2024-on Naxeon IAM Pro Review: A girder front end and electric powertrain mix for futuristic vibes

The IAM Pro feels strikingly slim, compact and light. Naxeon claim it weighs 137kg; on MCN’s digital scales our test bike registers 143kg including its optional panniers. That’s competitive against both petrol and electric rivals – Yamaha’s MT-125 is 142kg, while Maeving’s RM1S is 141kg. Despite its radical looks the IAM Pro doesn’t feel weird to sit on, with a typical 800mm seat height, a flat handlebar position, and low footpegs. It is however a strictly single-seat affair, with no pillion provision.

Cast 17-inch wheels and slender CST tyres (a 110 front and 140 rear) help the IAM Pro nip through traffic with effortless agility and intuitive low-speed balance. A generous steering lock allows tight U-turns and lets you duck and weave through every gap in traffic. On faster B-roads the chassis starts to stray towards the edge of its comfort zone, and it’s possible to scrape the pegs if you pile into a roundabout too keenly.

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The big curiosity chassis-wise is the IAM Pro’s funny front end, which uses a girder design rather than familiar telescopic forks. The two sturdy legs reaching down to the front wheel are solid, and connect to the headstock via four linkages creating a moving parallelogram.

In the middle, doing all the suspension work, is a monoshock. It’s an unconventional setup but it works well – the bars don’t feel weighty when you turn them from side to side, and the ride quality is comparable to any other small commuter. The main difference comes when you brake hard, when you can sense some anti-dive has been engineered in to the setup.

Speaking of which, the brake setup is a single disc at each end, with a four-piston radial caliper at the front, and the rear brake lever mounted up on the left bar, scooter-style. Combined ABS is standard, and while the brakes aren’t the largest, sharpest or strongest they’re plenty for the modest speed and weight of the IAM Pro.

An air-cooled electric motor lives inside the rear wheel hub, offering a claimed peak power of 10.5kW (14bhp) and a ludicrous-sounding 199lb·ft of torque. Don’t get your hopes up too high however, as despite that gargantuan figure the IAM Pro doesn’t quite tear away from the line like a Triumph Rocket 3.

There are three curiously-named riding modes (Sail, Dynamic and Zig-Zag) and in the quickest (Zig-Zag) it’ll pull away faster than most city traffic. But even engaging ‘Boost’ mode, which temporarily unlocks an extra 2kW (3bhp), it still takes 3.5 seconds to accelerate up to 30mph – and a whopping 13.8 seconds to get to 60mph.

The numbers might not look impressive, but in use the IAM Pro is plenty quick enough for riding round town, and subjectively it feels pretty swift up to around 50mph. Things get more laboured from 50mph to 60mph, and broadly that’s where its natural top speed lies. It is possible to push it a bit faster, the Boost mode briefly battling to an indicated 71mph (a true GPS-tested 68.8mph). Think short ring-road squirts rather than long motorway slogs.

But while the pace is fine, more work could be done to refine a few elements of the powertrain. The throttle can feel quite herky-jerky when you’re just trying to hold a steady speed. The traction control is so desperately over-cautious, limiting acceleration long before a slide, that you soon switch it off altogether. There’s also very little in the way of regen (engine braking) on a closed throttle.

The battery itself is a decent size for the class, storing 6.5kWh of energy (72V, 90Ah). That’s more than the Maeving RM1S (5.46kWh) and over twice as much as Kawasaki’s Z e-1 (3.0kWh), but slightly less than VMoto’s Stash (7.2kWh).

The size also means it’s fixed in the bike, so unlike the Maeving or Kawasaki you can’t remove it to charge indoors. Naxeon advertise a range of 180km (112 miles) but that would require saintly speeds, a featherweight rider, a tail-wind or all three. In our testing, even at a steady 30mph the useable range proves around 90 miles. At 60mph that drops to around 40 miles. In mixed-use we averaged between 50 and 60 miles.

Performance does slow down noticeably as the battery charge gets low on charge. The battery icon on the dash changes from green to yellow at 40% to give your first warning, then to red at 20%. At 5% the motor power drops to just 1kW (1.3bhp), giving a top speed of just 20mph. Presumably this helps prevent cell damage by running the battery too low, but it’s a shame that the full capacity isn’t useable in practice.

When it comes to recharging, the IAM Pro boasts a smart Type 2 socket beneath a flap on the ‘tank’. This is the same kind of socket used by virtually all electric cars and high-end electric motorcycles, and it means you can top it up at a public charger providing you bring along the correct cable.

