The customization potential of the LiveWire One electric motorcycle was on full display at Autopia 2099, a new and dedicated EV event held at Optimist Studios in Los Angeles designed to showcase electric cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and other mobility solutions.
The event featured more than 80 vehicles, from home-built and conversion EVs to brand new cars and trucks, plus a display of what the event organizers called retrofuturism. Custom motorcycle builder SMCO presented a fully customized LiveWire One motorcycle which originated in Los Angeles, a city rapidly becoming the electric bike’s most successful market.
Brothers Aaron and Shaun Guardado started racing as young teenagers, first in shifter karts and then in high-performance import cars before they turned their attention to motorcycles. They founded SMCO in 2010 to sell branded T-shirts and started building custom competition motorcycles in their Long Beach, Calif., shop to back up the brand and feed their appetite for racing and performance. Now in their mid-30s, the brothers have built serious Harley-Davidson flat trackers and performance bikes for hooligan racing and even converted a pair of Harley-Davidson Street Rod motorcycles into snow bikes for a winter hill climb at the ESPN X Games.
This past July, Shaun and Aaron entered a pair of LiveWire One bikes in the Roland Sands Super Hooligan Championship at the Laguna Seca race course in California. The series is open to almost any motorcycle, and for the event, the bikes were stripped of lighting but were otherwise stock.
“When we got our hands on the LiveWire One, we immediately wanted to race it,” said Aaron Guardado. The bikes are so fast and so much fun to ride, but we wanted to find ways to improve on that performance. We started by reducing rotating mass with a set of carbon fiber wheels from BST. Then we removed all the stock bodywork and used it to make molds for our own lightweight carbon fiber body pieces. We also designed our own rear-set foot controls to put us in a more aggressive posture for road racing the bike This project really pushed us into some new technology. We learned to use CAD and a 3D printer to create the rear sets, for example.
All of the carbon bodywork created by the Guardado brothers uses the stock mounting points on a LiveWire One, and if there’s interest from other owners, the parts may show up for sale in the future.
