What happens when a family-run concern that has made a name for itself in motorcycle customization embarks on a journey of performance electric mobility. We knew that the motorcycles would be good looking and desirable. What we did not expect was that the Barras Brothers, Guillaume and Benoit, are working on an extremely flexible and modular platform. AT EUR 16,900 to start with, the Hiro is expensive but the high desirability quotient, along with upgrade-as-you-go flexibility should help find buyers.
Today (23-Sep-25) BBM (Barras Brothers Motorcycles) opened their website and unveiled the Hiro platform. We were there and managed to sit down with them to get their view of the future.
We are very keen to know about your journey before you started working on the Hiro platform.
Guillaume Barras: We are from France, from the eastern part of Paris, in Champagne. I first came to Hong Kong in 2000 to work for the WindSurfing company. Ben joined me quickly after a year or two, and we started our first company, which was into trading. My last job was to work for a company called Greenstar. They manufacture racing suits for Moto GP riders under the brand Arlen Ness and Berik. I worked for the company for a few years, and after that, we started our motorcycle customization business.
We started to customize our own motorcycles, and we were importing parts from Japan. Some guys there saw that we were importing parts, and they asked us if we could help them find parts for their motorcycles, and we were doing that.
One particular gentleman came and said, “I’ve seen your bikes, and can you make a bike for me?” That’s how we started the company, Angry Lane, which is our customization workshop in Hong Kong since 2012.
So you have already spent about 13 years in the motorcycle business.
Guillaume Barras: When we started to ride motorcycles, I was nine, Ben was six. Our father always put us as the mechanics, whether it was a bike or cars, changing the brake pads, changing oil, etc. So we always had the tools and our hands dirty in the garage in France.
Benoit Barras: So I joined Guillaume a year or two after he left for Hong Kong. I joined him in Hong Kong. I used to work in the advertising and marketing industry. So, I studied marketing, but I was a design freak. So I learned at night, graphic design, coding, HTML, website, and everything around that. When I left France, I was working for Volkswagen, handling the website for them.
When I came to Hong Kong, before joining forces with Guillaume for the motorcycle business, I was working in design for Philips and a few other brands, taking care of their website.
From customizing motorcycles to actually developing your own electric motorcycle, and I would say a pretty big electric motorcycle, how did that happen?
Guillaume Barras: Actually, when the electric motorcycle started, I mean, really started, before that, we had a few inquiries. We had customers coming and saying, that I want to have a custom motorcycle, but I would like to have an electric powertrain. And we started to look into the market. At that time, there were only Brammo and Zero motorcycles. We couldn’t get them in Hong Kong, and we didn’t like them anyway because they were full of plastic, too big, too short range, and took hours to charge. So shortly after we got in touch with Cake and we became the dealer for them in Hong Kong. At the same time, we discovered the Damon bike. So I called JG (Jay Giraud) and I said, “Jay, I want to have the distribution for Damon; I want to be the dealer for Hong Kong.”
And of course, you know the story that never happened. But that’s how we started our first tryst with electric, and when we got our first Cake, that was the first electric motorcycle we tried, and the first in Hong Kong, and we really enjoyed the experience because it was instant power, and that was very cool.
We have many bikes together: Old Triumphs, old Harleys, and new Triumphs. I have a Bobber. Ben’s got a Bonneville. We’ve got a Yamaha Tracker and a Kawasaki W650. So, we are petrol heads.
But we want to have a rocket on wheels in our stable. That’s a totally different experience. You can fine-tune it according to your mood, according to what you want to do with it. That’s how it started.
Benoit Barras: And looking into the market, there was nothing we liked, nothing we would buy for ourselves. So we started to get deeper and study controllers and motors and VCU, and all the technology around electric motorcycles. We decided to make our own because it’s simpler than making an engine, and to get all those parts that are moving.
