Earlier this month, Cleveland, OH-based startup Land Energy was at the CES in Las Vegas, NV, and the Outdoor Retailer Snow Show in Salt Lake City, UT, with its electric two-wheeler called the District. You can read about the innovative electric cycle and the 2023 updates planned for it here.

Just after those two events, the company’s CEO, Scott Colosimo, briefed Futurride on the development of the LEV (light electric vehicle) and how it fits into his forward-thinking strategy that includes the E Moto ecosystem and CORE battery platform.

The industrial designer had worked a few years in the auto industry before moving back to his hometown of Cleveland, OH, where he worked for consumer goods company Techtronic Industries on his first battery-swap platform for vacuums and appliances. In 2009, the budding entrepreneur started his first motorcycle company called Cleveland CycleWerks. He used that experience to found Land Energy in 2020 based on the principle that energy continuity and mobility are essential to modern life.

The company has developed quickly. In May 2022, the LEV manufacturer closed its A1 investment round with Fenix Equity Partners. The investment is allowing it to scale U.S. production, bring in top talent in the EV space, and expand its IOT (Internet of things) platform and manufacturing footprint in Cleveland. It will enable the company to produce its connected battery platform and push production quicker as it scales.

“The path has been really three solid years of trial and error,” Colosimo told Futurride. “We quickly got a lot of product into testers’ and users’ hands, and then they started telling us what they loved and hated. We were pretty clear about not just trying to push tech for tech’s sake.”

 

Small mobility opportunities

Colosimo was originally drawn to EVs because they use about 20% of the parts of gasoline vehicles and for the potential to vastly reduce the complexity of motorcycles and make them more sustainable.

Early on, Land Energy decided to decouple the vehicle’s enduring hardware from its quickly evolving and swappable IOT/battery package.

“It’s not sustainable to create throwaway products,” he said. “We think of the vehicle as something that’s going to last a very long time, so you put the hardware on the vehicle. The reality is that the inverter technology and the drive technology have not moved nearly as quickly as the energy and connectivity. So, the vehicles can last 20 years into the future as long as you make the IOT, connectivity, data center, and battery swappable.”

Colosimo believes that small mobility has a big future and that the U.S. is ignoring it at its peril “like it’s not going to happen.” He is seeing the fast-changing reality by living on campus and teaching transportation design at his alma mater Cleveland Institute of Art.

“We’re seeing trends in real time that five years ago I would say would never happen in the U.S.,” he said. “I’ve never seen students have less money and less desire to own a car. I’ve never had students that haven’t had driver’s licenses, and now they don’t.”

However, people still need the freedom of mobility, and young adults are getting around in totally different ways.

“We’re having students get to school on electric skateboards and scooters regularly,” he said. “So small mobility is going to continue to grow. I think the transition is happening.”

 

Software-defined vehicles and mobile energy

Colisimo and Land Energy plan on easing that transition with software-defined vehicles and mobile energy. The District is how many consumers know the company, but what sets Land Energy apart from the rest of the electric two-wheeler competition is its transitional E Moto ecosystem and CORE battery platform.

“The mobile energy market to me isn’t quite where it needs to be,” he said. “I think we probably have a three-year climb to get there for many reasons.”

However, he is looking to push the market forward on electrification.

“Our focus is getting the energy and the bikes out, and the value proposition of the energy makes itself clear,” said Colisimo. “We don’t have to sell anybody on it. If you got the bike and you got the energy, it just makes sense. The market’s going to develop.”

He says that one primary use case for that energy is camping. One of the hottest accessories is an e-bike on the back of a camper so its energy can be made available for items such as running lights and cooking with electric induction stovetops.

“The whole industry started throwing solar panels on top of overland vehicles and campers,” he said, of the trend to more sustainable energy. “We kind of hit something that’s right at the beginning of this trend. We see all these people hacking together their own solutions for outdoor battery banks.”

“Predicting trends is pretty simple,” he added. “If there’s a massive DIY community out there making [solutions] because they can’t get it [otherwise, there’s a good chance that the trend is going to become pretty mainstream.”

Now, he says that RV manufacturers have started contacting Land Energy “saying, hey we need the energy.”

 

Made in the U.S.A.

Since the company’s founding, its focus evolved, but from the beginning—even going back to the Cleveland CycleWerks days, he wanted to do all manufacturing in the U.S. In the early days, “the focus was ‘take it all to China.’ In 2009, there was no interest to partner with us here,” he said, adding that it was too expensive to manufacture motorcycles in the U.S. “It was either let the dream die or move to China or Taiwan.”

However, he said the tide has turned for manufacturing in the U.S.

“What was great is that in 2020 the global supply chain collapsed,” he said, providing opportunities for reshoring. “So it’s like, all right, now is our time.”

He says that U.S. developments took off in tech, coding, and even traditional cutting/welding/casting because of the new electrification opportunities.

“Everyone saw that all the major car OEMs were going electric,” he said. “We kind of rode that tailwind.”

However, the company was not prepared for what came next.

“We thought we could rely on traditional suppliers to help us out,” he said. “Unfortunately, a lot of these traditional suppliers know less about the space than we do as a startup.”

