CDR 9 student design winner gets nod for production
Swedish brand Cake has commited to producing an electric quadbike, the Kibb, by 2025. It was designed by UMEA student Fanny Jonsson – highlighting the valuable role the next wave of talent will play in transportation design
A winner of Car Design Review 9’s best student projects will head into 2023 knowing that their thesis will become a reality. The fully-electric Kibb professes to be a “new type of vehicle” and sits somewhere between a tractor and a quadbike.
The concept is the work of Swedish designer Fanny Jonsson of the UMEA Institute of Design, a finalist for Student Designer of the Year in this year’s CDR 9 book. Created for Swedish electric motorcycle brand Cake, the Kibb is a small ride-on vehicle designed for regenerative agriculture – the practice of farming while enhancing the environment and supporting biodiversity.
While it is not a conventional car, of course, it does sit in the (increasingly broad) grey area of electric personal transportation. Jonsson recognises this and describes the Kibb as a “new vehicle type” that still manages to carry the core design language of Cake’s electric bikes.
In a significant development for a student design project, the Kibb will move beyond the concept stage, with Cake announcing in December that it had committed to making the Kibb ATV by 2025. Since graduating from her masters degree, Jonsson has also been brought onto Cake’s product development team full time and will work on developing the Kibb.
Renders reveal a futuristic looking ATV with a body that looks like a rocket launcher from side profile. Beneath this sits the lower frame that houses the battery packs, open suspension assemblies and wheel axles. Up front and the T-shaped face of the quad is accented by a gloss black mask with pixel-like LEDs.
The sci-fi feel is balanced out by retro-look wheel hubs, which would not look out of place on a 1970s Fiat 126. Special tyres – “soil savers” – were developed to ensure the vehicle does not harm the groundsoil. There are conventional handlebars like any other ATV, but the Kibb is also designed to operate autonomously in certain situations if needed.
The Kibb was designed to be what Jonsson describes as a “non-disturbing vehicle, both physically and chemically” and says it can assist farmers’ lifestyles in a “modular manner”with or without a human driver.
Reflecting on her project, which was shortlisted for the student design award for Car Design Review, Jonsson explained that the aim was to create a vehicle that would allow farmers to carry out their work while respecting the environment – doing away with heavy, fossil-fuel machinery that can wreck the ground.
If this wasn’t already evident, the electric quadbike has received high praise from the Cake team, with founder and CEO Stefan Ytterborn noting that “it was impossible not to turn the Kibb into reality.”