It needs a lot of chutzpah to manufacture electric motorcycles in California. The state is expensive when it comes to labor and environmental norms. But what if you design the product in such a way that assembly becomes easy? Ryvid did that. The whole frame is a stainless steel monocoque - everything is stamped out of 4 x 8 sheets and then fastened together with PEM nuts. The underslung battery can be detached and attached easily.
What is fascinating is that Ryvid maintains this cool simplicity throughout their design process. In the end they created a motorcycle that can be DIY maintained including things like removing and replacing the motor and controller.
This in a time and era where everyone else is running after complexity.
Deepesh Rathore: Dong Train, its great to have you here. Ryvid has been on my radar since the very first media reports. It’s a beautiful motorcycle, and I’m incredibly impressed with the frame — we’ll talk more about that.
What’s also interesting, as I mentioned before we started recording, is that while many passionate startups are coming out of North America, very few have actually reached the stage of commercially producing and delivering motorcycles to customers.
Before this interview, I also took a look at some Reddit forums to see what customers were saying about Ryvid, and there’s been a lot of positive feedback — so clearly, you’re doing something right.
I’m really keen to hear the full story. Can we start from the very beginning? Where did the idea come from, and what’s your background, as well as your co-founders’?
Dong Tran: Sure. Ryvid has four co-founders — three of us are Vietnamese — and we each come from very different backgrounds.
My background is in mechanical engineering. After that, I went to automotive design school and became a car designer. I worked for a range of OEMs — Honda, Toyota, General Motors, BMW — so I’ve been exposed to a wide spectrum of automotive companies.
Eventually, I shifted to aerospace by joining a startup called Icon Aircraft. I stayed with them as they grew to nearly a thousand people, then left to start my own product development company. That company did a lot of design and engineering work for automotive and electric mobility firms — including companies like Zero Motorcycles and some early-stage electric two-wheeler startups.
That’s really where the idea for Ryvid was born — not initially for urban mobility but for electric powersports.
Through that venture, I met my co-founders. One of them comes from a logistics and supply chain background, as well as from aerospace. Another had been working in the semiconductor industry, which is quite different from automotive — he specialized in making large tools for chip manufacturing.
