Honda brings back its ’80s MotoCompo micro-motorcycle, but this time it’s electric
If you’re old enough to remember the original 1980s Honda Motocompo micro-motorcycle – or are like me and have enjoyed learning about it since – then today’s announcement from Honda will come with all sorts of warm, fuzzy feelings of nostalgia, either earned or learned. The long-awaited spiritual successor to the Motocompo has just been unveiled, and this time it’s gone electric. Meet the Honda Motocompacto.
The original 1983 Honda Motocompo was a tiny little gasoline-powered motorcycle designed to fit in the trunk of small car and give drivers a way to extend their reach into a city.
Instead of driving all the way in, owners could park on the outskirts of a city, pop out their tiny motorcycle from their trunk, unfold it into something that was more or less comfortable to sit on, then ride anywhere in the city.
If you’re thinking that an oil-leaking, gasoline-burning motorcycle isn’t a great thing to keep in the trunk of a car, then you’re right.
That’s probably why the little bike was discontinued after only two years.
It’s also likely why when Honda brought the old idea back to life today, they did it with an electric drivetrain instead. Which if you’re an Electrek reader, probably won’t come as a complete surprise. We covered Honda’s trademarking of the Motocompacto name last year and surmised that this was the likely outcome.
Just don’t expect peak performance from the Honda Motocompacto. In fact, you’d be well-advised to not get your hopes up for even moderate performance. The tiny little folding scooter has an even tinier drivetrain. The front wheel motor measures 490W and the top speed is a mere 15 mph (25 km/h).
The battery is listed as “6.8Ah,” though it’s impossible to determine the actual battery capacity without any info on the system voltage. With either a 24V or 36V battery, that would mean a measly capacity of just 163 or 245 Wh, respectively.
Honda does give us an estimate range, though the “up to 12 miles” (20 km) isn’t very promising. But then again, this is an urban-centric motorbike and few people commute further than 12 miles in the heart of a city. A 110V charger can recharge that battery in 3.5 hours and there’s even room to store the charger on board, just in case you want to recharge in the office under your desk.
As Honda described it, “Motocompacto is perfect for getting around cityscapes and college campuses. It was designed with rider comfort and convenience in mind with a cushy seat, secure grip foot pegs, on-board storage, a digital speedometer, a charge gauge, and a comfortable carry handle. A clever phone app enables riders to adjust their personal settings, including lighting and ride modes, via Bluetooth.”
The Honda Motocompacto takes much of the same folding inspiration from the original Motocompo, including handlebars and seat that drop down into the body. With the folding footpegs, the little scooter is a mere 3.7 inches wide (9.4 cm) when fully stowed. In fact, it folds up into a package barely larger than a briefcase, measuring just 29 inches (73 cm) long and 21 inches (54 cm) high.
Fortunately the Motocompacto’s weight 41.3 lb. (18.7 kg) is just under half the weight of the original 1980s Motocompo, so it should be much easier to actually slide out of your hatchback.
It appears that Honda plans to sell the Motocompacto along with some of its electric vehicles, according to Jane Nakagawa, vice president of the R&D Business Unit at American Honda Motor Co., Inc.:
Motocompacto is uniquely Honda – a fun, innovative and unexpected facet of our larger electrification strategy. Sold in conjunction with our new all-electric SUVs, Motocompacto supports our goal of carbon neutrality by helping customers with end-to-end zero-emissions transport.
In practice though, it’s likely that few owners will actually treat it like a dinghy for their car in the same way that the original Motocompo was used. Instead, it’s probable that the Motocompacto will stand on its own as part of Honda’s small yet growing electric scooter and motorcycle lineup.
The bike sounds like it was designed as a primary vehicle, as explained by Nick Ziraldo, project lead and design engineering unit leader at Honda Development and Manufacturing of America:
Motocompacto is easy to use and fun to ride, but was also designed with safety, durability, and security in mind. It uses a robust heat-treated aluminum frame and wheels, bright LED headlight and taillight, side reflectors, and a welded steel lock loop on the kickstand that is compatible with most bike locks.
Now the only question is whether or not it will sell. Priced at US $995, sales will begin exclusively online and at Honda and Acura automobile dealers in November.
Electrek’s Take
I’m about as pro-micromobility as anyone on the internet, but I’ll tell you right now that the coolest thing about the Honda Motocompacto is merely the fact that it exists. If you actually look at specs and pricing, there’s not too much to get worked up about.
