For the past few weeks, John over at Prolly Is Not Probably has been tracking the progress of a high-performance concept bike project between Toyota Prius and Parlee Cycles. The goal of the design project is to blend innovation with sustainability in order to create a highly efficient road bike.
To help celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Prius, Toyota is looking to partner with other like minded companies in the creation of new cutting edge and environmentally sensitive means of transportation. Toyota turned to Parlee Cycles to help design a more aerodynamic bike, by incorporating the best of technology and automotive design.
Called the PXP, the Toyota Prius concept bike frame is all carbon fiber with an integrated braking system to create less drag. Parlee borrowed some ideas from the automotive design world such as integrated lighting, certain aero features and new bike fairings.
Since carbon fiber has its limitations with hole drilling, the project team thought of all the possible ways to remove cables and bosses and make the entire bike wireless. Working with design and development firm Deeplocal, the team took the latest in neuro-electronics and married it with a wireless shifting system to enable your brain to do the shifting for you.
The concept is that you wear a special neuro-sensor helmet that wirelessly transmits your thoughts such as "up", "down", "left" and "right" to the controller on the wireless shifters. The controller electronics have been reprogrammed to accept brain waves instead of manual input. I will be interested to see whether efficiency gains are made not just from doing away with shifter cables, but reducing the lag time between what your brain is thinking and the physical shifting of the gears.
Head on over to Prolly Is Not Probably to follow the progress of the Toyota Prius concept bike project from the start and wait to see the final PXP bike revealed.
