These comments just read like a whole bunch of people who never rode a bike and yet are somehow experts on everything about bikes.
This thing is not for Le Tour and you don't go fast on it and you don't go up giant hills on it. That makes a lot of the concerns here go out the window.
These types of bikes shaped objects often have all kinds of issues with trying to use bike parts designed for standard bikes on something that is very different. Issues with needing enormous chains, huge cable runs, etc.. when designers try things like this they are worrying about issues like that more than whether you can climb a mountain on it or stuff it into a corner at high speed without going out of control.
The thing with these is the cost to design & manufacture components that need to be different than normal bikes can be astronomical, so anything they can do to design the frame to use normal components in a normal/non-compromised way pays off in a huge way.
The ideas behind this aren't that different than the Cruzbike being front wheel drive to get rid of a lot of the component/drivetrain issues that recumbent bikes are famous for.
bgnn · 7m ago
People comparing these with racing bikes is so unbelievable.
btbuildem · 5h ago
Tricycles are inherently unstable in turns, especially when not loaded down, because they cannot lean. And when carrying a load, the same rules of physics apply, resulting in a lot of torsional forces on the frame. There's a reason we see so few of those on the roads, amidst an explosion of various human-powered modes of transport.
In both cases, the rider effectively sits atop of where the handlebars would be on a traditional trike. You can see in the first video the lads have a hard time keeping all wheels on the ground.
One notable difference between the new model and the old is that they seem to have changed the geometry of the frame so that the driver doesn't lean into the turn (the turning wheel stays upright). They don't demonstrate it in motion very well, but that kind of turn action will tend to throw the rider "out" of the turn, making the trike fall over opposite of the direction of the turn. The old version tends to fall "into" the turn.
I can't think of many advantages to this design, other than the driving unit and cargo are modular. Even then, the rider would not be able to travel without the cargo portion.
Trikes are tricky, they don't go very fast, they don't turn well, and they're wider than most other pedal-powered vehicles, making them hard to use on existing cycle infrastructure.
somat · 2h ago
Yes, the tricycle. Masterfully combining the exposed position of a bicycle with the space requirements of a car.
They really don't make sense in motorcycles, A large part of the point of a motorcycle is that you are willing to give up a lot of comfort and safety in exchange for having a very small nimble personal transport. Nothing wrong with this tradeoff, but why would want a vehicle that takes up the same amount of space as a car that gives you the safety and comfort value of a motorcycle?
turbosepp · 44m ago
My uncle always said: "those things combine the weaknesses of a motorcycle with the weaknesses of a car"
skeeter2020 · 2h ago
I personally set aside the safety & comfort sacrifice of the motorcycle but cannot accept the performance loses. Similar to when I see people maneuvering a bicycle over rough or varied terrain while sitting down; you might as well be driving a car.
cpgxiii · 4h ago
> There's a reason we see so few [tricycles] on the roads, amidst an explosion of various human-powered modes of transport.
Perhaps in the US and western Europe, but tricycle tuk-tuks and cycle rickshaws are extremely common in other parts of the world.
TrueGeek · 4h ago
In The Netherlands 3 wheel bikes are fairly common to haul kids and dogs.
I can easily get mine on two wheels if I take a sharp, fast, turn - but after you do it once you learn the limits and it's a very stable bike.
tda · 50s ago
No they are not popular in the Netherlands. Easily 90% of cargo bikes are two wheeled, because tricycles are really only for novice/disabled cyclists. Going above say 20km/h is just plain dangerous with a tricycle, definitely not stable at higher speeds in even the most gentle curve
clan · 2h ago
Same in Denmark. It is almost a must have for inner city families.
Much more common than two wheel Long Johns.
The common aspect is that both the Netherlands and Denmark are flat. The danish/Dutch trikes are really just unsafe when you pick up significant speed like down a hill. I am a long time cyclist, who raced for years. I've never felt as unsafe on a bike as when I tried riding and a fast bike speed on a Christiania.
bgnn · 15m ago
Luckily cargo bikes aren't for speeding and racing but for carrying cargo. It would be like using a truck to race instead of a mid-engine super light sports car.
