7bicycles

I freely admit from an manufacturing perspective it is somewhat impressive

Picture from the german wiki article

Being fast on a bicycle has a lot to do with aerodynamics so you go build an aero chassis around a recumbent and bam, fast as fuck boy.

If you do 200 Watts on a regular bicycle on a windless flat and a regular road, you're looking at going about 30kph. With this? 50kph. Obviously generalizing a lot here but you get the point.

They suck ass on hills though, because they weigh ~30kg with the chassis. not so much a problem in motion on the flat, kind of sucks uphill where aero doesn't matter. From my experience you don't see a lot of e-bike variants so far because with EU regulations the motor'd cut out at the speed you'd go for a leisurely ride on a normal bicycle, but maybe it'd be interesting to make them more hillclimbing capable.

Fun fact: in 1968 some dude did 100kph in this with by himself with no outside help.

Chassis are usually some sort carbon fibre or fiberglass and built monocoque, which means you better not ding them babies because repairs are gonna be expensive as fuck.

Prices run around 10k€ and then up to whatever you feel like paying for a new one. But they do look like old timey racecars which is fun. From personal experience of having chatted up a few of the local velomobile riders I feel like there's about a 50:50 split between buying one and somebody going fully "dad in the shed" and just building the entire thing from scratch

carbrain is "this is the fault of 3 million parallel, separated, individual actors" a lot

Now I was willing to accept this if you wanted something special. Mud tyres or spikes or combination road / gravel tyres or even doing 45° angle corner leans at 80kph down Alpe d'Huez or whatever but surely, SURELY, for just going A to B in an paved enviroment it wouldn't matter?

Yeah no turns out the premium shit does feel great and rolls better. I can never return.

I jest, of course. Become xbikers

this is in jest, it's the top comment to this post

just blew all my PRs after a few small beers and lynrd skynyrd

not much to tell beyond the picture. Some of them are hand cranked, others include e-motors with throttle either because there's legal modes for it or maybe you're at a bikepark where usual public regs against that don't apply.

Mostly niche-builds, so custom things adapted to specific customers or small scale lines

that's it that's the post

The discussion is an enduring internet classic of people who have seen horses in The Last of Us ascribing near magical powers to it vs. everyone who ever worked with horses saying this is the worst idea imaginable which is fun.

I'm posting this here on account of the amusing amount of comments that presuposse a horse is a car that runs on dirt and just self heals broken bones

EDIT: Bonus points for "a horse can carry so much more" which is demonstably untrue unless you want the poor thing to die real early or strap a cart to it, at which point you have both horse and bicycle problems

To be fair they also plan to dissect it, you know try and figure out why it did strand, put the skeleton in a museum and such but still: certified germany moment.