#269 - Specialized’s eMTB Product Team on Motor Development, Future Models, & Battery Regulations

The Pinkbike Podcast

Pinkbike

Sports, News

4.8 • 718 Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2025

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Last year we visited Specialized’s eMTB facility in Cham, Switzerland to ride some bikes and poke around their ebike innovation centre. We sat down with Jan Talavasek, Marco Sonderegger, and Joe Buckley, three of the key people behind eMTB development at Specialized, to talk about past, present, and future. We also got a special appearance from the venerable Marketing Todd, who swears Specialized is done making new bikes and that we should stop asking sneaky questions about future models. They had a lot to say, and we got a few tidbits out of them, so the pod runs a bit long. Alternatively, you can read the article + photos here. This was recorded before we'd figured out how to press the big red button to do video podcasts, but we'll be back soon with our regularly scheduled podcast. 03:07 The Evolution of E-Bikes & the Development of the Turbo Levo 14:58 The Shift in Perception of eMTBs 30:52 Brand Equity & the Levo's Original Name 33:51 The Swiss Office 44:02 Future Developments in eMTBs 50:20 Understanding E-Bike Performance Metrics 56:51 The Impact of Market Timing 01:00:00 Engineering for Performance, Legislation, & Consumer Safety 01:12:04 Charging Technology and Battery Longevity 01:15:59 Data-Driven Design and Testing 01:24:02 Field Testing and Component Tracking

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to another special edition of the Pink Bike podcast.
0:15.2	I'm Brian Park, and this week's episode is presented by Specialized.
0:19.0	With me, I have former Pink Bike Tech editor and current, I don't know, what's your
0:23.4	current title, Engineering Wizard, Dan Roberts?
0:27.4	Busy is my title.
0:29.2	What are you up to these days?
0:32.4	Tons of bike engineering for lots of different people around the industry. You've gone from being an unbiased
0:39.9	tech editor to an extremely biased engineer. Oh, I was always biased. That's why I live up a dead
0:46.9	down valley. Is the bike industry doing so poorly that you've had to resort to working for me again?
0:52.4	I'm running out of money. I don't even have any pants
0:54.4	on while we're recording this. I can't afford. The pants budget got cut for sure. Today we are
1:02.4	talking about e-bike development. So we've got some heavy hitters from Specialized and also
1:07.1	marketing Todd. Let's start with Jan. Jan Talavasek. How badly did I butcher your name? And what do you do at Specialized?
1:17.4	The name was actually pretty correct. Other people do way, way worse. Yeah, I'm Jan. What am I doing at Specialized? I'm currently focusing on future innovation dash pre-development.
1:32.3	So when we're talking about the things that we don't see in the next three years,
1:36.4	but we'll see hopefully in five to eight to ten years, or maybe don't see because we fail.
1:41.5	But those are the things that are on my desk these days.
1:45.4	Okay, so you're the guy that's going to tell us the secrets from the future.
1:49.6	Perfect.
1:50.9	Of course.
1:52.1	Perfect.
1:52.8	And then same question for you, Marco.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Pinkbike, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Pinkbike and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.