Entering an "era of new Energy Revolution" - How China's HORWIN is Making Intelligent Two-Wheelers (and Robots)

Founded in 2016, China’s HORWIN has its eye on the future. Headquartered in Jiangsu, China, with its European headquarters located at Kammersdorf, Austria, the company has launched a pure electric motorcycle brand, while also lifting the covers off its bionic robot IP, named MR.Y.

Speaking to Auto Futures, a company spokesperson gives more details about these new developments, as well as what the company has planned in the coming years.

“Based on the core technical concept of improving efficiency and reducing consumption, HORWIN abandoned the structural layout of traditional fuel vehicles and the traditional split motor-battery-controller layout of electric vehicles. The full-stack self-developed ‘IM (Intelligent Mobility) Integrated Intelligent Chassis’ has realised performance far beyond that of same-class fuel vehicles and electric vehicle products with only half the power and two-thirds of the battery capacity," says the spokesperson.

The company says vehicles equipped with the IM chassis are lighter, stronger, and more stable, and offer higher performance and higher efficiency. It also allows more freedom of design and manufacturing.

At the onset, HORWIN’s products were based on two scenarios: daily commute and leisure sports. EK and SK are for commuting, and CR is designed for leisure.  In November 2022, however, the company released two disruptive products - the world's first high-performance electric urban ADV (purpose-built adventure motorcycles) SENMENTI 0 and the world's first electric Hyper GT SENMENTI X.

“Firstly, HORWIN is not a motorcycle, a ppt, an electric vehicle, a cross-border e-commerce or an oversea returnee brand. We identify as a builder of brand-new mobile civilisation of life in the era of new energy revolution and intelligent civilisation. HORWIN is to destroy the old order and to explore the new world,” explains the spokesperson.

Self-Balancing Technology

In December 2022, HORWIN delivered the 5G intelligent building block factory, namely BB (Building Block) factory, to realise the first truly unmanned factory in the industry to optimise efficiency and improve product consistency.

"Based on our enterprise strategy and brand positioning, HORWIN has no competitors in this dimension. If we must compare, we compare ourselves to the likes of Dyson and Tesla," says the spokesperson.

HORWIN’s technological advancements in its products revolve around the IM integrated intelligent chassis technology and its dynamic self-balancing platform technology.

This is how HORWIN's self-balancing technology works. By using specially designed structural design, the power distribution is dynamically adjusted through intelligent algorithms. Most of the power allocation is used as self-balancing power to keep the vehicle balanced when balance is needed at low speed. If the vehicle is running at a high-speed requiring no balance, most of the power allocation is used as the forward power.

This design does not add extra weight, extra power redundancy and extra cost, thus realising the self-balance of the vehicle without losing flexibility and lightness of vehicle and overcoming the biggest disadvantage of the two-wheeled vehicle. Self-balancing technology can automatically interfere with vehicle balance at low speed, and effectively improve the safety factor of two-wheeled vehicles.

“Adoption of electric motorcycles continues to be an issue. As a unique emerging product of the current era, pure electric motorcycles fail to be adopted by users as an electric motorcycle that suits them and is nearly all-powerful. In actual use, people's travel will be affected by the insufficient distance. This requires not only a balance of performance, range and weight, making a trade-off among performance, energy consumption and weight, but also more fundamentally improving efficiency and reducing consumption.”

The company has also unveiled a bionic robot IP named MR.Y. The company goal is to build a proprietary intelligent robot that can help people in real life, including serving as a shopping guide, walking the dog, picking up children and taking care of the elderly.

Electrification is "Irreversible"

HORWIN currently has five major markets - Europe, South America, Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia. Besides an operation and production research headquarters in Changzhou, China, an innovative R&D centre in Shenzhen and a digital R&D centre in Hangzhou, HORWIN has set up operation centres and branches in Europe and the US respectively.

For now, the company aims to first target China, US and Europe with its latest technology and products, followed by the southeast Asian market, and then radiating all over Asia soon.

“In recent two years, driven by global peak carbon dioxide emissions, carbon offset, double-carbon policy and consumption upgrading, the trend of global electrification of two-wheelers is irreversible and promising,” says the spokesperson.

“At present, for domestic two-wheel electric motorcycle brands, whether for high-performance battery or software intelligent experience, the market is still at an early stage or even a blank stage, so there is an urgent need for an outstanding brand and product in China. Thus, the prospect of electric two-wheeler vehicles in the future looks very bright.”

A Promising Future

HORWIN plans to increase its innovative R&D investment in smart travel and smart manufacturing sectors, such as using 15%-20% of annual sales as R&D funds and strengthening the staffing of R&D teams in Hangzhou and Shenzhen.

By constantly practising technology development, it aims to build higher technical barriers, a technical moat and, taking innovative technology as the driving force for development, constantly enrich product lineup and improve product layout.

“Based on the current global development trend of two-wheeled electric vehicles and the current development trend of HORWIN, we have reason to believe that the future of HORWIN will be very promising,” concludes the spokersperson.