A Tesla Cofounder Is Electrifying Off-Road Vehicles, Starting With Dirty Lawn Mowers

Forbes profiled Dimaag-AI and co-founder Ian Wright in January 2024, exploring the company's mission to bring serious electrification technology to the off-road machinery sector — a market that has been largely bypassed by the passenger EV revolution.

Wright, who co-founded Tesla in 2003 before departing to start Wrightspeed (which developed electric powertrains for delivery trucks), brought his powertrain expertise to Dimaag-AI with a focus on the unique challenges of off-road equipment: eight-hour duty cycles, extreme operating conditions, and the need for fast, reliable charging at remote job sites.

"Off-road vehicles need to operate for eight hours a day," Wright told Forbes. "It is necessary to make the battery easily replaceable and to charge it quickly." These constraints drove Dimaag to build the ENCORE ecosystem from the ground up — optimized for the real-world demands of construction and agricultural equipment rather than adapted from consumer EV platforms.

The Forbes article noted that Dimaag's initial market entry included commercial lawn mowers — high-duty-cycle machines that run for many hours daily and where the total cost of ownership advantages of electrification are most immediately apparent. From there, the company has expanded to heavy construction equipment in collaboration with Hitachi and Komatsu.