Skate Uphill on the 'World's Lightest Electric Vehicle'

When you think electric vehicle, cars like the Tesla Model S or Chevy Volt might come to mind. But a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup wants to change that perception with what they claim is the "world's lightest electric vehicle" â€" and it's a skateboard.

Boosted Boards was a Kickstarter success last fall, when they raised over $467,000 to further develop their 12-pound electric longboard. The motorized board is packed with 2000 watts of power (or 2.6 horsepower) and has a six-mile range on a single charge.

“Because it’s really light and portable it means there’s a lot lower friction involved when you use it," Boosted Boards co-founder Sanjay Dastoor told Mashable at Stanford University's Cool Product Expo on Wednesday. "So you don’t have to park it, you don’t have to lock it, you don’t get stuck in traffic â€" things that you associate with cars or even bicycles.”

Equipped with a drivetrain that can get a lot of torque out of the motor, Dastoor claims the board can go up well-known Russian Hill in hilly San Francisco at up to 20 mph. A 185-pound rider can climb a 15% grade, he says. You can control the board with a handheld remote that has a throttle, brake control and a battery gauge.

A true beginner skateboarder myself, I rode a prototype of the electric skateboard comfortably on Stanford's flat campus. But it was only for a few seconds, before I got distracted with my camera and gracefully crashed right into the curb. Their polished prototype (which was safely shown indoors, away from my clumsiness) is very sleek and light: I think it's quite a contrast to more clunky designs you might see on competitors like the 28-pound-plus ZBoard.

Some of the startup's first Kickstarter backers will get the first batch of boards shipped to them soon, Dastoor said. Even though the Kickstarter campaign is over, Boosted Boards can now be pre-ordered online for $1,299. While that's pricer than a regular skateboard, Dastoor said, "compared to an electric bicycle or a scooter or something like that, it’s actually pretty affordable.”

“We haven’t compromised on the parts because that kind of ruins the experience of it," he said. "And so the price kind of reflects the technology that’s inside it.”

Beyond Boards

With backgrounds in robotics, the Boosted Boards team has big ideas that are gaining recognition. They are a Y Combinator alum and are also housed in Stanford's accelerator, StartX. Dastoor, who is also still finishing his Ph.D. thesis at Stanford, recently spoke at TED 2013, where he explained their technology.

"This [Boosted Board] uses 20 times less energy for every mile or kilometer that you travel than a car," Dastoor said at TED. "Which means not only is this thing fast to charge and really cheap to build, but it also reduces the footprint of your energy use in terms of your transportation."

Dastoor told Mashable they're not trying to replace cars, but he questioned the bigger picture of more sustainable transportation: “Do you need to push around a two- or three-thousand pound piece of metal and plastic and everything with you when you go places for a trip that’s only a couple miles?"

Boosted Boards explains that a commuter who travels by train could, for example, use their board for that final leg of their trip to the office or home.

"Instead of saying an electric vehicle equals an electric car or an electric motorcycle or something else that used to be gas-powered, if you look at vehicles a little differently, then you can build really interesting stuff and people go, ‘Oh, I never even thought that that was possible,'" Dastoor said.

With Boosted Boards' drivetrain design weighing only four pounds, Dastoor hints that the possibilities with this technology are vast: "It’s not just skateboards. This is kind of step one for us. And we think there’s a lot of other interesting stuff we can build, and we’ll kind of just explore that out of our curiosity.”

Photography by Vignesh Ramachandran/Mashable. Video editing by Bianca Consunji/Mashable. Additional video footage courtesy of Boosted Boards and Alchemy Creative.