https://vhelio.org/

I personally think it could be a great alternative to cars and bikes for those who need to take a whole family somewhere or a decent amount of stuff.

Only modifications I would make would be ride-by-wire and an extra set of pedals (so you can have two people pedalling without the annoyance of normal tandem bikes having to pedal at the same rate), and a more powerful motor (only 250W is legal in France, where this was designed, whereas 500W is legal here in Canada)

    • Fried_out_Kombi@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      Judging from this video, you could probably fit 4 or 5 in a standard car parking space. Obviously takes more room than a bike, but tbh I see these more as a car-replacement vehicle than a bike-replacement vehicle. Plus, these would weigh so much less than cars that it would probably be waaaay more cost-effective to build vertical parking garages for these things (like the ones in the Netherlands for bikes) than for cars.

  • stoy@lemmy.zipEnglish
    4·
    11 months ago

    Honestly?

    Seems kinda dumb, batteries weigh a lot, so I would assume that most of the energy used here is just to move the batteries along.

    The solar panels panels provide highly limited ammount of recharging.

    Having to pedal to make it go means needing either a generator or a transmission, both quite heavy, wasting more energy.

    I would get rid of the pedal part, and just use it as an electrical cart.

    The solar panels are not totally crap, they will be able to provide some charging when everything else fails.

    I would rather see a concept I saw in Taiwan, where they have electical mopeds with quick change batteries, the range would be lower, but you would just go to a charge point, check in your used batteries to recharge and checkout freshly charged batteries.

  • u/unhappy_grapefruit_2@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    It looks flimsy as fuck I would not want to drive one of these plus considering they’ve got only four seats no protection from the outdoors and from crashes and no where to store any items there isn’t much in the way of practicality as well something like this would probably fail in an instant

  • litchralee@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    11 months ago

    This seems to be in answer of a very narrow use-case. Supposing this seats four people, the same could be achieved with four ebikes with the benefit that each could go their own way at any point.

    Size-wise is not too concerning to me, being only 2 meters long by 0.85 meters wide. That’s about the width of a tricycle but longer, so it might still fit into bike lanes and many bike racks. The 80 kg curb weight is somewhat alarming though, due to the risk of this large machine impacting a pedestrian with its many metal surfaces.

    This is also remarkable for the use-case it doesn’t seem to enable: disabled mobility. Other designs for minicar-esque things have been deployed in the Netherlands that are smaller than this, to efficiently move a single individual with reduced mobility, while meshing with the rest of the public.

    In lieu of this machine, I would rather like to see laws loosened to allow a family of four to firmly couple their ebikes together single-file. This essentially becomes a bicycle train, with all the attendant efficiency gains. Cargo needs are still better served by cargo tricycles, like what UPS and DHL have deployed in urban areas worldwide.

    TL;DR: I’m not seeing the killer feature here