Epick X1

Future of Electric Mobility

Industrial Design

New Product Design

Research and Synthesis

Product Architecture Design

CMF Design

Look at enough Indian e-bikes and they start to blur. Two triangles of welded tube and a battery box fixed to the down-tube, a shape riders were all too familiar with. When we began working with Epick in 2022, the brief for their flagship was simple: stand out. Together, we set out to answer one question: what does a next-generation Indian e-bike look like when it stops borrowing from the past?

The question started with research. Through user studies, ergonomic mapping, perception analysis and competitor teardowns, one finding kept coming back: We observed that every e-bike looked like every other. The two triangles and the bare battery block made them all look generic.

That gave us three questions to work against. How do we give Epick a physical identity people know on sight? How do we break out of the two-triangle frame for good? And how do we make a large battery look light? Together they became the X1 hypothesis, and every decision after this was tested against them.

The answer to all three ran through one choice: aluminium die casting for the primary frame. It was new to us, and it was the riskiest call of the project. Welded tubes pull a designer toward straight lines and visible joints. A cast frame lets surfaces sweep and flow into one another, but only if a shape this complex can hold together through casting. It could. From there, design and engineering ran as one team, so the shape on screen and the part that would come out of the mould were never two separate conversations.

Let the Triangle Go

The two-triangle frame was never really a design decision. It was a manufacturing inheritance, the easiest shape to weld tubes into, carried forward for decades because the process behind it went unquestioned. To leave the shape behind, we had to leave the process behind. Die casting gave us continuous surfaces and the quad-frame stance that defines X1, a frame that looks carved rather than assembled.

Weight, Carried Lightly

Epick’s technical stack called for a large battery, placed centrally for stability and range. Big volumes read as heavy, and heavy is the wrong feeling for a flagship. We found our reference in the gazelle and the way its mass is distributed across its body. That became the logic behind X1’s surfacing and CMF, so the down-tube comes across as athletic and quick rather than bulky. The battery is still large. It just stopped looking like it.

Built From the Inside Out

Draft angles, shrinkage zones, mounting bosses, internal ribbing and the ergonomics of a removable battery were never left for a later engineering phase. We resolved them inside the same CAD cycles that shaped the surfaces. A die-cast frame leaves no room for a gap between how a part looks and how it gets made, so we closed that gap early. The result is a frame engineered for rigidity, manufacturability and long-term reliability.

Marks to Remember

A flagship has to be known at a glance. X1 carries three signatures. The sculpted quad-frame with its seamless Class-A transitions is the first. The concealed portable battery is the second. The third is the inverted-U rear light, a graphic gesture that can travel across Epick’s lineup and mark the brand wherever it appears.

Impact

X1 was made to turn heads. The road has not met it yet. A frame the category was seeing for the first time, shaped like nothing else out there. It was our first time working with die-casting, and the gamble held: the frame came out exactly as the idea demanded. The work took the 2022 CII Design Excellence Award home. Moulded, expressive, built to be known at a glance. With X1, Epick stopped following the category and started shaping it.

‍

X1 answers the question it started with. A next-generation Indian e-bike does not have to be a better version of what already exists. It can have a shape of its own. A shape that a rider can name from the silhouette alone. The work received the 2022 CII Design Excellence Award in the Two Wheeler Motorised Vehicle Design category, and the die-cast approach that began with X1 has since proven itself on the road through Z1. X1 arrives soon.