Durch cargo trikes are generally assumed safer than their two-wheeled alternatives here.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
Three wheel motorcycles are popular amongst bikers who get too old to handle a two wheeler. Some have two wheels in front, one in back, and look almost like cars, others are just a standard motorcycle chassis fitted with two rear wheels.
jandrese · 4h ago
If you're trying to keep all of the wheels on the ground you're not using it efficiently. With trikes when you go around a curve the inner wheel lifts off the ground, especially as many trikes have solid rear axles. It feels scary to have it pitch outward in the turns, but it is how the machine works.
kevin_thibedeau · 1h ago
The problem is that trikes don't steer with countersteering. When you transition to one wheel lifted, you have a brand new mode of operation with a misaligned rear wheel.
layer8 · 4h ago
Isn’t it the outer wheel that would lift off the ground?
skeeter2020 · 1h ago
it's the inner wheel with a tilt/lean. Your weight has to get out over the COG to balance. The feeling ranges from foreign to terrifying and I'm not sure why you wouldn't just go with an excellent cargo bicycle that avoids the entire issue.
jandrese · 3h ago
You would think so but no. The inner wheel is the one that lifts.
layer8 · 3h ago
What’s the explanation that this is different from bi-wheelers?
Gracana · 3h ago
It wants to roll over, just like a car would if it had very sticky tires and took a sharp turn at speed.
The fun bit is that on three wheels it steers like a car, but on two wheels it steers like a bicycle.
amalcon · 3h ago
> especially as many trikes have solid rear axles
Do you (or anyone I guess) happen to know why? Low speed differential non-drive axles are not that complex, and would sermingly help a lot.
rtkwe · 2h ago
If they're not drive why connect them at all? Why not have them mounted independently and eliminate the need for an extra part? My only real guess is it's easier for carrying capacity.
0_____0 · 4h ago
What makes this true of trikes but not of the typical automobile?
00N8 · 4h ago
Some cars like the Mini Cooper S do lift a rear wheel when turning sharply under braking -- I've seen this a lot in autocross racing. I normally only see front engine/FWD cars with limited suspension travel do it though. Trikes are less stable & will lift a wheel more easily overall.
enragedcacti · 3h ago
The principle is the same, the distinction has more to do with suspension (or lack thereof) and the solid rear axle. The same strategy of lifting the inside rear tire is used in competitive go-kart racing: https://youtu.be/cMAtgPX6st8?t=312 . If the carts had a differential then it would be a different story (and they would be cars and not karts according to the SuperFastMatt taxonomy)
mtreis86 · 4h ago
They do. Volkswagens from the 80s and 90s that have solid dead rear axles "tripod" around corners.
jandrese · 4h ago
Automobiles have 4 wheels. The geometry of the situation is very different. This is also why cars have differentials, because otherwise the car would be fighting against the turn.
Basically when you turn your trike turns into a bike.
cycomanic · 2h ago
Yes when my kids were young I tried out a bunch of cargo bikes and the christiania trikes feel so unnatural and unsafe it's really hard to describe. I still ended up with a trike but it's a leaning one which feels just like a normal bike (and it's very narrow so fits through doors into backyards...). This is what I got:
https://chike.de/en/ it was the best purchase I ever made! For anyone thinking about a cargo bike when having small kids; go ahead your kids will love it, you will love it!
econ · 5h ago
If you have a large preferably rusty box in front of you the cars treat you like royalty.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
The instability in turns was what made the "Big Wheel" fun when I was a small child. Too low to the ground to really tip over but easy to make it spin out.
I had a conventional tricycle too, don't recall ever falling over on it, though it could get tippy. You learned to lean to offset that.
asveikau · 3h ago
I see the word "tricycle" and I'm reminded of the Piaggio MP3, from the parent company of Vespa. It has two front wheels and one rear.
steanne · 2h ago
there are trikes that can lean. this is one, and not the one i remember see an article on a few years ago, so there's at least two companies out there doing it.
It's always exciting to see this idea get revived for the first time in ninety years every ten years!
I've pedaled around on a couple variations of this design. Like everyone who had never ridden one but saw it on the internet, I also confidently imagined it would violently hurl me to the ground at the slightest provocation. I was wrong, which strangely seems to be a pattern for confident opinions I've formed based on things I've only seen on the internet. Having not been for a ride on this particular iteration, I will not post confident opinions about it on the internet.