So, we decided to do it. We decided to create a platform that you have now seen, and from that platform, to be able to create different bikes, because I like the Streetfighter, but I like the Cafe Racer as well. Maybe someday I would like to get the Roadster or the Scrambler.
What we can do with our platform is that today you can buy the StreetFighter, and next year, if you want to have a Cafe Racer, you can just get the parts and modify your bike and fine-tune the app so that you can get a proper way to deliver the power that’s different from the StreetFighter and the scrambler.
Guillaume Barras: So that’s how we built this platform to be very easy to assemble, because we were already thinking about production and to have it as simple as possible. That’s very important for us, and it’s not because it’s simple and has very few parts that he has to look ugly or not pleasing to the eyes, but after that, it’s a matter of appreciation.
Coming to the styling: Who has styled the motorcycle? Is it you, or did you have an external designer?
Guillaume Barras: We both designed it; the idea was to unclutter everything. So it has to have very clean and easy lines to read. What we get in the market it’s always covered, and we hate plastics. Each time we work on an ICE motorcycle, we used to remove as many parts as possible. So, for the design of the platform, we really wanted to have something easy to read with your eyes, and that was the only way to make it look really like a motorcycle.
We were able to have something that people will like, that is compact, and really looks a good bike.
Benoit Barras: Very important point: We are making this bike for us first. We want to ride it. That’s a bike that we want to have.
Great! When I saw the specifications, it seems that you’re looking at a 70 kW motor and a 12.96 kWh battery pack. That’s a very sweet spot between the lower end of the market and the electric hyperbike that never comes to the market. But, frankly, it’s quite powerful for an electric motorcycle. How did you arrive at those kinds of specifications?
Guillaume Barras: A lot of homework. That’s one thing we learned with the electric power that you have to balance things. So we could have said, okay, let’s go for a 15 kWh battery, but that would have been too heavy. So we had to balance this regarding the power. We thought, if we do an electric motorcycle, we don’t want to go to the low-end market because you already have the Chinese and the Indian companies that are fighting with small bikes and scooters there, and we cannot fight against this. It’s impossible price-wise, volume-wise, and for distribution. We cannot fight. And, also because we don’t want to ride those bikes, I don’t want to ride a 125cc. I want to have a bike that has serious power, but that can still be adjusted, so it’s manageable.
Like, this bike is 70 kW at peak, 35 kW at nominal, and with the application, you can fine-tune it as a 125 cc; you can put out just 11 kW, if you want. If you are a beginner, or if you don’t feel confident, or it’s the first time driving the bike, you can just adjust it, and you can evolve together with the bike. The more confident you feel, the more power you can open on this one.
How does your supply chain look? Where’s the motor coming from, and where are you assembling the battery packs? Is it yourself, or what is the strategy here?
Guillaume Barras: For this, we are working with Sarolea. It’s a Belgian company, and they have built electric racing motorcycles. They participated for the first time at the Isle of Man Zero from 2014 until 2018, I think, and their bike was doing amazing. They finished fourth every time, and they have the experience and the engineering capabilities to do a completely carbon racing machine. They were manufacturing their own motor. They developed their own BMS system, their own VCU. Basically, they developed everything.
We started to talk to them about this project two years ago. They really liked it, and those guys are super nice. They are an engineering team. They are all motorcycle riders, and they love the idea of having a motorcycle that could be the equivalent of an ICE bike, like the Ducati Monster, Ducati Scrambler, Triumph Bonneville, kind of medium-sized bikes. Basically, it’s not a super-bike, but it’s targeting the middle level.
Benoit Barras: But if you take the electric route, with this motor, there is 150 Nm of torque at the motor. So that would be more than a Moto GP bike in terms of torque, obviously at the motor level, not at the wheel. So that can be a bike that can be very powerful, and that can also be very gentle for beginners, or for people who don’t need to go that fast or to get that quick.
So you’re sort of balancing both the beginner and the serious motorcyclist with this one machine. How much does the motorcycle weigh?
