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Manyone Co-Founder Jens Martin Skibsted Leads Design and Strategy for Sustainability With Creativity
Jens Martin Skibsted is working to make mobility more sustainable. His work is pivotal for humanity, given transportation’s outsized role in exacerbating the climate crisis.
Jens helped found the global design firm Manyone. Early in his career, he co-founded a bicycle company. “Back then, good bikes were sports bikes, and city bikes were bad bikes.” He helped create a market for good city bikes.
“One of the most exciting and biggest projects I’ve been on [at Manyone] is designing an electric car,” he says. “The idea was, how would you make this car if it was a bicycle?”
He notes that bicycles are so energy efficient that they even beat walking! So, he led a team working on designing a car with the advantages of a bike.
As he tells the story, it wasn’t easy:
We dealt with a lot of very heavy-hitting German engineers. Every time we were one people, they would be 23 in the room. It was like more or less a trench war because nothing was possible. We were told right from the get-go that none of these things were possible. So, the way it worked is we progressed; after each week, we got to push them just one centimeter. Also, this can be done. Yeah. Okay. In the end, we changed everything.
The design was remarkable, including a transparent front fascia allowing the driver to see a duck crossing the road and brake. Designed as a car for city driving, it has a range of 150 miles. With a top speed under 100 mph, it is just fast enough for an occasional trip on the highway to a nearby town.
“It’s the size of the smallest cars you will see driving around in American cities,” Jens says. “when you sit in such a car, you’re cramped. But in this car, since we were able to remove the whole of the engine in the front, you could, in theory, put luggage in front of your feet. I mean, there’s just no human that’s too big for that car.”
“You had this kind of almost Doctor Who impression that you’re going to this little thing, and then it’s just gigantic,” he adds.
The ultra-light four-passenger vehicle also featured unconventional doors. The front doors open in the poorly named “suicide” direction, with the rear doors opening conventionally to help people exiting the car move in opposite directions. The team replaced the rear-view mirror with a camera with an image projected near the instrument cluster to reduce eye movement while driving.
