It all began in 2016 when Farahbod M was about to finish his PhD degree majoring in Construction Project Management. He has always been a fan of personal mobility devices and one of the very early adopters of Personal Mobility Devices (PMDs) in Malaysia.
He noticed that electric scooter is regarded as a toy and yet to be considered a real mode of transport. Only 3 or 4 manufacturers, the majority of them from China, own the intellectual property in their design while others just manufacture replicate products only.
When the idea of developing ZUKBOARD CITY came to his mind, he tried to fill up the product gap and develop a customer-oriented product.
ZUKBOARD is a modular design electric scooter which can be customized easily. It never loses its uniqueness because, as a developer, he and team try to develop new modular parts in order to maintain ZUKBOARD's uniqueness. Front fork, external battery, plastic covering parts, interchangeable wooden deck with different designs are among the modular parts.
This projects started in October 2016 and successfully ended in the middle of 2017.
The development process has gone through several iterations and what you see now is the final product. The mass-production, however, started in Early Jan 2018 and as of today, they have made several batches.
They wanted to maintain the product uniqueness and at the same time enjoy the structural advantage of the wooden deck which is the elasticity. ZUKBOARD CITY at first glance is a hybrid combination of skateboard and an electric scooter. Using wooden deck as part of their design philosophy and they will continue using Bamboo/Maple decks in their future designs.
ZUKBOARD CITY is a customer-oriented product. ZUKBOARD development team started with an extensive market survey in order to understand customers real needs. Customers usually express their need in vague terms such as "good riding experience", "slow battery drain rate", "reliable" and so on. For a couple of months, forty general needs have been collected from customers and they were sorted and finally summarized into a list of eight real needs. Those needs include Smooth Riding Experience, Safety, Ease of Maintenance, Ease of Modification, Long Mileage, Light Weight, Foldability, Aesthetic. It is worth mentioning that all those forty needs do not have an identical priority, therefore, the development team prioritized customer demands.
Safety and Smooth Riding Experience are the most important demands. Ease of Modification and Ease of Maintenance both have an equal priority and are the third important demanding needs. ZUKBOARD's design team adopted Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and translated every single customer demands into an engineering characteristic. In fact, the development team innovatively respond to each demand with an engineering language. For an instant, in order to develop a product that satisfies "ease of modification," the scooter should be designed in accordance with modular design philosophy. That includes interchangeable wooden deck, interchangeable front fork, interchangeable front wheel, interchangeable front suspension and interchangeable front fork plastic cover available in different choices.
They came up with a unique suspension system that includes front and rear coil springs shock absorbers, silicon damping pad and a wooden deck. The silicon pad absorbs the low-frequency vibrations. Front and rear shock absorbers damp mid-range frequencies and finally, the wooden deck absorbs high-frequency vibrations. The combination of these systems guarantees a smooth ride.
ZUKBOARD covers many different styles in response to customer needs. Night Ride, Police, Racer Series, Girl Drifter and Boy Driver are among the available interchangeable deck options. Each wooden deck comes with a unique set of colours which definitely satisfies you.