The best (granted, of two...) version I've tried was semi-recumbent, with a standard geartrain and flevobike-style steering. The steering was a little weird at first, but I quickly figured out how to fully steer it hands free. Fully unloaded it was possible to tip it with hard front braking while turning, if you pitched your body weight into the effort. Loaded, it was absolutely nailed to the ground. You're just a mule winching a load down the road at that point. Sometimes it's fun to be a mule, piloting a weird bike-cart.
It turns out everyone flamewarring about stability on the internet forgot to get mad about drive wheel traction limits when pulling a load uphill. Which for me was a loading consideration rather than a problem. The underseat steering was brilliant for reasons I'd never thought about. But don't take my word for it, ride one and decide for yourself.
For everyone complaining about tricycles, one thing I've seen here and there in Europe being used for inner city deliveries is what I learned is called "Velove Armadillo", a 4-wheeled cargo bike
You can even hook up a trailer to it for even more cargo.
onlypassingthru · 4h ago
There's probably a good reason nobody has touched this design in 90+ years. As the last photo demonstrates, banging the back of your leg against a trailer hitch every time you turn would get annoying real quick.
torlok · 4h ago
Looks like something that can easily be solved by tweaking the curve. I also don't think you'll be doing such sharp turns often, and at that angle and speed you may as well get off.
onlypassingthru · 4h ago
On the contrary, it's a fundamental flaw in the design. The second to last photo shows the trailer directly over the pedal which will inevitably either push the rider's leg off or limit the turn radius.
rtkwe · 2h ago
It's pictured at the furthest back position for the pedals though which means your leg will mostly go forward of the pedals and not much back. I would trust people having actually ridden this to not have their legs slammed into the trailer vs how it looks on one render or photo.
Calwestjobs · 3h ago
Please do not mention spray from cars in front of you! XD
analog31 · 5h ago
Three wheeled cars and trikes mostly moved to having the two wheels in front for stability when cornering. Same reason why 3 wheeled all terrain vehicles were taken off the market. Otherwise, cool idea.
CalRobert · 5h ago
I was so excited to try a cargo bike I made sure to rent a Cristiana bike on a holiday to Copenhagen with my pregnant wife. Then I crashed while turning with her as a passenger. She was displeased.
We now ride a two wheeled urban arrow. Three wheelers seem incredibly unstable except perhaps for ones with independently pivoting wheels like the babboe carve
olau · 37m ago
When you buy one, they come with the warning to drive around first without cargo. But yeah, you need to take it easy. Safe speed is perhaps 10-12 km/h on a bike path with other bicycles, and you need to slow down to almost a complete stop for 90 degrees turns.
Perhaps I should add to this that they're actually super stable at slow speeds, compared to two-wheelers, especially when loaded. My wife prefers a cargo bike to her usual non-cargo bike, I think for this very reason.
tokai · 5h ago
While super unstable three wheelers are good for very heavy or large loads. Like moving a refrigerator. Start stop city traffic with +100kg load is easier on three than two wheels. Must say I never liked riding the Christiania bikes myself.
econ · 4h ago
The old ones in NL easily take 300kg. You just have to learn not to attempt sharp corners. A normal bike also allows you to jerk the steering wheel 90 degrees at high speed.
Steltek · 3h ago
It begs the question, are you carrying extreme loads, like refrigerators, on a daily basis? If not, then this is like buying an F-350 when you're mostly taking your kids to school. If so, then maybe none of these are the right design and you might want to look into something like a cargo trailer.
tokai · 3h ago
Well yes a ton of people are ferrying multiple kids plus their school bags everyday. They are far from common enough to get compared to F-350s. Nobody would commute on them daily if they didn't have a recurring need to haul something. They are far too expensive to buy as a beater.
lostlogin · 1h ago
> Nobody would commute on them daily if they didn't have a recurring need to haul something. They are far too expensive to buy as a beater.
I really can’t tell, are you referring to an F-350 or a cargo bike?
