The Yikebike – the world’s first commercially available transportation appliance - www.gizmag.com

The Intermot motorcycle and bicycle fair rolled around in Cologne earlier this month with a lot of focus clearly beginning to shine on the area of electric bikes, scooters, bicycles and even smaller devices.

The highlight for me was getting a ride on the Yikebike, a tiny electric mini-farthing which is the world’s first commercially available vehicle to be small enough to warrant a new category – it’s the first commercially available transportation appliance.

Just as computers have had to be continually redefined by category from desktop to laptop to netbook to tablet, transportation devices of the future are likely to proliferate in the space between a pedestrian and a motorcycle.

Currently, there’s a lot of development activity going on in this area by mobility manufacturers across the world but very little has actually reached market just yet. Dean Kamen’s Segway will one day be seen as the very first of this entire wave of mobility devices, but the Segway weighs in at 50kg plus, and such devices will become increasingly compact and light weight and quite a few such devices will be available a decade from now at the extreme lightweight end of the market – my suggestion is that to qualify as an transportation appliance, a device must be 10kg or less and fold to a size manageable for carrying.

Honda’s U3-X (U3-X video here) and Toyota’s Winglet would both fit into the rough definition of this category above as they too weigh in at 10kg or less, but the big difference is that the Yikebike does 25 km/h, at least twice as fast as that celebrated duo, and the Yikebike is available NOW!

It weighs so little and folds so small it can be carried in one hand and can be easily managed on a train or bus by even a child – it weighs less than 10 kilograms thanks to its economical design and carbon fiber construction. Just how important the Yikebike becomes in the future is going to be interesting to watch. It is the smallest viable transportation device yet invented and it has the added advantage of being similar enough to the bicycle that 75% of the learning to ride it is already done. Noel McKeegan, Gizmag’s editorial director is featured in the video in his first two minutes on the Yikebike and apart from a quick wiggle as he rewired his brain to the steering, you’ll see how quickly he picked it up. In short though, this is a very significant product as it’s commercially available, you can buy direct from the manufacturers over the internet and we’ll have a lot more detail in a feature video in the next week.