Sprint Features Mission Motors in TV Commercials

On my way to the Indianapolis GP this weekend, I was sitting in coach (because that’s how we roll here at A&R) on Delta flight 147 to Atlanta (direct flights are for wusses), passing the time on the 5 hour flight by watching the airline’s 15 or so TV channels ($6 for an in-flight movie??! Who are you kidding Delta?). Suffering through mostly daytime soap operas, I opted to to watch the news stations instead. While the day’s headlines were mostly about the impending apocalypses that were hurricane Irene and the retirement of Steve Jobs as Apple’s CEO, the segment I found the most interesting were the commercials (this should say something about CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News).

Somehow managing to stay conscious long enough through the advertisements, I hear a Sprint spokesman quickly say “what if we design an electric motorcycle?” Surprised to hear such a non sequitur on TV, I looked up in-time to briefly see a CAD drawing of a motorcycle, whose frame quickly reminded me of the Mission R (with and without its clothes). With the rest of the commercial talking about some Samsung tablets, I remembered that Mission Motors uses a Samsung Tab for the prototype Mission R dash (photo after the jump). Could it be the Sprint was hocking Mission Motors in a TV ad?

Apparently so, as I reached out to Mission’s Marketing Manager David Salguero, who said that Mission was a featured company in Samsung’s Biz360 campaign. Beyond the very cool use of a tablet PC for a dash unit (we’ll have to see if we can get more info on that from the folks over in San Francisco), Mission Motor is apparently using a variety of Sprint products to build their electric drive train components according to Sprint’s promo section on it Biz360 webpage.

While we may not see a Mission R on the street anytime soon, it is still pretty cool to see electric motorcycles getting some love the mainstream media and corporate world. Keep an eye out for the below on your television set.