Scooters And One Wheels
Industrial designer creating curler frames from merely folded sheet steel

The frame of a Vespa is something beautiful, and making a Vespa is relatively complicated. It is made up of a series of steel embossments welded together (you can watch the process here). This is both time and resource intensive, although the final welding will be done by a CNC drill rig.
Stilride, an electric scooter startup from Sweden, is working on a more efficient production method for their offer, the SUSI. You’ve ruled out the methods of joining separate stampings, each of which would require a separate production facility, or welding pipes into a skeleton to which body parts would be attached. Instead, they hope to take a single sheet of steel and fold it like origami to create a frame with no waste. Once folded, the seams would then be welded.
The resulting aesthetic “creates a really defined design DNA,” says industrial designer and Stilride founder Tue Beijer. It would also generate less waste and require fewer workers. Here’s what they want:
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Stilride is still in the prototyping stage and hopes to have a version ready for production by 2022 or 2023.