Out With the Old

Invercargill inventor Grant Ryan, 40, unveiled his YikeBike- an electric 10kg mini penny-farthing for the 21st century- at the Eurobike international trade show in Friedrichshafen, Germany. The Daily Mail’s Paul Harris takes the bike for a spin declaring that though “it might look like a collision between a praying mantis and a child’s scooter; it’s the result of five years of work to reinvent the wheel.” “True, it takes a little while to get used to riding it, especially if you’ve been raised on the kind of configuration that has so far proved perfectly adequate for everyone from Miss Marple to Sir Chris Hoy. But there’s one word which summarises the sensation of blatting along so quickly and so effortlessly on this rather clever piece of engineering: Yikes! Why change a design which has been around since Victorian times and is preferred by an estimated billion cyclists around the world? ‘We’re not trying to compete with traditional bikes,’ Ryan says. ‘We aimed to produce an electric bike that was portable, lightweight, compact, practical and fun. We wanted something you could ride to the bus stop in the morning, take to the office and charge up under your desk.'” Ryan went to Southland Boys’ High School, graduating runner-up to dux before completing a degree in engineering and PhD in ecological economics at Canterbury University.