When people hear of Segway, they probably picture the two-wheeled dicycles that police officers and polo players (yes, polo players) ride around on.

Come January, the now-Chinese manufacturer will enter the Dakar Rally on a more traditional two-wheeler. Called the Segway Dakar Race Bike, it is an electric motorcycle that produces 60 kW of power and weighs roughly 240 kilograms; given its power source, it will compete in Mission 1000.

Benjamín Pascual, Xu Jianhao, and Yang Jie will represent Segway Racing. All three are new to Dakar, though Pascual’s father Pablo raced it nine times while his brother Jeremías has W2RC experience and hopes to race it himself in the future. Pascual competes in the Argentine Rally Raid Championship.

Jie won the Chinese Motocross Championship in 2012, a year after finishing seventh in the Asian Motocross standings. Jianhao, a fellow Chinese rider, is a fourteen-time national motocross champion who went on to compete in the 2019 FIM Motocross World Championship’s MXGP of China.

“In mid-2024, the Chinese brand Segway contacted my father and they told him that they were looking for a driver for the Dakar,” Pascual explained. “We had a series of remote interviews and in October, I traveled to Beijing to meet the team, test the electric bike and try to contribute to its development. We did some training sessions but I think we still need to continue working on improving the different elements.”

While Segway might not be typically associated with racing, that is not to say the manufacturer has no experience whatsoever. The Segway Villain SX10 is a UTV that has seen action in some national cross-country rallies, including the FIA World Baja Cup’s Baja Portalegre 500 in October. Segway also has an electric bike that has competed in TT road races.

Mission 1000 is a category reserved for testing alternative sources of power like electric and hydrogen. The Segways are the only bikes entered and represent the former, while the latter is being used by KH-7 Ecovergy’s MAN truck and the HySE-X2.