Swedish e-bike maker Cake wins the Red Dot Award. Why is this such a significant news?
The Red Dot Award (there are three) is an international design prize awarded to designers and companies for outstanding product design, marketing and packaging, or design concepts, and is considered prestigious enough that past winners are called “laureates.”
This isn’t Cake’s first Red Dot Award. It’s Cake’s second, and it won them back-to-back in 2019 and 2020. In other words: it’s time to take a serious look at this electric motorcycles.
The 2019 award was for the Cake Kalk, a minimalist sort of electric moped with a sort of “dirtbike by IKEA” aesthetic and either a 30 MPH or 60 MPH top speed depending on which version you bought.
It’s a sharp-looking, modern sort of design (see photo galley, above) and it absolutely works, having been called “the perfect motorcycle for new riders.”
The 2020 Red Dot Award winner, below, is the Cake Ösa. The Ösa has what Cake calls a “workbench” aesthetic, and is geared towards people who are really going to use this small electric motorcycle for work, if not serious play. To that end, the e-bike is designed to a variety of bags, baskets, racks, tools, lights, and whatever else you can clamp or bolt to its stout, beefy frame.
It’s like a little electric mule that you can like, love, or something, and that sentiment speaks to the reason it’s been winning international design awards.
Apart from being a light, clean and quiet electric motorcycle, the Ösa is derived from the diversity of work and differentiated needs of the customer, while simultaneously serving a new means of transportation to accelerate toward a zero-emission future.
Reference- Gear Patrol website, Cake Website & PR, Red Dot Award website, Clean Technica