The custom ONYX Motors bikes displayed at this year’s The One Motorcycle Show did not look like variations of the same product. One looked pulled from a neon-soaked 1980s arcade, while another resembled a machine built for a cyberpunk dystopia. One carried the sleek aggression of a sculpted endurance racer, while another stripped the platform back into something cleaner and more performance-focused. Contrast between bikes, and between riders, was the point.
ONYX Motors has spent years building a culture around the idea that the RCR 80V should feel personal to the rider rather than standardized across everyone who owns one. The company’s latest custom concepts, shown in Portland through collaborations with designers and builders including Bryce Wong, Steady Garage, and Ivan Ceja, pushed that philosophy further into public view.
Bryce Wong’s “Pink Panther” transformed the RCR into something fluid and almost animalistic, with exaggerated curves and flowing bodywork that made the bike feel more sculptural than mechanical. Ivan Ceja’s “Citizen Zero” drew heavily from Akira-inspired cyberpunk imagery, giving the bike a low, enclosed stance that looked designed for a futuristic city shaped by automation and surveillance. Steady Garage’s “S-56 Outlaw” took a more restrained performance approach built around precision engineering, while ONYX Motors founder and chief design officer Tim Seward leaned fully into late-1980s nostalgia with “Trapper Keeper,” layering the bike in bright purples, highlighter yellows, and neon pinks inspired by the graphic overload of the era.
Together, the bikes revealed how broadly ONYX Motors sees the RCR platform creatively. None of the builds followed the same visual logic, yet all of them still felt connected to the company’s larger identity, which sits somewhere between retro motorcycle culture, BMX influence, Southern California style, and futuristic electric mobility.
That perspective reflects Seward’s own design background. Before launching ONYX Motors, he worked across industrial design and consumer technology with brands including Sonos, Google, Nike, Samsung, Intel, Bird, Scoot, and UBCO. Long before retro electric bikes became fashionable, he was already experimenting with electric moped conversions, pulling apart gas-powered bikes and rebuilding them into electric prototypes.
That history still shapes how ONYX Motors presents itself today. The company rarely frames the RCR 80V strictly as transportation. Even though the bike reaches speeds up to 65 mph, accelerates from 0–30 mph in roughly 1.7 seconds, and delivers up to 130 miles of range in Eco mode, the technical side never completely overtakes the emotional side of the brand.
A lot of electric mobility design still feels trapped inside the same visual language, utilizing design choices like minimalist frames and interfaces that resemble oversized smartphones mounted to handlebars. Companies often design EVs to look clean and future-proof, but somewhere in that process, many of them lose the emotional attachment that has always existed around motorcycles, mopeds, BMX bikes, and car culture.
The RCR 80V keeps visible personality baked into the machine itself, from the BMX-style pedals to the motorcycle-grade components and retro-inspired silhouette. Even before owners customize them, the bikes already feel like they belong to a specific world rather than a generic category.
That becomes even more obvious once riders begin modifying them. ONYX Motors actively encourages owners to swap finishes, alter components, and push the bikes visually in completely different directions rather than treating uniformity as the goal. At events like The One Motorcycle Show, the line between rider, designer, and builder starts disappearing altogether because the bike becomes part transportation, part creative identity.
The custom builds in Portland captured that especially well because none of them felt designed by committee. They felt specific to the people who made them, which is increasingly rare in a market where so many products are optimized to appeal to everyone at once.
That may ultimately be the strongest thing ONYX Motors has built around the RCR 80V. Not just an electric bike with good performance specs, but a platform people actually want to project themselves onto.
