Scooting out of Shanghai

Immigrant entrepreneur wants to bring
Chinese passion for electric two-wheelers
to Montreal

by CHRIS BARRY

Name: Daniel Ma

Age: 28

Occupation: Proprietor of Dyad (4142 St-Laurent, dyadcycles.com)

Bio: This industrious Plateau hunk arrived on these shores in 2004 from his native Shanghai to do a masters degree in mechanical engineering at Concordia and liked it so much he decided to stay. “It’s better here than in my country—except for the winter. I’d never imagined there could be so much snow in all of my life.” Finding work after graduation as a systems engineer, it wasn’t long before Daniel and his life/business partner Joelle started sniffing around for employment that offered them a bit more freedom to do the things they like to do together, so, working on a hunch that electric vehicles might well be the future, earlier this month they opened up Dyad Cycles on the Main, where they’re now hawking the latest in electric scooters and bicycles to a willing public. “Electric scooters are huge in China, every family has them. Think how bad the pollution would be there without them.”

Sure, but given that most of the electricity in China still comes from coal, are electric vehicles really any cleaner? “Here it costs about 25 cents to recharge the battery, which lasts roughly 50 kilometres. Think of how much pollution a car makes to travel 50 kilometres. And China is moving more toward nuclear energy now anyway.”

Is it safe to assume his family doesn’t work for a dollar a day assembling televisions and other fine Wal-Mart products? “No, my father has his own business. But my other relatives work in the factory that makes the electric scooters we sell. They’re the ones who told me they were exporting so many of them outside China.”

What kind of a lazy fuck needs a motor to pedal their bike for them anyway? Are most of Dyad’s customers fat? “No, they’re not fat, I’d say 80 to 90 per cent of our customers are students or people around 25 years old. But we sell to older people who live downtown too.”

Given that you can hardly leave a $20 junker bike around without some fucker stealing it, isn’t an electric bike just begging to be ripped off? “No, because you take the battery out to be recharged and then it looks just like a regular bike—a very chic, modern bicycle.”

Do you need to jump through hoops to get a license to drive one of his gizmos? “No, so long as the engine is under 500 watts it’s considered a bicycle. That and the maximum speed has to be less than 32 kilometres an hour.”

If I knew anything about electronics and wanted to fuck with one of these things, could I make it go faster? “Yes, of course, but it’s against the law. You could get it to go maybe 40 or 45 km/hr.”

What an electric bicycle is gonna run you: “The bicycles start at $1,649 and the scooters at $899. We let customers try them out first and we rent them as well. If you decide you want to buy one, we’ll apply the cost of your rental to the purchase.”

Childhood ambition: “To be a person of responsibility, with respect to family, career, everything.”

Literary preferences: The Sookie Stackhouse novels, by Charlaine Harris.

Musical preferences: Faye Wong, Chyi Chin, Lady Gaga.

Words of wisdom: “He who endures for a while uneventfully draws back a step of boundlessness.”

Comments: dimwit@hdot.net