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Video: This electric bike with two articulated front wheels promises adventures for people with reduced mobility
2024 Author: Nicholas Abramson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-10 16:34
Orange Mountain Bikes is a British mountain bike company that just launched a solution for people with reduced mobility can continue to enjoy the descents through their own means.
For this he has created this wild Phase AD3 with double fork, triple wheel and bucket seat. A extreme bike which was devised by engineer Alex Desmond to solve the problems of Lorraine Truong, a professional mountain biker.
Orange Phase AD3: adaptable to accelerate on its own or as a pedaling assistant
A tragic injury while downhill on a mountain bike led Lorraine Truong to live with an injury that reduced her body movement, having to use a wheelchair. After that injury, his love for mountain descent and, above all, for bicycles did not disappear.
On the contrary, it served as inspiration to find alternatives to the "adapted bicycles" that already existed on the market. Such was his insistence that he met Alex Desmond, an engineer who already had manufactured several prototypes of mountain bikes that tried to respond to that need for freedom on the part of users with reduced mobility, but who did not find the answer in adapted bicycles.
After testing some first prototypes on the Swiss trails that passed near Alex's house, Lorraine was delighted with his proposal. A proposal that reached the ears of Orange Mountain Baike through her and that almost immediately they contacted him, not only to support his solution, but to hire him. A proposal that he could not refuse.
This is how we came to know the current Phase AD3, an adaptive bicycle designed to provide independent mobility to its users by feeling like a conventional bicycle. To achieve this, it uses a geometry in its front end similar to that of the Piaggio MP3 scooter. That is to say, it applies a double articulated suspension formed by a central spring Float X2 signed by Fox joined to two independent Fox 38 forks.
Thanks to this articulated suspension, the bicycle can make direction changes "lying down" like a motorcycle but without losing the adherence of any of its wheels with the ground. A solution that gives stability both in curve and in static, as it can maintain the upright position by itself as in the Italian scooter.
Its saddle has been replaced by a "bucket" type seat that increases the central stability of the user to maintain balance when stopped. To get around it uses a Paradox Kinetics eMTB Motor with 150 Nm of torque and a power of 1.5 kW with peaks of up to 2 kW, although according to reports this exaggerated power has been achieved to offer specific benefits to Lorraine.
The lithium thruster, housed in the bottom bracket, is powered by a 504 Wh battery capacity. A figure that gives you a fairly reduced range of 25 kilometers or 700 meters of technical climbing. However, it has removable batteries that can be transported 100% charged in a bag for replacement as they run out.
In addition, to adapt to any type of reduced mobility, the motor can be operated with a hose / grip throttle or as a pedaling assistant, it all depends on the person using it. The total cost of making this bike with the most premium components was approximately £ 17,000, which equates to about 15,000 euros currently.
Despite the revolutionary idea, it will not go on sale yet. In the words of Alex Desmond: "We will build them in small batches. We are trying to know the demand to know how many to manufacture in the first batch […] We have not yet signed any specifications. The design is modular, which means that we can offer customization based on needs."
For her part, Lorraine Truong has conveyed a few words about how she feels when she takes a bike like this: "I didn't want to ride an adapted bike just to say I was riding a bike, I wanted a bike that could give me back the excitement of riding on tracks. technical and challenging, and that could handle both natural trails and bike parks. The AD3 is truly everything you could hope for. The feeling I get when I ride is like a normal bike and thanks to the bucket seat my brain can cope with everything. I feel so lucky, it's hard to describe."
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