CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 16years old!
Well done to ALL posters
It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
RULES No personal insults. No swearing.
And is a car.
Of course.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14060276
"Push the wheel - which is more of an iPad-inspired joystick - forward and it surges ahead into a sprint at speeds of 25mph (40km/h) or more, depending on how the computer is programmed, delivering a 25 mile (40km) range per charge.
Travelling at such speeds may seem hazardous, given that the car has been designed without bumpers, air bags or any other conventional crash protection devises."
"
The EN-V is basically a widened Segway, enclosed in a bubble
"
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Oh dear lord. I saw a Segway, for the first time, while I was on vacation on Cape Cod. I have to admit, there was a real temptation to push it over just to watch it's self-righting capabilities, like a Weeble or something.
Sheesh. There's so much in that article to ridicule. Okay, so there are some benefits (specifically for possible disabled users, as mentioned in the piece), but going on about it being small and light so easy to take on a train, or small enough to park easily, or being capable of 25mph (but obviously being dangerous because it has no airbags)... That's all just a 'bicycle' isn't it?
"That's all just a 'bicycle' isn't it? "
You have to hand it to them - any idiot can reinvent the wheel. Only the really special can reinvent two..
Ah, but with a bicycle you're not completely enclosed, and thus exposed to dangerous fresh air and inspiring breezes.
Wonder if the segway technology could be adapted to suit an inline wheel application...
You could run a much more aerodynamic bodyshell (more speed/range), and lean into corners for comfort, then enable the magic balancing trick only at low speeds, thus saving the power required to run it and making the whole thing more efficient (and gaining, again, more speed/range)... and it would be a "proper" two wheeler ;-))
Making it single track would disable it from being able to use the wheels to regain fore/aft balance so it would need the ability to waggle its wheels to allow it to either scuttle sideways or allow the wheels to tilt left/right relative to the body of the vehicle (to shift the CoG relative to the centre of rotation) to regain port/starboard balance.
If it was able to switch between having the wheels parallel (for low speeds) and inline/single track mode (for higher speeds) it'd be a bit more Q-worthy.
Still not as fancy as the adaptive-tread monowheel thing Iain (M) Banks mooted in Against a Dark Background.
Ahh, that makes sense, clearly I hadn't thought about *how* the thing balances lol
(wanders away blushing)
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