Ryvid: Electric Motorcycles Powering a Change in Urban Transportation

0:01Dong Tran:Welcome to Third Angle, where we are born to ride into a greener future.

0:18Dong Tran:I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world. around the world, each powered by PTC technology.

0:36Dong Tran:Based in California, Rivid is an electric motorcycle startup on a mission to rethink sustainable urban mobility. Their motorcycles are not just electric, they are lightweight, modular, and designed for reuse and recycling. With celebrity owners including Chris Hemsworth and Lana Del Rey, the bikes offer riders a sleek, efficient, and sustainable alternative to cars or traditional motorcycles. The modular design means riders can swap parts, upgrade systems and extend the product's lifecycle far beyond traditional bikes. At the heart of it all is a removable, swappable battery that can be used as a portable energy station for camping or a backup power source in emergencies.

1:17Dong Tran:Dave Duncan, PTC's VP of Sustainability and proud owner of a Rivid motorcycle, traveled to Los Angeles to meet Rivid's CEO and founder Dong Tran. Dong tells us how Rivet approaches modularity, efficiency and reuse to create the sustainable motorcycles of the future.

1:49Hi, Dong. Hey, how's it going, Dave? Excellent. Yeah, hey, great to meet you. Good to meet you too, Matt. I'm thrilled to be here. I love the bike. I can't wait to talk about how you designed and manufactured this excellent machine. Hi, I'm Dave Duncan. I'm head of sustainability at PTC. Today, we're visiting Rivet in California. I'm excited about this for two reasons. One, Rivet's a PTC customer. And secondly, I'm an owner and driver of a Rivet motorcycle. Hi, my name is Dong Tran. I'm co-founder and chief executive officer at Rivet. You know, when we started out Rivet, the mission was actually to create a sustainability platform that kind of outlasts the general hardware software cycle of what the electric mobility market is right now.

2:37So the idea was to create a sustainable product that doesn't completely rely on software. It has a good hardware base and then being able to build on top of that as we expand out. We've been around since 2021. one. We have been in production now for a year and a half and we currently ship all over the United States.

3:01Yeah, so tell us a bit about the design of Rivend Motorcycles. What makes them different? Yeah, so when we started out the company, we really looked at design for sustainability. And sustainability really meant for us not just the fact that it's EV, it's more of the use of materials, how we do production, all the way to the end life cycle of the product. Our battery, obviously battery technology changes as time goes along, so we made sure to make the battery component very separate from the bike, allowing us a lot of flexibility in not just how we assemble the bike, but how it grows with the user.

3:42For instance, someone can actually purchase a brand new battery and pop it on their bike to upgrade in the future. Yeah, excellent. I've been looking for an electric motorcycle for a few years right now. And I'm 6 '7", which for our European and Asian listeners, that's two meters tall. and with this modular design you're able to put a larger suspension in for me and an adjustable seat height so I can get a 36 inch seat height and it's adjustable so my family members like my wife who's a little bit shorter and also a rider could fit on it too so size the battery modularity and the price point are I think amazing and really the first bike that I've seen that's answered those three needs for a typical rider like me.

4:40We basically have one frame that works across all three different products. Suspensions that can work across all the different products. Headlight assemblies. And we broke it out so that we managed to do sub-assemblies that goes on to a main assembly. So it's not a linear production process that we look at is much more of a modular production method, right? Everything's done at the same time. It's all in parallel, not series. You don't have to wait for things. And that has really allowed us to manage a lot of different components, a lot of different options. We have like five or six color options, which is always a nightmare, but our panels are pretty easier to swap so it became pretty straightforward for us.

5:26The modular design is brilliant and maybe first Dong if I summarize for our listeners what the commercial advantages of your modular design is. First is you're able to offer the variability that your customers desire and through good part classification and be very diligent about not creating duplicate or unnecessary parts you can control the inventory and the part variability that you need not only for initial assembly and MRP but also ongoing support of the bicycle or motorcycle. The second point from the sustainability perspective is, if you think of the L. MacArthur butterfly diagram which is the most recognizable standard for circularity, recycling's not the top option, not even close for discrete products.

