Yikebikes
From NZ, apparently – though I’ve never seen one:
how the… blinkerty… blue-blazes… god-damnitt…
It’s got lights and indicators and whatnot in the handlebars… which are at seat level… those are a pretty neat innovation. It folds up etc, goes 7-8km on a 30 min charge and has a 20km inbuilt-electronic-emasculation.
There are a couple of videos in the gallery part of the site… there’s one on the front page as well… which is basically an advert, and adverts are facile, manipulative. I’m not interested in advertising.
So there you go. Neat little motor etc. Unfortunately it costs $5k which means it will be about as relevent as the… err… those things with wheels that you stand on… can’t remember the name.
Oh. Yea. I can. Whatever.
The thing with any transport innovation… unless it’s a disruptive innovation, it’s basically just more of the same, and the thing about disruptive innovations is that they pull the carpet from under the incremental-innovations of the status quo…
… by radically changing the economics.
Longbows changed the economics of warfare. This ain’t a longbow. We need a longbow.
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Shelley Noble
Yes, something utterly new and obvious (once we see it done). Q: what prompted the rise of the longbow?
Sep 2nd, 2009
Nick Taylor
Ermm… a couple of things I suspect
1) The English/Welsh new how to make them, and had the materials
2) They had the sort of social setup where the huge amount of training that was necessary happened… I think at one point – under Edward the 1st? John? It was actually illegal to play football rather than train with a bow.
Hundreds of years later Wellington decided he might like to try squads of longbowmen against Napolean… and was basically told he couldn’t do it, because it takes years, if not a lifetime of training. There basically wasn’t anyone in the military strong enough to deal with a Plantagenant-era longwbow.
–
then came crossbows, guns… each of which were winners because of the reduced learning curve. Early guns were actually less powerful than crossbows at the time… but you could get a man on the field with a fraction of the investment… and so it went. Economics.
These days we’re fighting wars in other people’s countries – blowing up a $5 tent with a million dollar cruise-missile, and trying to pretend we’re winning. We ain’t.
Sep 3rd, 2009
Reply to “Yikebikes”