This "Electric SnowBike Kit" by the Canadian firm ENVO lets you replace the back wheel of your bike with a powered snowmobile-style tread, and the front with a snowboard.
The upshot is just delightfully bonkers, as the action in that video will attest.
Granted, kitting out the whole bike with the treads, board and battery will cost about $2,400 USD, and as The Next Web notes, it has some limitations …
According to Envo, the snowbike kit has a top speed of 11 mph, which is good going for snow. But sadly, because of how hard it is traveling across snow, its range is just six miles.
It then takes eight hours to charge the battery, which is, um, not that practical. There's no sign if it can be fast-charged.
I don't care, I'm still giving these folks 12/10 for engineering, would ride again.
It's weird, sure, but having grown up in Canada I can tell you that the winter makes everyone in Canada pretty damn weird. Winter begins early and goes for a loonnnnng time, and eventually you've gone all The Shining from being cooped up all the time, such that attaching tank treads to the back of a bike begins to make eminent sense. I mean <quizzical look at your puzzled expression> of course you're gonna that, right?
A couple of years ago while visiting my family in Northern Ontario for Christmas, we went to my in-law's farm and he had an old sofa he didn't need anymore, so we dragged it into the snow and covered it in gas and set it on fire. My nephew was using a snowmobile to tow a friend around at high speed, so we built a snow ramp and his friend would go careening off the ramp dangerously close to the flames. I took a great photo of his friend arcing through the air with the sofa — now apocalyptically aflame — right behind and below him, but alas I can't seem to locate that photo again.
In retrospect, burning a sofa probably released enough toxins to appear on a pie-chart of Ontario's annual emissions, so, not exactly a brainiac move. But like I said, Canadian winter makes you odd.
I leave you with "The Snowmobile Song" by Canadian country icon — and ultra weird dude himself — Stompin' Tom Connors.
(That photo of the snowbike courtesy ENVO)
