The Motocompacto, possibly a tiny e-motorbike, has a trademark application from Japanese carmaker Honda. The trademark application makes comparisons to the 1980s Honda Motocompo. The Motocompo was a miniature ICE motorbike made to fit in a small car’s trunk. It gave drivers a way to travel further into the city.
In case you missed it, the first Motocompo was a little folding scooter propelled by a 49cc air-cooled two-stroke single. Its bars and seat could be folded up into its own rectangular bodywork to form a handy package that might fit in a car’s trunk. The Japanese-market Honda City was the ideal vehicle for it, and today a matching City and Motocompo fetch high prices on the used market.
Therefore, the trademark’s name is quite similar to that of the Motocompo, but we anticipate that the new bike will be powered by electricity rather than gasoline like its predecessor. But this is not the first time that rumors of an electric Motocompo have surfaced. Honda registered the first Motocompacto trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2020. In the 2020 submission, the vehicle was merely identified as being related to an electric scooter.
In order to escape unpleasant traffic, the plan was to park your automobile outside of the city center, take out your Motocompo, unfold it, and ride the final few miles to the office. Before your ride home, you might store the bike in a room’s corner or perhaps under your desk. Theoretically ideal for the fabled traffic in major cities like Tokyo.
The folding mechanism is more complicated than it first appears to be, and the Motocompo’s two-stroke engine meant that both your car and your clothes would smell like fuel. Honda expected to sell 10,000 of them per month, but in reality, only 50,000 were sold in two years.
Motocompacto has recently had a new trademark application filed with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office. In the Canadian lawsuit, there are two distinct filings, the second of which is spelled Moto Compacto. The trademark is described as being associated with Goods Land vehicles, namely self-balancing electric scooters and motor scooters with electrical propulsion. A tiny scooter-themed trademark logo design is also included in the Canadian application.
The spirit of the Motocompo lives on, despite the fact that we haven’t seen a new concept or production bike in a while. In 2020, Honda filed for trademark rights on the word “Motocompacto,” which it still retains in a number of nations, including the US. The Motocompacto trademark is targeted specifically at “self-balancing electric scooters.” After more than two years, the project seems to be one step closer to becoming a reality because Honda has just applied for IP protection for a logo to go with the Motocompacto brand, giving us our first look at what the bike that will utilize it would look like.
The small Motocompo was made in quantities of up to 50,000 between 1981 and 1983. Due to the lack of a gas engine, the electric version of this little bike is anticipated to be smaller. In order to excite the market, it is also probably to include a number of other developments. Honda appears to be on track to meet its goal of introducing 10 new electric motorcycles and scooters by 2025. During EICMA 2022, it also debuted the Honda EM1 design for its electric moped in Europe.
The Motocompacto’s small size and array of technological features may attract the market’s attention to the Honda nameplate. Honda has not yet released any official information about the Motocompacto.
A box-shaped machine’s outline is depicted in the logo, with two wheels, some bars, and a seat issuing from it. That makes it different from the first Motocompo, even if the new bike seems even squarer, like a trunk on wheels. Although the logo itself is obviously a highly simplified form of the concept, such as an avatar to represent the bike rather than a scale picture of the machine, it is most likely exactly what it will be.
Since the original Motocompo was primarily designed for the Japanese market, both the name and the emblem of the company have become trademarks in North America. The original release in 2020 came from the US, then in November 2022, two further applications – one of which featured the redesigned logo – were made in Canada.
