Tigoona's Electric Assisted Vehicle (EAV)
Driving the Change

Design for India's 10 Million Street Vendors

India has more than 10 million street vendors. They sell vegetables before sunrise, move through neighbourhoods that no delivery app has mapped, and provide the daily sustenance of cities that do not acknowledge them in any design brief. During the Covid-19 lockdown, when these vendors lost their livelihoods without any institutional support, Studio ABD made a decision: to self-fund the design of a vehicle built specifically for them. The Tigoona Electric Assisted Vehicle is not a corporate project. It is Studio ABD's most direct expression of the belief that human-centred design has an obligation that goes beyond the client brief, to the people that design most often overlooks.

Frugal Innovation at Its Most Rigorous

The Tigoona EAV was designed around a set of constraints that would challenge any industrial design studio: it had to be affordable, repairable anywhere in India, operable by women as comfortably as by men, capable of carrying 100kg of load, solar-powered for night trading, and flat-packable for easy distribution. Each of these constraints was treated not as a limitation but as a design opportunity. Advanced simulation tools were used to optimise the chassis geometry. Multiple prototype iterations refined the steering mechanism for use in crowded urban lanes. The solar panel integration was designed to function in the variable light conditions of Indian streets, not the consistent sunlight of a test facility.

3× More: The Measure of a Design That Works

Tigoona — from 'teen guna', three times — was designed to give street vendors three times more of everything that matters: more business reach, more physical comfort, more personal safety, and more dignity in the job they do. Deployed in collaboration with BBMP, the Rotary Club, and SEWA, the Tigoona has become Studio ABD's most visible social impact design project, and the clearest proof that connecting life and design is not a marketing slogan, but a design practice with real consequences in the real world. The EAV is the next chapter: electric-assisted, cleaner, and designed to extend the Tigoona's range into the next generation of Indian street commerce.