6:17Number one is repair it if you can. Number two is if you can't do that, refurbish, then remanufacture. And only if you can't do those things do you recycle. And modular parts provide both the supply and demand for repairability, remanufacturing, and refurbishment, which in our experience preserves about 65 to 90 percent of the embodied carbon of that that particular part so it's I think commercially and environmentally brilliant how you're designing these motorcycles.

6:57So I grew up in Vietnam. I was born there grew up there in Vietnam everything is on two wheels And when you look at how the people there, including my own family, use the product, it's a tool to get around. It's not like here we do it for recreational purposes. We build bikes because it's cool and it's fun. Over there, you're kind of forced to fix it if it breaks because you don't have a way to get around. So the idea of what you just mentioned there on being able to fix it yourself, reuse it, we took all of that and we put it into a product here for the United States. because I think recycling is a lot harder than people think.

7:36You can't just take a part and crush it down and remake it into something else. So it's really the life cycle. How long can this product last beyond the battery, beyond the tech? And we built it exactly like that. You don't need any software to run our bike. In fact, you take the display off the bike, the bike just operates on its own. There's nothing involved with that. So we use the software as an improvement layer to the owner experience. rather than you need this to run the product. Like it's a good product on its own and can be fixed. We've had customers who built their own batteries, put in their own motor controllers and built an entirely different product from our base.

8:15Because ultimately if you distill it down, it's some wheels and tires and a seat. For instance, we have essentially a power pack that you can use the battery off the bike for a power generator. You have an inverter that you can plug in, you can run your laptop, whatever it is. So in the off-season when you're not riding, you can throw the battery in your RV and use it as a power station. I don't know if you knew that, Dave, but... Is it kitted to do that right now? You can actually take the battery off your bike, go camping with it, and you buy this little kit that we're going to put on the store soon.

8:51But it essentially lets you plug in 110, run your TV, laptop, whatever it is. Fantastic. I'll be one of your first customers on that one. We got a lot of power outages out east from thunderstorms and that's going to be... That's a great reuse and repurposing of it.

9:15See the battery?

9:21So you can... It has a little lock, right? So you can... the red handle you pop up. Have you ever have you actually tried to take it off yet? Just because I haven't needed to yeah You just hold it kind of hold the front and you lift that safety and it just kind of comes down All right, so that's that's 80 pounds I just lowered with like one arm because most of the weight is actually on the bike 15 seconds to take the battery off and put the battery back on 15 seconds Yeah, so you kind of lift it off the back and pull it out. Yeah, it has a little handle that pops up I mean, I'll definitely, I haven't had a range problem yet, but I'll probably bring it in for December and January just so it doesn't 90 % too cool.

10:02Well, that's another great use case for removal battery. In the winter, you know, cold is bad for batteries. People actually bring them inside. When they put them back on the bike, you have the full range of the battery because it's not cold. Because the battery is so small already, you want to maximize all the mileage. So we have people that actually just stores it inside, so they don't put it in the garage. And it's actually, yeah, it's pretty helpful.

10:34What we're looking at here is R &D. We have R &D production. Some of the marketing and sales folks are also here. Pretty small building as you can see, it's about 8 ,000 square feet. when you walk in you can kind of see all the bikes that we have on demo where we build them to test them out we have demo units that we actually sell and here are all of the bikes that are ready to go to customers right they get finished tested we do a road test around the area and then we actually load them onto trucks and then they go straight to someone's house so it's kind of the typical D2C model. Yeah, and it looks like each one of these bikes looks substantially different, but really off of the same modular design, but with limited parts.

11:18So you're able to offer a lot of personalization with your design in this.

11:27Being able to do production in a small space like this is also part of our sustainability story, right? Because when we move to a different country, when we go and we localize production, we don't have to stand up big manufacturing buildings of all complexity that's involved we basically need a warehouse space some storage space and all of our systems go with it you kind of look around everything is on wheels with the exception of these offices here these little mini offices but it allows us to like move things around like all these shelves can be collapsed we can move all these stations around pretty quickly and have the ability to really remove the factory and reconfigure the factory pretty quickly.