However, whether you plug in at home or on the road, charge times are limited by the bike’s onboard 1600-watt charger. An hour gains roughly 25%, and we timed a complete 5%-to-100% recharge at 4.5 hours.

This is the first and only Naxeon we’ve ever ridden, and 2025 will mark the first time the bikes have been imported from their native China into the UK. As a new brand there’s very little we can go on to predict the IAM Pro’s long-term durability or reliability. There’s a three-year warranty on both the bike and battery, which may offer some reassurance, while the battery itself is rated for 1500 charge cycles, which could potentially be around 100,000 miles.

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First impressions of build quality are pretty solid. Sure, the chassis components definitely aren’t no-expense-spared – the Hangte brake caliper and CST tyres aren’t from firms most European riders will be familiar with, while the suspension is unbranded.

But overall you get the sense some time, thought and effort has gone into the IAM Pro. It certainly hasn’t been cobbled together on the cheap from a bunch of generic off-the-shelf parts, and the use of a proper Type 2 charging port wouldn’t seem to suggest a company trying to cut costs and corners. Overall, we had no problems during our test, and we spotted no obvious cause for concern.

The IAM Pro costs £6995. If you’re looking at electric rivals with comparable performance, it’s several hundred quid more expensive than the similarly new VMoto Stash (£6299), but less than a Maeving RM1S (from £7495), Kawasaki Z e-1 (£7199) or BMW CE-02 (from £8450).

Running costs should be trivial provided you can charge at home. Even if your home electricity tariff is set at the price cap (24.5p/kWh in late 2024), a full charge will cost around £1.70. That works out to between 2p and 3p a mile. Switch to a specialist EV overnight tariff (7p/kWh) and it drops to less than 50p for a full charge, meaning ‘fuel’ costs fall below a penny a mile. Ride 4000 miles a year and that’s a total electricity bill of £35.

As for servicing, UK importers Artisan Electric say the IAM Pro needs a ‘health check’ at 500 miles, another at 3000 miles, and then just an annual service after that. They estimate a typical cost of around £165.

For a relatively small bike, the IAM Pro comes with a gargantuan list of standard equipment and ‘futuristic’ features. If you long for the simple life of carbs and fuel taps, look away now…

Let’s start with keyless ignition – and it’s truly keyless, as not only is there no physical key, there isn’t even a chunky fob. Instead you switch it on either by waving a contactless RFID card near the headstock, or you can unlock and fire it up directly from the Naxeon smartphone app.

The app is all part and parcel of the Naxeon’s mind-boggling connectivity. The IAM Pro is able to communicate with the rest of the world via Bluetooth, wifi, GPS and even a 4G mobile signal. That means you can keep tabs on its location, track rides, navigate, check the battery health, schedule charging times and plenty more all from your phone. You can even update the bike’s software over the air.

If that’s not enough screentime the dash itself even looks and acts like a smartphone, with a large 7-inch touchscreen TFT running Android software. If offers a labyrinth of menus, sub-menus and customisable settings, so you can activate, turn off or customise a seemingly endless list of features and rider aids. The display is large, bright and clear, with a choice of simple displays showing speed and battery charge, or more detailed layouts giving a wealth of riding data. Impressively, it even shows real-time tyre pressures.

There are other features you’d find on flash, fancy high-end flagships too. The IAM Pro has a rear-facing radar, which serves as as a blind-spot detector. When the system notices a vehicle behind either closing rapidly or doing something it thinks might be a hazard, the pair of ‘bracelet’ light strips around the bars flash orange to alert you. There’s cruise control, albeit a simple one-button affair, and an alarm as standard.

Then there are features we haven’t seen anywhere else, like a pair of front and rear-facing HD cameras. You can either leave them running permanently, serving as dashcams, or press a button on the bars set to record specific moments while you’re riding. If you need to access the videos, you can either take out the SD card they record to, or download them via the phone app. It also serves as a reversing camera – because, yes, there’s also a walking-pace reverse mode, with the dash switching to show what the rear-facing camera sees.

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Despite all the cleverness, one simple thing irritates: the indicator setup. It uses two buttons (one left, one right) positioned slightly awkwardly on the left switchgear cluster, and to cancel you have to press the correct side’s button again. Even after a week we found ourselves still glancing down, which is distracting.

Compared to a conventional scooter (or VMoto’s Stash), the IAM Pro lacks any storage space. However, the soft zip-up fabric panniers on our test bike are available as an official extra, adding £250 complete with the mounting racks.