly different animal.
Siekon's batteries can be expected to be at the forefront of automotive usage and it is aiming to sell those technologies to other Chinese manufacturers for use in their motorcycles, cars, eVTOLs ad infinitum.
With that knowledge added to the barrel-chested prototype, it became a little clearer why Siekon Motor might develop a test mule for the battery packs at the same time as developing a bike that will be able to take advantage of significant quantum leaps in power density that its sister companies are developing.
The touring bike can be rightfully expected to be the last bastion of the internal combustion engine on two wheels before a complete electric conveyance whitewash.
Touring bikes are the heaviest breed of motorcycle and need to go the longest distances between stops, and a battery big enough for that job weighs too much with current at-market battery technologies.
While touring might seem an unlikely latent marketplace right now, it has to be noted that this is the third Chinese-designed touring bike to have surfaced so far this year, with the "near-future" Felo TOOZ electric touring concept looking ahead to a time when the energy density of EV batteries has improved considerably. Felo forecasts that a top speed of 125 mph and a range of 720 kilometers per charge (450 miles) would be possible – in the not-too-distant future.
Souo, another Chinese motorcycle start-up that is owned by Chinese automotive giant "Great Wall Motors" (GWM) showed an equally ambitious first model in the form of an eight-cylinder, 2000cc tourer.
In its guise seen at the Canton Fair, the Cruise Prince’s 144-V, 73-Ah battery pack sums up to a total capacity of just 10.5 kWh – so it's carrying considerably less energy than the decidedly non-touring Zero S nakedbike.
We're not sure Siekon's claimed range figure of 260 km (162 miles) adds up, either – Zero's quoted range figures are pretty reliable, and even under "City" riding conditions, Zero only claims around 248 km (154 miles) for the 14.4 kWh S. Either way, if that's the final battery spec, we wouldn't expect the Cruise Prince to cruise nearly as far as the 22.5 kWh Energica Experia, which could go up to 420 km (261 miles) if you went easy on the throttle.
There is, however, going to be a lot of difference between the US$27,500 price of the Energica Experia (plus getting it to China) and a motorcycle that can be expected to cost a fraction of that figure in China.
China's domestic market sees motorcycle touring quite differently to our western perceptions.
The small number of real Harley-Davidsons that have sold into the Chinese marketplace have traditionally cost a lot of domestic RMB and this has positioned motorcycle touring as a luxury pursuit … as a status symbol.
By Harley's own admission, it competed directly with golf and boating for its share of China's luxury leisure expenditure, coincidentally also pursuits that enabled China’s most successful people to “get away from it all.”
In a land filled with skyscraper forests and big cities (157 cities of over one million people now, 250 by 2030 – America has nine), the ability to get outside the beehive is now an aspiration for many of China’s 1.5 billion people and a modest budget touring motorcycle is apparently expected to do extremely well in China.
Supply and demand will keep golf and boating prices as inaccessible as they currently are to those of less-than-abundant means, but the motorcycle touring marketplace is seen as fertile ground for China’s manufacturing industries as it can offer a nearly identical experience to that of a perceived premium experience, for much less cost.
So the Cruise Prince will definitely have a lot of appeal to a very large audience. It might be deficient in power and range by western standards right now, but those are areas where Siekon’s fellow companies have 100 R&D teams working on relevant technological next-generation manufacturing technologies.
Hence, it might be more appropriate to think about this motorcycle with Felo TOOZ-like numbers – much more power storage capacity and a much stronger motor. The battery pack and motor it runs appear to have been built for the 250cc class motorcycle that shared the same stand, and I’d consider the current spec motor a placeholder, at least for western markets, but it could be perfect right now in China at the right price.
It certainly seems to have a ton more room in its chesty frontal area for significantly more cells than the svelte E-LT bike does, so we wouldn't be surprised to see a vastly different battery spec – and hopefully an upgraded motor too – by the time the production bike is revealed for western markets.
For the domestic Chinese marketplace however, the Cruise Prince may turn out to be an ideal motorcycle, if for no other reason than it's the biggest domestic market electric cruiser with international aspirations and the Chinese motorcycle market is gargantuan in size and spending power.
China's massive population is working hard and growing rich and beginning to purchase the aspirational rewards their hard work promised.
Americans buy more than 500,000 motorcycles in a good year.
Chinese citizens buy nearly 2,000,000 motorcycles PER MONTH.
In a market of that magnitude, there is almost certainly room for a motorcycle exactly like the Cruise Prince.
Siekon knows exactly how far away solid state batteries are, because it is competing at the bleeding edge to develop and produce batteries for everyone's cars and motorcycles. It has done it once before, which gives it immense credibility.
Siekon intends to be a player in the New Energy Vehicle economy, which will also make it a player in the low altitude economy currently under development in China – flying cars need batteries with high energy density even more than motorcycles and batteries are the company's strong suit.
The Cruise Prince is just a prototype at this stage, but we were told to expect announcements about the bike in Q2 2025, which would suggest those announcements might be coming as soon as Auto Shanghai 2025 in late April.
ADDENDUM – if you’re a bicycle, ebike or motorcycle enthusiast or dealer looking at what might be coming in the near future, we’re adding a significant image gallery for the show over the next day.