Check out Discovery channel show that describes the YikeBike in detail
http://www.yikebike.com/site/gallery/video/yikebike-discovery-channel

If you want to know why it doesn’t make you fat check out
http://yikebike.com/site/blog/surely-yikebike-will-make-you-fat

There are over 25 million electric bicycles sold in the world and the YikeBike is about half the weight and a third the size of any other folding electric bike meaning it can be taking on trains, buses, cars and never left out side to be stolen. The YikeBike was on the cover of Time magazine as one of the Best Inventions of the Year for a reason
http://yikebike.com/site/blog/yikebike-cover-time-magazine

YikeBike CEO
Grant Ryan

Uber-bikes are a special class of design porn, trying to improve a very nearly perfect machine, barely ever workable (let alone saleable). What is it about bikes that draws designers to them?

That said, my mom and grandparents should totally get one each.

For a little more, I could buy a car an put an electric motor in it.

And it’s free.

This makes the target audience for this kind of junk to be rich environmentalist who live in a place without public transportation or bad weather, but are only a few miles from work and have no desire to live healthy and just ride a bike. Um, yeah. Have fun with that target audience.

“Ideal for short-hop commuters who are too lazy to pedal a bicycle.”
Now I’m just thinking about how I would face disapproving glares and insults from scores of ableist jerks along my travels. Thanks for the heads-up before I contemplated spending money on something like this.

And they wouldn’t be too lazy to peddle this….why?

and 3K buys a helluva bicycle.

I say this as a man upon whose walls hangs a Greenspeed GTO trike (which I rode about the U.S. for four months accompanied by trailer and solar mad science) and a 1993 Specialized Epic Pro carbon fiber road bike that I rebuilt with original-spec parts. (They don’t just hang there, either, that’s how I get around.) I’ve also got an HP Velotechnik Street Machine stashed in the shed at mum’s because I’ve run out of wall space.

I mean, come on people! This is the sort of thing that will eventually lead to fucking hoverboards, just dig it already.

I’ve fired this link off to several people who are in the same situation as me, even though I also doubt they’ll go for the “lazy” remark as well…

And that’s without going into the sheer idiocy of trying to replace a century-old model of perfect human transport, one that utilizes the human engine of heart, lungs, and legs, with a faddish redesign of the same that utilizes unnecessary supplemental energy to make it work. No thanks!

@_OM_: there’s really no reason for you to take offence, you either misread the comment or missed the point.

Don’t call something that connects with someone’s bottom a “…farthing” it sounds too much like… well you know, *snicker*

Given the inventor seems keen to license the technology cheaply, and to multiple manufacturers, economies of scale ought to bring the price down closer to existing electric bicycles (that is, if turns out to be popular.).