12:08And that's really helped us kind of grow the company, attract the company depending on where we are.

12:17For me and I think for the rest of the team at Rivet, the most important thing for the company is not necessarily the product itself, it's what happens after you buy the product, right? We're not just selling a motorcycle. We want to sell an experience of good ownership. like what that means for the end user because ultimately that's what will set the company apart and and you know will grow the company so we take that i mean we put a lot a lot into place as a young company right a lot of effort into doing that

12:52donk thanks for the tour today i learned so much i had anticipated based upon from what i I researched on the bike on my own and saw by driving it for a few months since I've owned it about the impressive efficiency and modular design, how it helps the environment, the circularity aspect of it. But you taught me so much more today about how you really deeply thought about it, the full life cycle, and how not only you can drive environmental efficiency, but also a robust business for global expansion, tier one, as well as OEM businesses, customization, and hit different market segments. So truly insightful and brilliant.

13:33And thank you. Awesome. No, thank you. Thanks for visiting and we definitely appreciate the great partnership that we've had with PTC and Enabling us to do a lot of what we're what we're trying to do. So appreciate it. All right. Thanks and goodbye I'm gonna put my helmet back on and Head on home. Thanks again. Oh, hope you talk soon. Don't make any noise on the way out. Yeah Quiet and smooth. Thanks again

14:07Dong Tran:That was Rivet's CEO, Dong Tran, sharing how Rivet puts sustainability and enjoyment at the heart of their design. Now it's time to meet our expert, Brian Thompson from PTC. Brian, Rivet's approach to electric motorcycle design is clearly innovative. How does Creo support startups like Rivet in bringing bold ideas to market quickly while still aligning with industry standards and expectations? The first thing I would say is we've been in the automotive market since the very early days of Creo. And so being able to deliver designs that will work in that market is a hallmark of what Creo can do.

14:49But the reality is Rivet is taking a fresh look at the markets that they're serving with their innovative design. And what I would say is an important extension of that principle is that Creo is built to have all of the technologies that we deliver that are mentioned in this great podcast. Things like surfacing capabilities, integrated simulation capabilities. These things are all designed so that the design engineer has everything they need at their fingertips. They don't have to change context. They don't have to, importantly, they don't have to move data around in order to access all the great technologies of Creo.

15:33They can simply move on with their job regardless of the type of tool that they need, whether it's really cool surfacing capabilities, amazing sheet metal capabilities, integrated simulation. They can access all those things. And what all of this does is it reduces the dependence that they might have on physical prototyping because they can really model exactly what they want in the digital prototype. They can simulate it with integrated simulation. They're not making clay models. They're not doing any of the traditional things you might see in automotive markets. That, of course, shrinks time to market, helps them improve quality.

16:05And then ultimately, as they grow and they scale, and they do these things across the entire team with the use of Winchell as the backbone in PLM, they'll actually see none of that slow down, but their ability to expose those designs real-time across the world to different people that are collaborating to, say, build variants of bikes for specific markets. They'll actually just see the incredible scalability of Creo and Windchill together as they grow the business. And so I think first and foremost, the big thing is you get a startup, you get them working with a world-class tool like Creo that's got experience in the market, and more than anything with the array of tools that they need to deliver a product as innovative as their e-bikes are getting that all integrated into one platform and then being able to support that with world-class collaboration and windshield i think that is a big thing for a startup so they don't have to go to multiple locations to get what they need they can get it all right there inside creo and to some extent windshield so i would say those are the key things and i'm really really excited to have them as a customer and see where they take things going forward.

17:15Dong Tran:Thanks to Dave, Brian and Dong and to our producer, Susan, for taking us behind the scenes of Rivet. Please rate, review and subscribe to our bi-weekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes. Companies that make products the world relies on rely on PTC.

17:41Dong Tran:This is an 1860 production for PTC. Executive producer is Jackie Cook. Location recording by Susan Vallott. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. And music by Rowan Bishop.