Dong Tran, the founder and CEO of Ryvid, has the chops to start a motorcycle company. A graduate of Detroit College of Creative studies, he’s worked at General Motors, BMW Designworks USA, Toyota’s Tokyo-based Design Laboratory, and Honda R&D. Since then, he’s been the lead designer of the Icon seaplane and was the head designer for an eVTOL (electric vertical take-off-and-landing) aircraft so secret that he can’t even name it.

But his real passion is motorcycles. And even though he had a superbike at age 15, what really interests him is something that’s not really fundamental to the US or European motorcycle markets: motorcycles as transportation. He sees the vast two-wheeler markets of Vietnam, of India, of Indonesia, of all Southeast Asia and Latin America and Africa, and figures they’re ripe for electrification as the price of batteries drops, fuel prices rise, and the appetite for cleaner air and lower emissions increases.

Aft of the pack is the stainless-steel frame and an integrated motor/swingarm, generally like the design that’s commonly used on internal-combustion-engined scooters. The motor doesn’t mount to the frame, but directly to the swingarm, and drives the rear wheel through a long-lived Gates belt that’s fully enclosed inside the swing arm. The original BMW electric scooter, the C Evolution, used a similar design.