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The motorcycle of the future is so safe riders can cruise without helmet—all of the thrills with none of the danger—according to BMW.
The German automaker unveiled on Tuesday its Motorrad Vision Next 100, a sleek, self-balancing prototype the company released as part of its 100th anniversary celebrations.
The zero-emissions bike has self-balancing wheels designed to stand upright even at a complete stop, stability that the company says will allow riders to forgo riding a helmet.
"Its self-balancing system will help protect the rider at any time," said Edgar Heinrich, the design director of BMW's motorcycle division. "Any late reaction from the driver will trigger and the vehicle will balance out."
"In the future, motorcycle riders will be able to enjoy riding without protective gear."
The TRON light cycle is almost here.
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Thursday October 13 2016, @03:21PM
I've only ever laid a bike down once, and it wasn't really intentional.
Exactly my point. If you ride enough, you will crash. It's not something you can plan or schedule, it just happens. Even if you are very careful, you can't control the cars or predict wet leaves or black ice. I used to know a lot of people who rode. Some even rode with, um, groups of like minded individuals as it were. They all had personal crash stories and were witnesses to many more. One, where the stabilized bike would not matter, was when a friend was sent over the handlebars from being intercepted by part of a car. In his case, he tucked and rolled like a ball a ways down the road. When he got up and started walking back towards the scene accident, the car driver panicked and drove off. Leaving him with a wrecked bike. Even though there was no serious damage to him, he still wasn't quite right for a month or two. Another friend dodged a car that came at him, but it sent him into the path of two trucks, which he also dodged but which set him on some gravel at a tight curve near a drop. He went off the road into a tree, followed by the bike. Then he fell and then the bike fell too and landed on him. He lived but spend many weeks in the hospital. That's just two out of many.
Yeah, the plural of anecdotes is not data, but in neither case would a stabilized bike have helped, and without helmets either one would have been quite dead. And without other protective gear, many other cases I heard about would have been much worse. No one I knew got road rash, at least not bad enough to complain, but then they never went riding in short and a t-shirt, as one sometimes sees these days, but always had proper leathers even in the summer.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Thursday October 13 2016, @04:31PM
This. I've put mine down twice, both times to avoid a collision w/ a deer. I've had some close calls in traffic but after riding a while you start to recognize a potentially dangerous situation and learn how to best make yourself seen, or even avoid them altogether.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Friday October 14 2016, @12:12AM
i wonder if deer aren't a bigger problem than we generally know...
hell, they take out enough cars as it is...
(not to mention, the factoid -if you didn't know- that deer are the number one killer of human beans on the planet...
not poisonous snakes, not hippos, not crocs, not sharks, but bambi... true story...)
since we don't let cougars and wolves do their thing, the deer overrun a LOT of places like rats...
it is scary enough to imagine hitting one with a regular vehicle, taking one on with a motorcycle sounds like a thousand kinds of hurt...
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Friday October 14 2016, @01:19AM
Both times it was dark out. The 1st was around 12:30am, I came around a curve and he was just standing in the middle of the road. I went into the ditch, but couldn't coax the bike back up out of it and went down. I wasn't going fast and was OK. Bike was banged up but I was able to ride home. Second time it was about 6am and foggy, it jumped out of the road on my left and then turned and sort-of ran along side me a little bit, in the other lane for oncoming traffic, then turned and jumped back the way he came. I was startled by the suddenness of it that I again hit the ditch on the right side instinctively trying to avoid it. Luckily there was a ditch at that spot b/c the road was on top of a hill, and there's a stretch of road just before that spot w/ a guardrail and steep drop-off. It took some time to swallow my heart back down after that one. I was a little banged up but OK, and was able to limp the bike home.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.