Sure, Honda’s engineers can pull a muscle patting themselves on the back all day for bringing back the Motocompo, which is a really cool feat. But a thousand bucks for a briefcase with wheels? That’s a tough sell.
The original Motocompo was so incredible because it was the only thing like it – there just weren’t any other tiny motorbikes that could fit in a trunk. These days there are literally a thousand different electric scooters and mini e-bikes that can fold up to fit in a trunk and fulfill the same role as this thing. So ultimately, that means the only differentiator here is the design. And it IS a legitimately cool design. In fact, it looks awesome. The origami game is strong with this one. But I’d still rather ride a JackRabbit or a folding stand-up scooter if I’m looking for a serious micromobility for urban use. They’d fit in a car trunk just as well and would actually give better performance as well as bang-for-your buck.
But even after saying all that, I’m still going to be tempted to buy one of these just for “kicks and jiggles” as my non-native-English-speaking wife likes to say. It wouldn’t even be the first weird little folding e-bike thing I’ve bought this month.
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This week on Electrek’s Wheel-E podcast, we discuss the most popular news stories from the world of electric bikes and other nontraditional electric vehicles. This time, that includes the potential end of Rad Power Bikes, Tern’s new belt-drive Vektron, a semi-solid-state e-bike battery coming soon on a production e-bike, ALSO drops price on its entry-level model, a tilting flat-bed electric trike/truck, and more.
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For most of human history, currency was a direct claim on tangible, productive output. Before the abstraction of government fiat or cryptocurrency, value was stored in things that required real work and resources, bushels of grain, livestock, gold, assets with their own direct productive output: horses, and tragically, slaves.
These were the foundational assets of economies, representing a direct link between labor, resources, and stored value.
As we accelerate into an all-electric, all-digital age, this fundamental link is re-emerging, but with a new unit of account. The 21st-century economy, defined by automated industry, robotic, electric transport, and now power-hungry artificial intelligence, runs on a single, non-negotiable input: electricity. In this new paradigm, the real base currency, the ultimate representation of productive capacity, is the kilowatt-hour (kWh).
The kWh is the new economic base layer.
Last week, I was in Bijiashan Park at night overlooking Shenzhen, arguably the most technologically advanced city on earth, built over the previous few decades, partly on cheap electricity, cheap labor, and manufacturing innovations.
I could see the giant high-voltage power lines coming over Yinhu Mountain to power the constant light show that is Shenzhen at night. I couldn’t help but think about how cheap electricity and a strong grid have been critical to China’s exceptional economic rise.
As you stroll around the city, you see power everywhere. There are charging stations at every corner, including insane 1 MW charging posts, electric cars and trucks, trucks that carry batteries to electric scooter shops, which are also literally everywhere.
Everything moves on electric power. Industries are powered by electricity, and now, with the advent of AI, virtually everything is increasingly processed by LLMs, which are ultimately powered by electricity through power-hungry data centers.
In a world where everything runs on electricity, electricity itself becomes the currency of civilization.
It is measurable, divisible, storable, and universal – all qualities that a currency needs, but unlike fiat and crypto, it’s actually directly linked to productive output. No politics. No inflation. Just physics.
This concept is not merely academic; it appears to be the quiet, guiding principle in China. While others debate the merits of decentralized digital tokens, China is executing a multi-pronged strategy that treats electricity as the foundational strategic asset it has become.
First, China is building the “mint” for this new currency at an incredible, world-changing scale, and it has retained absolute state control over its distribution. Its deployment of new electricity generation, particularly from renewables, is staggering. The country met its 2030 target of 1,200 gigawatts of renewable capacity five years early, in 2025.
In 2024 alone, renewable energy accounted for a record 56% of the nation’s total installed capacity, with clean generation meeting 84% of all new demand.
Here’s a comparison of electricity generation between China and the US:
If this chart doesn’t scare the West. I don’t know what will. The trend is not reversing any time soon. In fact, it appears to be accelerating as China is doubling down on solar and nuclear.
State-owned monoliths manage this entire system, primarily the State Grid Corporation of China (SGCC), the world’s largest utility. For better or worse, this centralized control allows the state to execute massive national strategies impossible in a liberalized market, such as building an Ultra-High-Voltage (UHV) grid to transmit power from remote solar and wind farms in the west to the power-hungry industrial hubs on its coast.
