Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Not alone

Before we started the project, we did some pretty thorough googling, but were unable to find any center-hub-steering cargo bikes. Now, within the last month we have found no less than three of them. It is a bit of a bummer not being first, but we'll just have to be cheaper, lighter, faster, stronger, all round nicer and easier to build than the competition.

Here are the bikes we found:

Elian Cycles has created a beautiful bike, featuring a hub design related to what we are designing:

01 Cargo by Elian Cycles
The design and manufacture however is very much a contrast to ours. This is professional craftsmanship, requiring high levels of expertise, while our project follows a 'for dummies, by dummies' approach. Hopefully the prize tag of our bike will also be quite different. The 01 Cargo is listed as costing 3.245 euro. ($ 4.220 / 24.130 dkk)


More in line with our DIY approach, but still requiring specialist skills, is the Sports Utility Bike. The front hub and wheel is that of an Italjet scooter.

The Sports Utility Bike


Last is a bike with the oddly familiar name OpenCargoBike. Like the Sports Utility Bike it has a mono fork-like design. It also has a modular construction, which is related to our way of building, except this seems to require quite a lot of welding.



The OpenCargoBike

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