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.

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.

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.

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.

Please excuse my hacker-newsyness…

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!

Really good looking :)

You should definitely put a repairable Gouach e-bike battery on it haha https://gouach.com

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.

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.

It's totally mad and impractical; I love it!

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.

Lol @ what appears to be paddle shifters or paddle brakes [0] under a steering wheel on a bike??

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA7qGYNFuY0&t=77s

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 …