While interesting, I feel like this would be difficult or at least feel extremely weird to ride. When you steer on a 2-wheeled bicycle, you countersteer, which is pushing the wheel left in order to go right, or vice-versa. But this has a steering wheel that I assume works like a car, you turn the wheel left to go left. It would feel weird riding a bicycle while having to remember to steer like a car.
thesuitonym · 4h ago
Probably less weird than you think. For one thing, it uses a steering wheel like a car, so that steering motion would feel more natural, and most people don't know they need to countersteer on a bike, they just do it without thinking. Even if it used handlebars, people ride trikes all the time without any real problems.
skeeter2020 · 1h ago
feels like these types of human-powered cargo vehicles work better when they're pushing the load vs towing a trailer, either the 2 wheeler cargo that's got the payload way out front, or the reverse trikes. The closest I've tried to this type of geo is a regular bike towing a 2-wheeled trailer, and that has both logistic & performance issues. This setup has you really tall/forward, and the trailer interfering with the pedaling & leg movement.
hombre_fatal · 5h ago
That front bike section looks so cool. I guess it's so alien looking because the whole section turns instead of just the wheel which affords it more creative license than a traditional handlebar attached to a fork.
I bet it also feels alien to turn a steering wheel with your feet on bike pedals.
0xEF · 5h ago
I'm not sure where you grew up, but in the US we had a kid's toy called a Big Wheel which your feet had to turn with when you turned the handlebars. It was wildly awkward, terribly designed, but we got really good at it, anyway. The pedals would even scrape concrete on turns often enough to wear them down.
hackingonempty · 4h ago
A USA company has/had a patent on a pivoting bottom bracket bike transmission like this and has been making bikes for a while.
I was under the impression these had been out for a while. Last May, when my wife and I went to France, these cargo bikes all over the place, especially in Paris.
lostlogin · 1h ago
With a front wheel design like this one?
ljf · 4h ago
Off topic - the the colour scheme choices for the Cookie selection pop-up on that site are awful. I'll admit I'm colour blind, but I assume those are hard for others to see when the switches are on or off? Unless that was their plan?
gomox · 5h ago
Lol @ what appears to be paddle shifters or paddle brakes [0] under a steering wheel on a bike??
This idea is absurdly underbaked…other commenters mentioned that it’s going to flip, and it is. Not to mention that no bike shop in the world will know how to work on these things.
There’s lots of reasons that this design died in the 1930’s after a short run.
But…so you know I’m a reasonable guy despite my blithering criticism…I love weird alternative vehicles and I hope that version two of this is a massive success because this world needs more tiny vehicles and fewer 8’ tall Ford F-150’s.
Best of luck!
ploum · 4h ago
Am I the only one unable to open that website ?
dsr_ · 4h ago
It half-opened for me, bogged down, and on re-load crashed the Firefox tab.
ploum · 4h ago
had the same experience, even in private windows without any plugin. People really goes to great length to make sure their text is unreadable for some of their users.
ploum · 2h ago
Funnily enough, it works "great" on Librewolf (with quote around "great" because that design is awful, eating most of the screen estate with a fixed menu)
jmercouris · 5h ago
This design is unstable and expensive to produce with a complicated in wheel transmission. It is novel, but almost certainly more expensive and less reliable than existing designs.
ninalanyon · 4h ago
In wheel gears have been in use for over a century very successfully. I had a Raleigh bicycle with Sturmey Archer gears as a child. It never gave me any trouble, unlike the derailleur gears I had on later bicycles.
But modern hub gears are no longer standard, and relegated to specific use cases.
There's a lot of friction in hub gears (at least the one I rode a decade ago), and fixing them is generally impractical.
puzzlingcaptcha · 1h ago
Shimano Nexus is from 1995. What did you ride twenty years later, in 2015? I call BS on the friction argument.
camtarn · 4h ago
You've not come across hub gears on bikes before, have you? They were pretty much the standard before derailleur gears became popular, and modern ones can have up to 7 speeds.
mrob · 4h ago
Modern ones can have more than 7 speeds. The Rohloff Speedhub has 14 speeds, and the Shimano Alfine is available with either 8 or 11 speeds.
lostlogin · 1h ago
They are so so nice to ride.
