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VISION
“A city is an hour across”, is how Prof. Richter, -who works on the development of transport in cities – defines Berlin. It is necessary that you don’t need to spend more than an hour getting from one side of the city to the other. Otherwise – so he says – a city loses its competitive edge over other cities .
According to Richter, it doesn’t matter what means of transport is used to achieve this. For us, following the spirit of the Lohner family history of the scooter of the 50s and the Lohner-Porsche electric car in 1900, it was now a logical next step to focus on two-wheelers.
But if 50% of the world population lives in cities and towns are huge in size, it is necessary to see the city not only as the place where you work, but also to find the place and space to relax and recover. In this way, urban man lives between tension and relaxation, between adaptation and revolution, and is thus entitled to link his needs – his needs as an individual, too – with his mobility.
A bicycle should both give joy, offer relaxation, as well get you from A to B, that is, meet your transport needs as comprehensively as possible. It was therefore necessary to build bicycles that are perfect for today’s and tomorrow’s mobility in urban areas, in a way in which form follows electrical technology and meets the standards of good design. In doing this, electro-technology serves further aspects of city living – noise reduction and freedom from hazardous substances. This leads quite logically to our Lohner Stroler.
That this process is being continued with the LEA, an electric scooter as a comfortable urban cruiser, quite apart from the unique look of this class of scooter, it is only logical.
LOHNER – ONE PURRING PASSION
HISTORY
Great story – in short,”mobility begins in the mind”: That’s what I have learned from the Lohner family history which began in Vienna in 1821. The previously unknown Heinrich Lohner, who, coming from a family of coachbuilders in Mayen, Alsace, fled from Napoleon, into whose army he should have enlisted, to the then peaceful, prosperous Vienna.
So, a highly personal mobility, which was characterized by an objective analysis of the situation and the courage to make a completely new start. Thus, in Vienna, the Lohnner family rose to become the greatest coach builders of the Imperial Danube monarchy.
In 1900, the first electric car in the world, the Lohner-Porsche, was built. Going beyond this, they successfully got involved in aircraft constructionft successfully – Lohner became the biggest propeller manufacturers. They began with electric trolley buses and developed trams.
Right out of the blue, in 1948 the idea came to my grandfather to build scooters, and these were presented to the public a year later. Becoming a legend among these were the Lohner Sissy, the first two-seater moped, and the L125 scooter.
In 2010, I succeeded in re-establishing the Lohner factory, after a 40-year break in our family tradition of vehicle building. It was an experiment to summon up the confidence to tackle such a project, for which I, as an IT man, had absolutely no previous experience. It was probably my ancestors who have inspired me ‘just to have a go’ at building something that looked to the future.
Now these projects are ready for the market: the Lohner Stroler, with which we are establishing a new class of vehicle. And the LEA, an electric scooter, an urban cruiser in a class of its own.