The seed for Boulder ElectroRide was planted on a warm summer night over beers at the Hungry Toad.  Brainstorming over what could be done to blunt global warming, Ned and Tom settled on a green commuting option.  What started as an electric scooter project morphed in a full-on motorcycle effort when we joined forces with Blair, who was ahead in the hardware arena with a working prototype under his butt.  Since then we have made several e-motos to refine our designs and technology, until we settled upon the Spark M4.  BERI is self-funded, although we welcome discussions with an investor who holds similar values.

Meet the founders...

 Blair Keller  -  Chief Designer

Blair is the jack-of-all-trades for the project.  His educational training in fine art and sculpture is augmented by a wealth of practical skills from welding, construction, cabinetry, and electrics.  The classic lines of the Spark M4 showcase his fine eye for design.  Blair is also become a master of the SolidWorks solid modeling package.

Blair's biking days began while at college in central Florida on a Honda Magna 500.  His current rides are a Honda NT650 Hawk, a Honda CB900F 919 and a Honda XR400R.

Tom McKinnon  - Chief Technical Officer

Tom left academia after 20 years teaching chemical engineering to join the ranks of the entrepreneur.  For the last 5 years he has worked in a number of arenas related to mitigating climate change -- from organizing campus symposia, to biofuels, to spearheading state ballot initiatives.  His technical training is in combustion chemistry; at BERI he heads up the battery and power train efforts.

Tom is a relative latecomer to the world of motorcycling, but he's made up for lost time.  In the last couple of years he has done the western section of the Transamerica Trail on his Yamaha WR250R and taken his BMW F650 Dakar from Germany to Uzbekistan and back.

Ned Riedel  - Chief Engineer

Since completing his PhD in mechanical engineering, Ned has had his feet both in academia and industry.  Ned's experience ranges from serving as the lead engineer for an experimental combustion package that orbited the earth on the Space Shuttle to down-to-earth biofuel projects.  Ned specializes in CAD/CAM design and fabrication as well as stress analysis.  He is a registered professional engineer in Colorado. 

Ned's first motorbike was a Suzuki GS 550 on which he terrorized San Diego as a teen.  He currently rides a Zero DS electric, but looks forward to trading it in on a Spark M4.