Greece, with its sunny weather and city traffic, is made for motorbikes.

The first “smart” electric scooter, which is 100 per cent Greek-made, is expected to hit the roads by next summer. Its designers, co-founders of Greek company Give, say the i.lectra project is in its final stages. All that needs to be done is to find a catchy name for the scooter before it hits the roads.

The company, set up by Ilias Nasiopoulos, Lefteris Kozas, Asteris Apostolidis and Sevastianos Mail, was created when Mr Nasiopoulos returned from England four years ago. Following his eight-year tenure with the Force India Formula 1 team at Prodrive and the Nissan Research and Development Centre in Europe, he devoted himself to his vision.

Nasiopoulos told the Athens Macedonia News Agency that Give was “set up with electromobility as the vision and the goal of innovating in the area of urban mobility. We started out, however, with services to third parties to generate capital that we could then invest in our own vision.”

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The company’s services mainly concern computer engineering for the automotive industry, from resilience analysis to liquid mechanics, aerodynamics and electromagnetic analysis. It is currently collaborating with a Chinese auto industry, UK’s Prodrive and other smaller firms.
The idea for a scooter dates back to the foundation of the company, alongside more ambitious plans for vehicle production, and its design started in 2017. “We now have the prototypes ready, we are testing at the Demokritos park and the goal now is to start the certification process and then go to an assembly line. It is a difficult stage, financially, but we are optimistic,” Mr Nasiopoulos said.

He said the company had adjusted its vision to the realities of the Greek market and planned to start small, with about 200-300 units in the first year and then rise to 1000 in the following years.

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The scooter will hit the roads in the summer of 2021 as an environmentally-friendly electric motorbike with a top speed of 85 km/ hour and a range of 180 km with one charge, provided by three detachable batteries. It will also have a digital-screen dashboard and navigator. In addition, it will be one of the first vehicles worldwide that can be activated by a mobile phone, which will also double as an alarm in cases of attempted theft.