This Electric Scooter Started Out Boring, Now It’s An Elegant Art Deco-Style Wood Streamliner Motorcycle

Many of the electric scooters zipping about your city have boring, uninspired plastic bodies. They get the job done, but rarely will you turn your head as you walk away. One builder has built a scooter that guarantees almost everyone will be looking. They took a bland 2007 Vectrix VX-1 scooter and turned it into a sort of 1930s vision of the future. The scooter, arguably now a motorcycle, has a new body featuring mahogany wood on top of fiberglass. It’s a one-off Art Deco masterpiece and guess what, it’s for sale! It even comes with its own custom owner’s manual.

I’m a sucker for Art Deco style and architecture. As the New York Public Library writes, the style has its origins in 1920s France. It gained worldwide attention at the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. I’ll let the library continue here:

After 1925, designs increasingly reflected the rapid artistic and technological innovations of the period between two world wars, incorporating chic elegance, eclectic historical and national imagery, and Machine Age forms into an effervescent decorative vision. Art Deco originated in a time of intense aesthetic experimentation; art movements such as the Bauhaus, Constructivism, Cubism, De Stijl, Futurism, Orphism, and Surrealism helped define the style’s inherent modernism.

Art Deco design exemplified opulent consumption, crass commercialism, and the acceleration of contemporary life summed up in the Futurist credo “Speed is beauty.” Art Deco’s greatest achievement, however, came in its mature phase, when designers liberated the machine from long-standing artistic contempt.

Even the trains looked great during that era!

I’m not sure why, but I love Art Deco metalwork, colors, and indeed, how designers were able to turn machines into art. I also love the verticality of some Art Deco architecture. If money were no object, I would build an Art Deco-style house to live in with a fake Art Deco car dealership to store my cars in.

I would also ride this Vectrix VX-1 custom scooter motorcycle thing, but I’d totally need to look the part.

The Scooter Underneath

As I said in the intro, this scooter is a one-off build. So, you aren’t going to buy this from a company. The builder says he built the scooter by hand with hand tools, and without documentation. If it breaks, the replacement parts will come from your own two hands.

The scooter underneath came from Vectrix, a Rhode Island-based scooter company that was founded in 1996 by former Lockheed Martin engineer Andrew MacGowan. Vectrix took a decade and $50 million to bring its first product to market, the 2007 Vectrix VX-1 scooter. What made Vectrix’s Poland-built scooters unique was the fact that the company was trying to show how electric power could work back in 2007. That year, Vectrix also unveiled the rMoto Electric Superbike concept.

Unfortunately, Vectrix came at just the wrong time. The VX-1 scooter cost $11,000 and what was right around the corner? The infamous Great Recession. None of that dissuaded the people at Vectrix. The company dropped the price of the VX-1, unveiled the cheaper $5,195 VX-2, and continued expanding its distribution channels. None of this was enough and Vectrix filed for its first bankruptcy in 2009.

The company emerged out of reorganization with what looked like a promising future. Vectrix put the VX-2 into production and even partnered up with Daimler to create the Smart Scooter. Yep, Smart was supposed to have its own scooter! It was due to launch in 2014, then the walls came falling down. Vectrix ran out of money again, ceasing operations in 2013 before going bankrupt again in 2014.

That makes the donor VX-1 scooter a bit of an orphan. When new, this 2007 Vectrix VX-1 sported a 3.7 kWh NiMH battery pack. As a maxi-scooter, the VX-1 sported an electric hub motor with a peak output of 27.1 HP, 48 lb-ft of torque, and a top speed of 68 mph. Sadly, the motor’s continuous output is a much more tame 9 HP. The range was 65 miles, provided you rode around 25 mph. Regeneration helped the scooter retain what little range it had. Vectrix also advertised that the scooter could be charged to 80 percent from a standard household socket in two hours.

The Vectrix VX-1 was certainly an electric maxi-scooter pioneer, but it didn’t look much different than any other maxi-scooter. Those specs also wouldn’t be that impressive today. Remember, I said 65 miles at 25 mph!

Steve’s Art Deco VX-1

This particular Vectrix VX-1 is the work of Steve Patmont, the inventor of the Go-Ped motorized stand-up scooter. He purchased the VX-1 in 2019 and got started on making the scooter better in every way. Honestly, he changed so much about the VX-1 that it might not be fair to call it a scooter anymore. It’s not a step-through design anymore and more resembles classic motorcycles like the Henderson KJ Streamline. Let’s call it a motorcycle.

He started with a platform upgrade. The 3.7 kWh NiMH batteries may have been a big deal in 2007, but they were old hat by now. Patmont ditched the old cells and filled the cycle with 19 Nissan Leaf lithium modules. Each module contains four cells and the cells charge to 4.1 volts, each. In total, the scooter now has 152 volts and 6 kWh of power and as a result, Patmont said the motorcycle’s range has doubled to over 100 miles. Patmont says the scooter will travel about 35 miles at 50 mph. He says this is more of functional art than a practical motorcycle.

The drivetrain has remained untouched. When the motor is putting out its peak power, you’ll get roughly the performance of a 250cc motorcycle. When the motor is in its continuous state, you’ll get the performance of a 125cc motorcycle. Think of the performance as like a Honda Grom. The scooter rides on 14-inch wheels with a Pirelli GTS2 up front and a Dunlop Scootline SX01 in the rear. The odometer shows 11,000 miles, but only about 100 of those miles were added since the conversion to an art piece.

Patmont even created a custom owner’s manual for the motorcycle, though that’s not surprising as he’s been in the powersports industry for decades.

Patmont didn’t stop there. He then fitted the Vectrix with a hand-laid fiberglass body. On top of the fiberglass is hand-formed Mahogany wood. The design is capped off with aluminum trim, running boards, automotive urethane sealing in the wood, and a leather Corbin seat. Patmont didn’t just encase the scooter underneath, either. He thought about the fact that you might need to work on the thing. Thus, the body actually consists of two large panels that can be separated for maintenance and repairs.

Patmont called his new creation the Sliver 1 Horsycle and sold the motorcycle on Bring a Trailer in January of last year, where the hammer dropped for $10,250. Sadly, due to health issues, the buyer is no longer able to ride the machine, so he’s passing it onto a new custodian.

That person could be you! How would you need to dress to ride the Sliver 1 Horsycle? Obviously, you want to be safe, but an art piece like this demands a period-correct rider. I imagine you need gear that looks like brown leather. And when you arrive at your destination, you’ll need to peel off your gear to reveal a pinstriped suit. If you can figure it out and happen to have $10,500 in your pocket, you can pick up the Sliver 1 Horsycle from the seller in Eugene, Oregon.

Correction: Due to a typo, we called the motorcycle the “Silver.” It has since been corrected and we regret the error.