Cable routing is all external, possibly the only thing that isn’t perfectly clean on the bike. The Cafe’s mountain bike-derived 10-speed Shimano Deore XT drivetrain helps propel the powerful, 750-watt, direct-drive motor. “We found it to feel almost scary fast in level 5 at top speed on the road.” That’s half the time of most batteries on the market today. It has a Rosenberger-style charge port and a 6-amp charger that fully recharges the battery in a scant two hours. You can also unscrew the pin to lock the battery on, making it harder to simply remove if you’ve stopped at a coffee shop and locked the bike. It’s beautifully detailed and features a pin to pull for easy removal and an attractive leather handle on top to make it easy to tote around or simply remove to make the bike about 10 pounds lighter to load onto a rack or carry onto public transportation. The Cafe’s battery is designed to be smaller, lightweight and easy to carry with you into the coffee shop or your office. It does take a little away from the clean aesthetic, however. Where Vintage did go old school is with the external cable routing. The battery in the front triangle is machined from aluminum to resemble a small motorcycle motor and takes up only about 1/3 of the front triangle, unlike his other bikes that have huge batteries taking up the entire front triangle and looking more like a V-twin engine. Unlike the much more motorcycle-looking bikes from Vintage, including the Cruz, Scrambler and Tracker, the Cafe is a little more bicycle in its look than that of an old Indian motorcycle. The rigid aluminum fork is aesthetically pleasing but transfers energy from road bumps straight up to your hands.ĭavidage says the Cafe is a nod to old cafe racer bikes. Right now they’re doing electric bikes, but they can expand into other forms of transportation if there’s a need. He says that Vintage Electric is a transportation company, not a bike company. This fuels the aesthetics that he and his company use to drive the design of Vintage Electric bikes. He loved the simplicity and rawness of early motorcycles, especially race bikes. At first, like many businesses, it started at his home in his garage building custom bikes, but it soon needed a bigger space, so in 2013 he moved into a machine shop in Santa Clara.Īs a kid, Davidage was so enamored with motorcycles that he would have his dad read him Harley-Davidson catalogs and sales sheets instead of bedtime stories. ![]() The response was to his bike was overwhelming, and Davidage knew he had an idea that he could turn into a business. Dolan went the traditional route with a gasoline engine, while Davidage opted for an electric bike. After graduating high school in Los Gatos, California, he had a contest with his best friend, James Dolan, to build a vintage motorcycle. Vintage Electric was started as a concept by Andrew Davidage in 2010.
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