How to commute green and smart with style

The next time you’re in a traffic jam, don’t loose your mind. With this cool new folding electric bike you can arrive at time, being a good planet citizen and not badly sweat.

New York City based Industrial designer Manuel Saez has just won two major design awards with a little guy that can solve the problem of many city dwellers, while helping them to make a better world.

The CMYK Elektric Bike is a small folding electric bike that allows people to ride the shorts distances between home/office/school to the public transportation station without much effort and then carry it into the indoor spaces.

The product has just won the 1st prize in the Spark Design Awards –a international design contest with experts in design as a jury- and has reached the 2nd place in the 2009 People’s Design Award at the Cooper-Hewitt National Museum with an overwhelming support from people from all around the world, showing the sex-appeal that the product has both in experts and in the public.

The electric motor can push you forward during 1 hour and then you can re-charge the battery as a laptop. The lightweight and the small size are differential features, since the rest of the e-bikes in the market are too big to be carried out comfortably in the subway or in the bus.

Manuel Saez, the Argentinean origin designer, former Design Director of Humanscale is now leading his own design consultancy where he has enlisted an eclectic group of young talented people from all over the world, from places such as Turkey, China, Brazil, Barcelona and Brooklyn. The team is very proud working in a project that allows them to help to make a greener world through design.

As the National Bicycle Dealers Association says in the U.S. Industry Overview 2008 “national trends related to the green movement, environmental sustainability, the need to address health problems related to inactivity, and higher gas prices bode well for the future of human-powered transportation”.

In the other hand the Electric Bikes Worldwide Report says “the 170K units of electric bikes to be sold in the US in 2009 are forecasted to growth up 194% to 500K in 2011”.

Therefore good commercial future is promised to the company that is currently working in the design and development of two new innovative electric models for different segments to follow up the first model.

For more information, see the following links:

Work

http://www.sparkawards.com/

http://peoplesdesignaward.cooperhewitt.org/2009/

http://nbda.com/articles/u.s.-bicycle-market-2008-pg196.htm

http://www.ebwr.com/