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Comment by frereubu | Hacker News Reader

I love this in principle, but the one thing I always wonder about recumbent bicycles is how visible they are to lorries / trucks. I've seen some with a tall aerial-like stem and a flag on top of it, but knowing how bicycles can be pretty invisible to cars even when wearing a reflective top at their eye height, I think I'd always be anxious about being crushed from behind. I suppose that says a lot about cycling infrastructure in the UK in terms of being forced to ride on the same road as massive lorries.

Edit: Actually, looking at the official site - https://twike.com/en/home/ - it's bigger than it seemed to me at first, so perhaps not as bad as recumbent bikes.

Edit 2: Blimey, they're expensive - "The new vehicle price for a TWIKE 5 shall be between 39.900 € and 49.900 € (sales price in Germany, incl. 19% VAT, depending on the battery equipment)."

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Ah, so they just multiplied the ridiculous cost of bicycles by the ridiculous cost of electric cars. Brilliant.

That would have units of money^2 and wouldn't type-check. You'd have to do something like a geometric mean or choose a money-valued scale, like the price of a smug bumper sticker, to divide by.

divide it by 1€

Wow, that is expensive for such a simple design.

I live in the Netherlands and these are too fast for bicycle paths and too unsafe for regular roads. Love the idea, but we would need much cheaper mass production and a completely different road infrastructure.

I used to live in NL, so I know the paths you mean, and the same applies here in Switzerland. But in Switzerland they instead plate them as cars and drive them on regular roads, keeping up/competing with automobile traffic. These are not uncommon here despite their cost and moderate practicality, probably because their cost relative to salary is lower than elsewhere in Europe.

Wow. For that price, you can easily buy an electric car.

Or ten used ICE's.

Or 50 good e-bikes.

Or 100 good regular bikes.

Or 500 cheap secondhand bikes.

Good ebikes for 1k? I think "good" starts at 2k.

Well i would say with a speed of about 120km/h and the range of 150km in the most basic configuration (max with 190km/h and 500km range) the Twike more or less IS an electric car^^.

Yeah, but for less than 30k € you can already get a Renault Zoe with a speed of 145 km/h and a range of almost 400 km (52 kWh battery).

At the price of 50k €, you're in the Tesla Model 3 range.

For all practical purposes bicycles and motorcycles are invisible to drivers. FortNine has an amusing video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x94PGgYKHQ0

My personal experience, after years as a courier on both upright, recumbent, and motorcycles is that I am more "visible" on a recumbent then the other options because I'm "weird" enough to make it into a drivers consciousness...

None of this is ofcourse scientifically relevant data.

It's strange that this is a meme, because my experience is the opposite: as a motorist, bicycles are the most visible things around. As a cyclist, I see cars react to me every time I'm close enough to them that it's relevant. They're clearly aware of me.

My theory is that cyclists become invisible in areas where the roads force them to mix with cars. Where I live, they rarely mix, so when they do, it's an unusual event that promotes itself to your attention.

Either way, it backs up the idea that weirdness counts for a lot.

In areas with separated bike lanes traffic mixing usually happens in slower speed areas. This greatly reduces the chance that a small vehicle like a bicycle gets lost in the saccades.

The twike is not much smaller than a small car, and perhaps even a bit bigger than a Smart ForTwo... so, no real problem here... and i can asure you: If there is one of those around, they HAVE the attention of any driver around them ;-)

The wheelbase might not be smaller than a small car, but it definitely looks like its height is much smaller. One could still imagine it being invisible to a person in an SUV staring at their phone.

The benefit for safety for this is that it is large enough fast enough to move with traffic on most city streets, so won't be getting sideswiped into the gutter by passing cars regularly.

40 thousand euro?

That's insane and offensive.

There is an actual car in India that retails for 1/8th the price.

For 20k you could pay someone to build you a custom of the same vehicle and have money left over.

It almost seems like a conspiracy to make eco friendly transportation seem expensive.

I've wondered how feasible it is to add an automated detection system to a bike that makes a loud noise/light show when it detects a vehicle is driving towards you.

Is radar enough? Would it take too much power?

Garmin's Varia product line does this.

https://www.garmin.com/en-US/c/sports-fitness/cycling-bike-c...

I do prefer a decent mirror though. Radar can't tell me what a car is doing, what it is, if a bicyclist is approaching, if my friend stopped to fix a flat, etc.

I was about to post that same link :)

> one thing I always wonder about recumbent bicycles is how visible they are to lorries / trucks

I'd be worried about any vehicle that isn't a Twike. These would not fair well in accident.

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