Cake, the Swedish company known for its electric dirt bikes, street motorcycles and mopeds, has just announced a new partnership with PaperShell that could see the motorcycle manufacturer asking customers upon checkout, “Paper or plastic?”
The technological partnership between PaperShell and Cake could see the former’s material make its way into the latter’s motorbike body panels.
PaperShell fancies its natural fiber composite as a structural material that is stronger than plastic while offering a lower impact on the environment.
Compared the carbon footprint of polypropylene at 4.95 kg CO2e per kg and fiberglass’s even higher 25.05 kg CO2e per kg, PaperShell’s natural fiber composite touts an impressively small 0.65 kg CO2e per kg.
According to Cake, the company will work with PaperShell to evaluate the properties of the new material and how it can be used to replace certain plastics already used for Cake bikes.
As Cake CEO Stefan Ytterborn explained:
“Cake was founded to inspire towards a zero-emission society and this naturally involves carefully investigating the best possible materials for use in our electric bikes. We’re excited to work with PaperShell and hope that we can play a crucial part in finding a material that can minimize or even eradicate the use of conventional plastics in our motorcycles. This is a collaboration that ultimately will benefit the entire vehicle industry and beyond.”
PaperShell sounds equally excited, as CEO Anders Breitholtz expanded:
“We are happy to partner with Cake and look forward to further evolving PaperShell into a material that will make the use of plastic a thing of the past. We can’t think of a more perfectly challenging testbed for our material than the industry leading electric off-road motorcycle and look forward to developing further PaperShell’s inherent resistance to fluids, UV-radiation, weather and fire.”
Cake is coming off a string of new announcements lately. In addition to interesting new accessories for the brand’s Makka line of electric mopeds, the company recently unveiled a new line of work-oriented electric two-wheelers.
The line uses nearly all of the brand’s models, from the Kalk electric dirt bikes to the Osa electric motorcycles and even the new Makka electric mopeds.
The company also recently announced big funding news, plus a partnership with Polestar that put Cake’s electric mopeds on the back of electric cars.
The electric motorcycle industry is rapidly expanding, but paper-based body panels may still be a first!
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Author: Micah Toll
Source: Electrek