This applied to both the motorcycle and automotive industries.

“The batteries we were getting from them were just absolute garbage,” he revealed. “The drive units we were getting were crap. They were giving us specifications that they couldn’t meet. They were making promises that they couldn’t deliver on. We wasted a year and a half with a German battery company that gave us a worse product than it took us three months to develop.”

An underlying factor he says is that the traditional supplier base was trying to hold onto the traditional business and trying to make electric vehicles endlessly complicated in the transition from gas to electric.

“It doesn’t work for us because we’re trying to make a better product,” he said.

So, as Tesla did, Land Energy pursued vertical integration.

“We vertically integrate on what we call the high IP (intellectual property),” he said. That includes the tech stack, a lot of coding, some of the PCBs, and some of the connectivity. “That’s really what we want to own.”

 

The energy lives with you

That vertical integration extends to the battery packs and electric motors.

The company designs and assembles its own swappable packs from purchased cells, with the embedded IOT tech being crucial for the company’s ecosystem development.

“We look at the battery like an iPhone; it’s a data center with a ton of energy,” said Colosimo. “We put all the tech in the pack because we can not only update the vehicle through the battery, but our IOT system’s in it.”

Updates to this tech have happened quickly.

“We started with 3G/4G connectivity inside our batteries,” he explained. “Within 12 months, we were at 4G/5G. If we built all that into the vehicle, we’d be screwed.”

That is why the company is building the tech into the battery.

“Every three years, we think people are going to want to replace the battery because the energy density is getting so much better, he added. “Just like you’re swapping the battery out you’re also swapping out the full IOT package. So we can always keep the connectivity, the IOT, relevant and new with the energy.”

With the swappability comes the need for portability.

“We did a lot of consumer experiments on how heavy we could get the small pack,” he said. “We arrived at about 27-28 lb as the heaviest we could make an easily swappable pack that gets about 40 mi of range. It’s a 2.1-kW·h pack at 72 V.”

The vehicle can use one or two of the small packs and get up to 40 or 80 mi (64 or 129 mi) of range. With the smaller packs, there was not enough room to put in a big inverter for an AC outlet, so there is also a bigger single pack that’s double the size called the Core+. It has 6.4 kW·h of energy and a mass of about 48 lb (22 kg), so it is not as mobile.

“We figure most people getting the bigger pack will probably keep it in the bike,” said Colosimo.

Going against another trend, the focus on charging is not so fast, since “the energy lives with you.” The 45 min or so it takes to charge to 80% for a standard U.S. wall outlet was deemed OK for now.

“We felt like pushing higher and higher charge rates, then you have to go liquid cooling, then you have to add radiators,” said Colosimo. “It just makes it more complex and heavier.”

And high rates of charging (like Levels 2 and 3) can reduce battery life.

“You can literally just charge these things anywhere,” he said. “The idea is energy that lives with you enhances your life. We started thinking about all the other needs we had for energy when we’re on the go and having the vessel, the energy inside the motorcycle, just made complete sense.”

 

Against the flow with radial flux

Land Energy also developed its electric propulsion motors, going its own way with a radial-flux design. Colosimo says that the company went against the traditional industry wisdom of using an axial-flux unit, which provides higher torque output but has limits on how fast it can spin.

“You’ve got to limit the speed because they’ll just tear themselves apart,” said Colosimo. “We ended up developing our own radial-flux motor because we can induce something called flux weakening,” creating the effect of “a two-speed gearbox” with just one speed to get higher revs. He added that the team experimented with 18-20 different combinations of motors, voltages (36, 48, 72, to 100), and currents.

“You can spin a radial-flux motor almost up to 12,000 rpm, where axial flux limits are around 7000 rpm,” he said. “When you no longer have a gearbox, how fast [the motor] can spin is everything, and how much torque it can produce at different rev levels is also very important.”

The choice offered clear real-world benefits for the company’s LEV application.

“We were able to create a motor that has a lot of torque up to 50 mph and then we can push through,” he said. “We’ve gone up to 115 mph on a single speed. We limited the vehicles that we sell to 72 mph for safety, but that’s 25 mph more than we could get with axial flux at the same torque. We’ve created a torquier product with a higher top speed.”

 

Sharing the IP

Land Energy is committed to sharing what it is developing with other manufacturers, saving them significant amounts of R&D dollars and resources. Execs believe that the company’s game-changing approach in the LEV industry using the connected CORE battery platform could enable many more users to travel, work, and play anywhere with a personal, portable, easy-to-use energy grid, keeping them connected and running at all times through a 4G network connection.

Just as the proprietary ecosystem can help consumers, the connected CORE battery and analytics platform can enable businesses to have both a portable, energy-efficient, sustainable source of power for their devices, fleets, and factories, and a continuous feedback loop of customized performance, maintenance, and use of analytics and insights.

The platform is designed not only to plug and play with most devices and vehicles that use a motor but also provides a front-end dashboard and backend data security for the use of its IoT (Internet of things) and software technologies. Digital security capabilities are enabled by geolocation and blockchain technologies.

The company believes its CORE battery and analytics platform has potential applications in health tech, fleet, demand/response power grid, and expansion to other LEVs.