Aim for the Future
Oscar Morgan - Bo CEO - September 2025
We are at an interesting fork in the road. The naughty secret of electric vehicles and autonomous cars is that as soon as we start using them everyone’s mileage dramatically increases.
When drivers first switch to an EV, the miles they drive each year can go up by as much as 30%. This means it may be cutting emissions, but it’s on a path to gridlocking our local streets. Then you combine EV with autonomous driving, and suddenly we are all heading fast for traffic armageddon.
The funny thing is that automakers - who sell us on the freedom of cars - already know this. Before starting Bo, we worked in car design and engineering. Our role was to design the cars of the future and the brief for those projects went something like this: ‘The year is 2035, the streets are locked solid with traffic, how will we entertain passengers trapped in their cars for hours each day’.
Normally the answer was to slap massive screens on every surface and connect it with instagram and Gmail. This is not an inspirational vision of the future to work towards. It certainly isn’t freedom.
Since the Bo team comes from the world of cars we can hardly be tarred as ‘anti-car idealists’. We adore cars, we are very good at making them and we love driving them.
However, it is fair to accuse us of optimistically believing we can help to stop the approaching traffic armageddon. We believe if we take the skills we used to build great cars, and apply them to other vehicle types, there is the opportunity to create an alternative solution and a better future.
In short Bo has been working for five years to create the perfect vehicle for short trips, better even than the car, and makes your local journeys a pleasure rather than a chore.
Since you often make several short journeys in a single day, maximising your enjoyment in this area also has the biggest possible impact on your quality of life. This is already playing out: what we have learnt from our riders is that they find Bo to be an incredible life upgrade.
That is at the heart of Bo: a belief that if you give individuals the right tools - not only equal to the car, but better than it - that they will be empowered to take direct action that stops traffic armageddon and improves their local streets.
The question is what tool can possibly replace car journeys. Walking is slow, cycling is a sweaty hassle, and public transport is dire. There needs to be a better alternative.
Enter: Bo Model-M. As you know this is the first product from Bo. The Financial Times test rider Rhodri Marsden described it as ‘The Super E-Scooter’, and we like that a lot.
We didn’t just set out to create the best e-scooter in the world, we set out to create the best vehicle for short trips - bar none. And yes, the outcome is a super e-scooter. That means it needs several skills: not only moving people, but also being practical to carry bags, secure for locking, safe for any rider and stylish enough to arrive proudly to every event.
Importantly, this has set the precedent for the family of Bo vehicles to follow. The Bo future is this: we plough every dollar the company generates back into R&D to reduce cost and create more vehicles that serve an even wider group of people. When you buy a Bo you are literally helping to develop the next models in the range.
As those vehicles come through, and you start to see more Bo near where you live, suddenly the fork in the road becomes obvious. You are watching the future we’ve created, come to life. Every Bo sighting is a reminder of a car journey that would have been, and has now been removed from your street.
Link to the Bo World Homepage
Link to the Bo Model M product page