Second, China wields its control over the grid as a precision tool of industrial policy. China’s average electricity rate of $0.084/kWh is cheaper than most of the rest of the world, but its power lies not in the base price but in its strategic application. The government deploys a “Differential Electricity Pricing” policy: a “stick” that penalizes low-tech, high-consumption industries with higher rates, and a “carrot” that provides preferential pricing to incentivize strategic sectors.
The most potent example is in the AI sector. China is now offering massive electricity subsidies, cutting power bills by up to half, for data centers run by giants like Alibaba and Tencent. The condition for this cheap power is that these companies must use locally-made, Chinese AI chips, such as those from Huawei.
China is spending its “electricity currency” to directly fund the growth of its domestic AI chip industry and sever its dependence on foreign technology. This same logic applies to its global dominance in green tech, where state-subsidized firms like BYD benefit from a state-controlled industrial ecosystem built on reliable, managed power.
Third, and possibly the most explicit exemplification of China viewing electricity as the base currency is its moves against cryptocurrency.
In 2021, the government banned all cryptocurrency transactions and mining. While the official reasons cited financial stability, the move might have had a deeper, strategic intention.
From the state’s perspective, it was a tool for capital flight, allowing wealth to bypass government controls. But in a world where electricity rules, cryptocurrencies are, in effect, a competing “currency” that burns the foundational asset (electricity) to create a decentralized store of value.
By banning crypto, China simultaneously reclaimed its monopoly on economic control and shut down a massive, “wasteful” leak of its most precious resource. It freed up that generating capacity to be strategically allocated to its preferred industries, like AI and manufacturing.
China’s actions, viewed together, are a clear and coherent strategy. By massively investing in and securing total state control over its domestic electricity supply (the “mint”), using its price as a tool to fuel strategic industries, and banning decentralized competitors that consume the same resource, China is making a clear bet. It has been recognized that in an age where all productivity is powered by the grid, the ultimate source of national power is not gold, fiat, or crypto, but the state-controlled kilowatt-hour.
The Blockchain and Crypto: Ledger vs. Furnace
This perspective brings a critical nuance to the role of blockchain technology. In an economy where electricity is the base currency, the blockchain makes perfect sense, but only as a ledger, not as a store of value.
A distributed ledger is the ideal technological layer to act as the accounting system for this new economy. It can track the generation, transmission, and consumption of every kilowatt-hour with perfect transparency. It can automate complex industrial contracts and manage the grid’s load balancing without a central intermediary. In this sense, blockchain is the “banking software” for the electricity standard.
However, “Proof of Work” cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin face a fatal contradiction within this paradigm. They aim to serve as a store of value by burning the base currency (electricity) to secure the network. If the kilowatt-hour is the 21st-century equivalent of gold, then Bitcoin mining is akin to melting down gold bars to print a paper receipt. It destroys the productive asset to create a derivative token.
Bitcoin is quickly losing credibility as a classical safe store of value. It trades like a security, at least over the last year, and its value is only whatever the next moron is willing to pay, with no valuable asset behind it.
China’s strategy reflects this precise understanding. While they ruthlessly banned Bitcoin mining (the “furnace” that wastes the asset), they have simultaneously championed the Blockchain-based Service Network (BSN) and the Digital Yuan. They have embraced the ledger to track and control their energy economy, while rejecting the supposed asset that destroys it.
This is a trap that crypto fans often fall into. They recognize the value of the blockchain, which is real, but they mistakenly broadly assign the same value to cryptocurrency, which is simply an application of the blockchain.
Electrek’s Take
What I’m trying to explore in this op-ed is the idea that if the present is electric and the future is even more electric, then it makes sense for electricity to be the foundation of the economy.
If electricity is the backbone of global trade and the metric of productivity, the kWh ultimately becomes the real currency of a truly electrified world.
And I think China has figured this out, as evidenced by its new electricity generation surpassing the rest of the world combined and by its ban on cryptocurrency.
They are going to let the rest of the world hold the crypto bag while they have more electricity generation than anyone to power their industries, which are already taking over the world.
I think the rest of the world should learn from this. Instead of pouring capital into meme coins and made-up stores of value, we should invest in electricity generation and storage.
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