Guillaume Barras: The weight is about 200 kg because we have a trellis frame in chromoly steel. The subframe is in aluminum. The swing arm is aluminum. The battery casing is aluminum. Basically, everything is aluminum, except the mainframe.
The wheels we chose to go with are spoke wheels because now you can get tubeless spoke wheels. This is very flexible because if you take the first three bikes, the Cafe Racer, Roadster, and StreetFighter, they have the same wheel size of wheels at 17”.
But when you go to the Scrambler, there will be a 19” at the front, and a 17’ at the rear. So we can use the same wheels across all models except for the front wheel on the Scrambler.
That was also something very important for us – to have as many common parts as possible, because if you have different parts on different bikes, then you cannot get to a volume that would be interesting for a supplier to work with you. We have been working with Excel for many years. We have also been working with Brembo for many years, YSS, Ohlins, all the parts on the bike that are not related to the powertrain are from suppliers that we have been working with from earlier.
What does the development journey look like? Where are you right now? At what stage?
Guillaume Barras: Everything has been developed in 3-D. I was telling a gentleman in Spain that we don’t want to create a dummy, an empty shell, that you put on the road on a slope, and you take pictures and you say, “Ah, we have a prototype.”
No, we decided not to do that. So, we developed everything in 3D with a designer who specializes in automotive. Ben has been sitting next to him for like six months, and we got all the 3D files from all the component suppliers, including the wheels, and we created what we call the digital twin.
So today, everything is at scale. Everything is integrated. We can send the battery casing to the supplier, and they can do the battery.
Same thing for the controller box. Same thing for all the parts basically. The rest are off the shelf. What Guillaume forgot to say about the weight of the bike is that all the body panels are in Bcomp, which is a very resistant and very light bio-composite. So it’s similar to carbon but much cheaper than carbon fiber, recyclable, and has the same technical specs as plastic, so that’s why we put this on it.
What’s the plan like? Where do you see the market potential, how many numbers, and which markets are you targeting?
Guillaume Barras: We are based in Hong Kong, but we decided to start in Europe because the European market is the biggest. As we see with Zero Motorcycles shifting from California to the Netherlands, we were right. So the biggest market is Europe. Of course, with the level of quality we are going to provide, we’re not going to be a cheap motorcycle. We’re not going to be inexpensive.
We still think there is a market because the bike, we think they’re sexy, and we put the user experience first, which is very important for us, and that’s what will be visible through the application. You can fine-tune the bike’s power so that it can appeal to a wide range of people who have the budget to buy that kind of motorcycle. But I want to add that this is the first platform to show people what we can do, and we have already started to work on a smaller platform that will be equivalent to 50-125cc.
Are you planning to do this on your own? Like, are you bootstrapping the company, or are you trying to raise funds?
Guillaume Barras: We have a first investor from the Basque Country. We are getting support from the local government, and we are doing fundraising in Hong Kong by the end of the year, because we have people who have bought bikes from us before under Angry Lane.
We show them the project, and some of them have already placed orders for the bikes.
What about things like the electronics, the motor, the cells, etc? How is the sourcing looking?
Guillaume Barras: The cells are coming from Taiwan, from a big company that is providing to many companies.
All the lightning is also from Taiwan. The Chargers are from China. We bought the 6.6kW charger from China, because we couldn’t find any supplier in Europe for that. We don’t want to reinvent everything. There is no need, as the motorcycle industry is 140 years old, and a lot of parts have been perfected over many years. So there is no point in bringing something entirely new that would need months of development.
The company we work with for the Controllers is based in the Basque Country, and they’re already working with major OEMs, so we don’t need to try to do our own controller.
Fair enough. When do we see the first model on the Hiro platform on the roads?
Benoit Barras: The final prototypes should be ready by June next year. After that, there will be a period of testing or homologation of the ABS system in Germany. We have planned a production pilot by the end of 2026, and we expect to deliver the first bikes by Q1 2027.