I’ve ended up with some electronic road SRAM which is seriously quick in comparison (except for the slow rider), but do miss the smooth internal hub and the stationary gear changes.
jmercouris · 2h ago
I meant the whole design. The hub gear is no different than on any other bicycle and can be reliable.
sn0n · 2h ago
Kids these days would take the unicycle front and just roll around doing their free wheelie thing.
oulipo · 5h ago
Really good looking :)
You should definitely put a repairable Gouach e-bike battery on it haha
https://gouach.com
DocTomoe · 5h ago
Pedals directly on the front wheel means no shifting the chain, which means you better have not skipped leg day if there is even the slightest hill on your route while you are fully loaded.
dmurray · 5h ago
Isn't it the other way around? One revolution of your pedals gets one revolution of the wheel. Normally you'd get several revolutions out of it. So you need to pedal faster than you're used to, but each push is easier. It's like being in a very low gear suitable for climbing hills.
The penny-farthing solved this problem by having a very large wheel.
tokai · 5h ago
>A three-speed gearbox in the hub makes starting easier.
It was not direct drive.
zellyn · 5h ago
It apparently has a gearbox in the hub.
smlacy · 5h ago
Electric motor though?
doctoboggan · 5h ago
The chain is the transmission, and the shifting mechanism works with it. But you can easily have more compact gearboxes directly on the wheel without the need for a chain.
MomsAVoxell · 5h ago
Revive? These things are still in active use all over Europe .. backfiet .. and while they’re fun, they can be exhausting if you overfill them with groceries, kids, roadkill, oilyballs, etc.
There’s a tricked out one in my ‘hood (Vienna) that has electric assist. I guess that’d be practical for a daily ride …
uxp100 · 4h ago
When I look up backfiet I see a typical cargo bike, what the article is discussing is a design where you directly drive the front wheel (with a 3 speed hub in this case). Seems worse, but nifty.
century19 · 4h ago
Bakfiets no? That’s what the Dutch call it and they use them widely. Especially the electric versions you can get nowadays.
micromacrofoot · 4h ago
You can see how it's different from a backfiet though, right? the article describes:
> places the rider directly above the front wheel. They pedal this wheel directly; there's no chain, reducing maintenance needs. A three-speed gearbox in the hub makes starting easier.
> An additional benefit to the two-piece frame is that the bike can be broken down for transport, allowing the user "to load it into a trunk for easy transport from point A to point B."
> Lastly, the company says the shorter wheelbase of their arrangement provides a tighter turning radius, making the bike easier to maneuver in urban environments.
IneffablePigeon · 4h ago
Did your read the article? It’s talking about a totally different design to a standard bakfiet.
This thing is not for Le Tour and you don't go fast on it and you don't go up giant hills on it. That makes a lot of the concerns here go out the window.
These types of bikes shaped objects often have all kinds of issues with trying to use bike parts designed for standard bikes on something that is very different. Issues with needing enormous chains, huge cable runs, etc.. when designers try things like this they are worrying about issues like that more than whether you can climb a mountain on it or stuff it into a corner at high speed without going out of control.
The thing with these is the cost to design & manufacture components that need to be different than normal bikes can be astronomical, so anything they can do to design the frame to use normal components in a normal/non-compromised way pays off in a huge way.
The ideas behind this aren't that different than the Cruzbike being front wheel drive to get rid of a lot of the component/drivetrain issues that recumbent bikes are famous for.
Here's the original: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RuPwRQOUhl4
Here's the reimagined modern version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA7qGYNFuY0
In both cases, the rider effectively sits atop of where the handlebars would be on a traditional trike. You can see in the first video the lads have a hard time keeping all wheels on the ground.
One notable difference between the new model and the old is that they seem to have changed the geometry of the frame so that the driver doesn't lean into the turn (the turning wheel stays upright). They don't demonstrate it in motion very well, but that kind of turn action will tend to throw the rider "out" of the turn, making the trike fall over opposite of the direction of the turn. The old version tends to fall "into" the turn.
I can't think of many advantages to this design, other than the driving unit and cargo are modular. Even then, the rider would not be able to travel without the cargo portion.
Trikes are tricky, they don't go very fast, they don't turn well, and they're wider than most other pedal-powered vehicles, making them hard to use on existing cycle infrastructure.
They really don't make sense in motorcycles, A large part of the point of a motorcycle is that you are willing to give up a lot of comfort and safety in exchange for having a very small nimble personal transport. Nothing wrong with this tradeoff, but why would want a vehicle that takes up the same amount of space as a car that gives you the safety and comfort value of a motorcycle?
