INTERVIEW
ONE MOTO STARTS MOTORING
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Meet Adam Ridgway the visionary behind One Moto, the UAE’s first producer of electric vehicles
I’m sitting in a restaurant, eating good food. I couldn’t be more comfortable,” Adam Ridgway says as he begins to break down the extraordinary story of One Moto - the first – and possibly only – fully realised producers of electric vehicles that are assembled for the UAE market. Ridgway and his partner’s company produces a range of light electric vehicles from scooters to compact vans and is shifting gears working alongside companies in the delivery sector in the country and has designs on expansion to the wider region. To establish One Moto, Ridgway is turning his back on a successful career in the media to become an entrepreneur in the automotive industry. The company is young – barely four years old – but its founder tells T&FME that he hasn’t started One Moto to be a start-up he will sell later down the line. After all, he says, his interest in all-things motorised and on-wheels stretches back over two decades. “I was desperate for independence at 16, so I saved up my Christmas and birthday money and bought myself my first bike,” he recalls. “I did my CBT (compulsory basic training) and bought myself a 50cc. I could reach the outskirts of London (he grew up 80km away in the small town of Bishop’s Stortford). It was amazing.” Still in his teens, Ridgway was also turning his back on a fine art degree and setting off on a career: “I knew I was creative, but I was also a businessman. At 16, I started my first business running party cruises up and down the River Thames.”
18
MARCH 2020
Despite this early commercial success, by his early 20s he was working as a runner on a famous UK TV show called Ready, Steady, Cook: “I spent seven years in TV, but it took me until I was 28 to find what my purpose was. I had moved to Dubai to work for Dubai One and six months later I set-up a media company called Mediacubed – an online portal for the media sector. Think of it as LinkedIN for the media industry.” Riding the economic turbulence that hit the UAE at the end of the decade it found itself casting Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol when scenes were filmed in 2010 – the movie including Tom Cruise’s iconic climb of the Burj Khalifa: “The applications were processed on an online platform and then a shortlist was sent to Prague where they were shooting. By the time they came to Dubai, the producers, execs, wardrobe designers, etc, knew who had been cast and even what their sizes were. We cast over a thousand roles…. It was the first time in Hollywood history that a feature film was cast online.” While his business grew and prospered, Ridgway was able to continue his love of motorcycling, collecting a Vespa on the way. While his job was allowing him to maintain his passion, he was becoming increasingly agitated at the risks that delivery bikers were having to take while they were doing their daily grind. “Some of these bikes have square wheels. You’ve got baggy chains. They make a lot of noise,” he says regretfully, adding that some of the drivers are not receiving enough training. “There’s a move that every rider knows. It’s called the lifesaver where you
Being an avid rider, the safety aspect of what I see really affects me. I talk to a lot of the riders. This one guy told me he his helmet only costs about 200 dirhams. Every day they are going out and risking their lives”
look over your shoulder: left and right. It takes a quarter of a second but these riders don’t do it. I know everyone talks about the language differences here, but you can teach everything someone needs to know about bike safety with sign language.” Expanding on his concerns for professionals riders, and the training and equipment that he feels is lacking, he adds: “Being an avid rider, the safety aspect of what I see really affects me. I talk to a lot of the riders and this one guy told me he has one uniform which he has to wash three times a week. His helmet only costs about 200 dirhams. And seeing the state of these bikes bothers me. Every day they are going out and risking their lives.” His worries on the state of drivers and thoughts on why their employers couldn’t afford to provide them with the training and equipment to keep them safe were a strand of what was beginning to stir thoughts on how to improve the situation he was seeing on the road. He realised that if you could make sustainable delivery vehicles cost-effective they could improve safety. But, first, there needed to be prompting from another source: “This is where One Moto really comes from….” he begins. “I had a classic car that I wanted to get electrified. I went to three different places – no one could do it. I could see loads of different bikes sitting outside their garages but found there weren’t any electricpowered delivery bikes in the market.” Ridgway began talking to engineers back in the UK to see how feasible it would be to fill in this gap in the market. As an early design came together, his UAE meconstructionnews.com
