Benelli Has Whipped Out Its Dong And It's Rather Impressive

You can always trust the Chinese to come up with something quirky, but even by their own lofty standards of bizarreness, the newly launched Benelli Dong (get your mind out of the gutter!) electric scooter is remarkably left-field. Right from the cantilevered seat unit to the design of the switchgear to the way the apron is styled, the Dong is downright radical.

Going down the electric path opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of packaging and design, and we're glad to see manufacturers finally exploiting this factor. If you thought the rest of the scooter was outlandish, wait till you get to the tail section. The Dong employs a hub motor, so there's no need for either a chain or shaft drive system. Which is why the swingarm can look like the serpentine piece of modern art that it is. The underseat region (what little there is of it) is unlike anything we’ve ever seen on a scooter before.

• There’s A New Player In The Electric Two-Wheeler Market
• Ola Announces 1,00,000 Hypercharger Network Stations For 400 Cities!

The Dong's slender design (again, get your mind out of the gutter!) does seriously compromise practicality, but nobody ever made history by always making safe choices. The vast majority of the underseat region is taken up by the battery pack, leaving little room for much else. The battery pack in question is a 1.56kWh lithium-ion unit that's good enough to carry this scooter 60km on a full charge. You won't be getting there very quickly, because the 1.2kW motor is only good for 45kmph. This is good news for onlookers, though. Gives them more time to ogle. What they probably won't like, though, is the artificial IC-engine sound that the Dong produces. Thankfully, it can be turned off.

Benelli has already launched the Dong in Indonesia. Considering the boom in electric two-wheelers we're seeing at the moment, and Benelli's historical inclination to bring most of its global lineup to Indian shores, we can expect this e-scooter or a derivative of it to reach our market sometime in the future. In Indonesia, it's priced at 36.8 million Rupiah, or Rs 1.89 lakh. That's a hell of a lot of money for a little electric urban runabout, but every single one of those rupees will be worth it when you're at a party and somebody asks, "So what're you riding these days?"

On a serious note, we hope Benelli can get the pricing right if it ever does bring this scooter to India.

Image Source