Perhaps in the US and western Europe, but tricycle tuk-tuks and cycle rickshaws are extremely common in other parts of the world.
I can easily get mine on two wheels if I take a sharp, fast, turn - but after you do it once you learn the limits and it's a very stable bike.
Two very common models are:
https://www.christianiabikes.com/classic/
https://www.ladcyklen.dk/ladcykel/nihola-ladcykler.html
Durch cargo trikes are generally assumed safer than their two-wheeled alternatives here.
The fun bit is that on three wheels it steers like a car, but on two wheels it steers like a bicycle.
Do you (or anyone I guess) happen to know why? Low speed differential non-drive axles are not that complex, and would sermingly help a lot.
Basically when you turn your trike turns into a bike.
I had a conventional tricycle too, don't recall ever falling over on it, though it could get tippy. You learned to lean to offset that.
https://youtu.be/9LwqIIqysZ0
I've pedaled around on a couple variations of this design. Like everyone who had never ridden one but saw it on the internet, I also confidently imagined it would violently hurl me to the ground at the slightest provocation. I was wrong, which strangely seems to be a pattern for confident opinions I've formed based on things I've only seen on the internet. Having not been for a ride on this particular iteration, I will not post confident opinions about it on the internet.
The best (granted, of two...) version I've tried was semi-recumbent, with a standard geartrain and flevobike-style steering. The steering was a little weird at first, but I quickly figured out how to fully steer it hands free. Fully unloaded it was possible to tip it with hard front braking while turning, if you pitched your body weight into the effort. Loaded, it was absolutely nailed to the ground. You're just a mule winching a load down the road at that point. Sometimes it's fun to be a mule, piloting a weird bike-cart.
It turns out everyone flamewarring about stability on the internet forgot to get mad about drive wheel traction limits when pulling a load uphill. Which for me was a loading consideration rather than a problem. The underseat steering was brilliant for reasons I'd never thought about. But don't take my word for it, ride one and decide for yourself.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130309080557/http://hpm.catore...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAaVXKBamd0
You can even hook up a trailer to it for even more cargo.
We now ride a two wheeled urban arrow. Three wheelers seem incredibly unstable except perhaps for ones with independently pivoting wheels like the babboe carve
Perhaps I should add to this that they're actually super stable at slow speeds, compared to two-wheelers, especially when loaded. My wife prefers a cargo bike to her usual non-cargo bike, I think for this very reason.
I really can’t tell, are you referring to an F-350 or a cargo bike?
Obligatory Top Gear link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8
https://youtu.be/H7w57U3ijHY?si=EWXoYPNVpkwxh-oT
I bet it also feels alien to turn a steering wheel with your feet on bike pedals.
https://cruzbike.com/
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA7qGYNFuY0&t=77s
This idea is absurdly underbaked…other commenters mentioned that it’s going to flip, and it is. Not to mention that no bike shop in the world will know how to work on these things.
There’s lots of reasons that this design died in the 1930’s after a short run.
But…so you know I’m a reasonable guy despite my blithering criticism…I love weird alternative vehicles and I hope that version two of this is a massive success because this world needs more tiny vehicles and fewer 8’ tall Ford F-150’s.
Best of luck!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hub_gear
There's a lot of friction in hub gears (at least the one I rode a decade ago), and fixing them is generally impractical.
I’ve ended up with some electronic road SRAM which is seriously quick in comparison (except for the slow rider), but do miss the smooth internal hub and the stationary gear changes.
You should definitely put a repairable Gouach e-bike battery on it haha https://gouach.com
The penny-farthing solved this problem by having a very large wheel.
It was not direct drive.
There’s a tricked out one in my ‘hood (Vienna) that has electric assist. I guess that’d be practical for a daily ride …
> places the rider directly above the front wheel. They pedal this wheel directly; there's no chain, reducing maintenance needs. A three-speed gearbox in the hub makes starting easier.
> An additional benefit to the two-piece frame is that the bike can be broken down for transport, allowing the user "to load it into a trunk for easy transport from point A to point B."
> Lastly, the company says the shorter wheelbase of their arrangement provides a tighter turning radius, making the bike easier to maneuver in urban environments.