When it comes to inventions for the terminally lazy, this one takes the bakery. The Panasonic Lithium Vivi RX-10S is the world’s first, and hopefully last, battery powered bicycle. Proof once again that regardless of how smart the human race is, we are doomed by our own stupidity.
Let me explain something to you bike makers/innovators - When you have a vehicle powered by a fast depleting natural resource, it is a really good idea to find alternative, and possibly more environment friendly ways to power it before we are condemned to live a dead, slow moving and polluted world. But when you have something as simple, green and easily powered as the bicycle, why do you have to change it and fuck the whole thing up. One may argue (if one were an idiot) that less power would be consumed to travel further distance in shorter periods of time. But if one wanted to do that, one would buy a car, or ride the bus, or take the local trains or, if the mind is willing, invent a teleportation system. The USP of most bicycles is that you have to peddle hard to get them moving, thus allowing you to get from point A to point B smoothly while burning energy and keeping fit. It’s a form of exercise! Adding a battery to it just lowers the peddling required without increasing speed, therefore lowering the energy you burned while peddling while also increasing your chances of destroying or poisoning yourself via the explosive, toxic lithium ion battery.
But if you think this is next greatest invention since the automatic ice cream licker, go ahead and buy it. But as you lay there on your couch, clutching your chest as your heart gives out because of the enormous amounts of fat clogging your arteries I hope that my voice is ringing in your ears, screaming out “I told you so!”.
