Designing India’s First High-Voltage Electric Motorcycle with Model-Based Design

Electric motorcycles should be a natural fit for India, the world’s largest two-wheeler market. While electric cars gained traction, India’s electric two-wheeler segment is dominated by low-powered scooters that don’t match the performance expectations of the country’s motorcycle riders. Startup Raptee.HV saw this mismatch as an opportunity and recently launched the T30, India’s first high-voltage electric motorcycle. It features a top speed of 84 mph (135 km/h), a range of 125 miles (200 km) per charge, and, importantly, compatibility with the existing car charging infrastructure.

The T30’s breakthrough wasn’t just about building a performance-oriented electric motorcycle—it required reimagining the fundamental architecture that had constrained the entire industry. To create a high-voltage system that didn’t yet exist in the market, Raptee.HV turned to Model-Based Design with MATLAB^® and Simulink^®, compressing years of traditional development into months of rapid digital iteration.

“To push higher power, you must increase the voltage,” says Kumar. “The subcomponent ecosystem did not exist, so we developed everything from scratch.”

High voltage—with a nominal voltage around 240 volts—unlocked an unexpected advantage: compatibility with CCS2 charging infrastructure already established for electric cars. The difference in user experience is stark.

“There is no charging standard for two-wheelers yet. Every company has its own chargers and pins,” says Kumar. “You must either charge at home or, if you’re traveling, carry the charger with you.”

By contrast, Raptee.HV riders can tap into the same charging network used by electric cars—over 26,000 chargers across the country, with operators adding more daily.

Building an entirely new class of electric motorcycles from the ground up meant Raptee.HV couldn’t afford the traditional trial-and-error approach. Before gaining access to MATLAB and Simulink, the team built multiple physical iterations of their drivetrain system, including three or four different versions of sprockets and chain drives. Each time, they discovered issues that required costly redesigns.

They turned to Model-Based Design to create digital twins of their vehicle systems, allowing them to iterate and optimize before cutting any metal. They started by modeling the powertrain, suspension, and overall vehicle dynamics to understand how the motorcycle would react to different gear ratios, driver inputs, and wheel sizes. Using Simulink Design Optimization™, they could feed in various design parameters and let the algorithm determine the best results for acceleration, braking efficiency, and top speeds.

For this complex engineered system, the digital approach compressed what used to take weeks of physical prototyping into days of computer simulation. “With Model-Based Design, you can iterate with different parameters,” says Phunith. “We knew we designed a better product before we built our first prototype.”

The team also tackled the challenge of creating 22 custom printed circuit boards containing the microcontrollers and electronics that manage the vehicle’s systems. They engineered three core subsystems critical to safely managing high-voltage architecture: their own battery management system (BMS), motor controller, and vehicle control unit (VCU).

The team modeled the power electronics systems using Simscape Electrical™ blocks, creating a digital representation of how the electronic systems behave under different conditions. The team also used reference application models from Motor Control Blockset™ as a quick starting point for its motor control algorithm development.

For the battery pack, they built a cell-by-cell model of their 200+ cell configuration, complete with all electrical connections, resistors, and busbars to understand how current would flow through the system. They relied on Simscape Battery™ to simulate individual cell behavior and analyze charge-discharge dynamics under real-world conditions.

Raptee.HV generated production-ready code for the microcontrollers directly from its Simulink models using Embedded Coder^®. The team leveraged target support packages from MathWorks to streamline code deployment to their specific microcontroller architecture. This eliminated the traditional handoff between control engineers and software developers, a process that typically creates delays and potential misinterpretation of requirements. Instead of sketching algorithms and waiting for programmers to translate them into code, Raptee.HV’s engineers deployed new logic to their test systems within minutes.

“You build some logic, you find a fault, you change it in MATLAB,” says Koshy George, deputy general manager of power electronics at Raptee.HV. “You deploy the new code on the bike within five minutes.”

Raptee.HV’s participation in the MathWorks Startup Program helped enable its ambitious timeline. The program provided access to the full suite of development tools and technical support from the MathWorks team in India to help optimize its workflow.

“The support we’ve got from MathWorks has been tremendous. From the start, we received hands-on help with whatever tools we use,” says Kumar. “The technical guidance proved especially valuable for a startup team that needed to quickly master sophisticated development processes while racing against investor timelines.”

The integrated approach also transformed how Raptee.HV’s cross-functional teams collaborated. By connecting their models to GitHub^®, they eliminated the version control chaos that had previously plagued their development. “We had file names that went from one to 76 just to keep track of which is the newest one,” says George. “Once we moved to GitHub integration, it was seamless.”

For Kumar, the sophisticated development tools and processes were simply a means to an end. “At the end of the day, it’s all about building a product for customers,” he says. “All that matters is what customers can use.” Riders were finally getting the performance they’d been waiting for in an electric motorcycle.