Motorised Bicycles.

The police in New Zealand appear to have laser-speed trap eyes that can catch kids riding bikes too fast, and have pulled over someone travelling at what they confidently claim was 75Km/h down a hill. I’m not saying that this is impossible (it’s about 45mph and therefore within reach on a steep hill for a good cyclist) but it seems slightly unlikely, and apparently seems to have been judged solely on the guesswork of the police officer involved.

One answer might have been that the man in question was riding a bicycle with an engine as demonstrated by Jeff Amett. His company attaches 2-stroke engines to bicycles and then offers the chance to either pedal your now extremely heavy bike, or use the engine. I can guess what gets the most use. The trouble is that this isn’t really that exciting. I mean, it’s like taking an invention that already exists quite successfully and popularly and then pretending to invent it all over again. My advice is if you want a bicycle, buy a bicycle and if you want a two wheeled vehicle with an engine then there are many many options available to you, all of which look far better and are more suited to the task than retrofitting a small petrol engine to a pushbike.

If you really must try and ignore the existence of something better suited to the task than your bodged job on a crappy bicycle frame, then at least destroy a bad bicycle. I simply despair at the thought of anyone custom building a carbon frame, and then making it the opposite of what it should be. At least there’s no-one at any respected top end frame builder who would entertain that idea. Oh.

It’s not even like you can achieve the mad speeds reported from New Zealand, further reading has confirmed that these conversions end up with a top speed of around 30mph. It hardly seems worth the effort.

Just to illustrate my point (and be slightly topical) here is one way that the technology for two wheels and an engine has developed. I think you’ll agree it’s somewhat more impressive than Mr Amett’s video?



Now, back to bicycles without engines.

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