$20 Cardboard Bicycle Could 'Change The World,' Inventor Says

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/10/15/162949884/for-about-20-cardboard-bicycle-could-change-the-world-inventor-says

by rileycrane • 14 years ago

107 82 14 years ago

npr.org

antonioevans• 14 years ago

Very cool use of materials. I could totally see this mass produced for children learning how to ride bikes and even cities testing out the "share-a-bike" program.

quantumhobbit• 14 years ago

I immediately thought of some sort of share a bike program or better yet disposable bikes. For $20 visitors to a city could buy a bike ride it for a week or so then recycle the cardboard, assuming the cardboard is recyclable after whatever treatments it goes through.

Although I doubt the $20 estimate without a way to automate production. The video made it seem like a fairly labor intensive practice.

ramchip2• 14 years ago

But... why not just lend regular, cheap bikes and reuse them? Reuse is a lot less expensive than recycling.

I visited a city last week (Matsumoto) that has this service, they lend cheap city bikes for free by the day. Not even an ID card needed, you just write your name and phone number and go. It's a fantastic service when visiting.

beering• 14 years ago

You can already find real bikes for $20 in parts of the world like China. Since the article doesn't say so, I guess that this bike has to be quite a bit cheaper to make than $20 for it to be worthwhile, but then it'll be the labor costs that outweigh the material costs by far.

marknutter• 14 years ago

I'd wager he point isn't really the cost, it's that recycled materials are being used.

reportingsjr2• 14 years ago

Metals are much easier to recycle than paper products.

To recycle metals you might need to do a bit of pre-processing, grind up everything a bit, and throw it in a crucible to melt it down. 100% recyclable and the same as new when recast.

To recycle paper you have to make sure everything is sorted (no plastic, metal, etc in with your paper) and do a good amount of chemical processing and the end result isn't as easily like "new" paper.

I don't see how this gives cardboard the edge in recycled materials use for a bike.

pbreit3• 14 years ago

Let's say it costs $15 to make using third world labor. Is that your objection?

wtvanhest• 14 years ago

The cheapest brake pads available for bikes cost about $4.99 or roughly 25% of the cost of what he says this bike could cost. So how exactly can you build the remainder of a bike for $15.01?

It doesn’t make any sense at all.

At the end of the day, everyone would be better off if no one built cheap bikes, and they only built high quality bikes that people would resell in a used market as they got older. Riding a cheap bike is at best uncomfortable and at worst dangerous.

[Added] Bicycle frames last for 20+ years, it doesn't seem like the environment is really a factor here whatsoever.

dmm• 14 years ago

Plus bike frames are made from steel or aluminum, both completely recyclable materials.

recursive• 14 years ago

When you talk about the cheapest brake pads available, are you talking about consumer price from a retailer?

Anechoic• 14 years ago

Bicycle frames last for 20+ years

That's conservative - my mom has (steel) bike frames hanging in her garage that date back to the 1970's that are in great shape and they've barely been maintained in the interim. I'm guessing a well-maintained frame could last for 50 years.

reportingsjr2• 14 years ago

Over the summer my brother lent me his bike to use for a month or two. It is a 1974 Gitane racing/road bike, so nearly 40 years old, and it was still in fantastic shape. Practically zero visible rust, frame was still decently straight, etc. (I did have to replace a plastic gear in the derailleur)

dlhavema• 14 years ago

My niece was given the little red bicycle my mom learned to ride a bike on after my dad refinished it, the frame was great, just the aesthetics needed touching up. This bike is in the running for 60 or 70+ years, which is probably not an uncommon occurrence..

squeed• 14 years ago

No kidding. I've worked with a few people who have done bicycle advocacy in West Africa (through the awesome https://bikesnotbombs.org/). They learned that West Africa is awash in cheap used bike frames - it's about the only part of the bike that is eternally repairable. Instead, the finer parts eventually get chewed up and need to be replaced. Things like ball bearings, derailleurs, chains, and tires eventually die. Wheels last a long time, but also have a limited life.

This project (and other ones I've seen, like bamboo bikes) generally only create bike frames, the one part that won't really help the developing world.

To the cardboard bike's credit, the wheels are pretty cool. Find a way to make brake pads, chains, tubes, and tires from locally sourced or recycled materials, and you'll really be on to something!

barrkel• 14 years ago

Quality bikes get resold after being stolen. Theft is the biggest reason, IMO, why cheap bikes are important.

Comfort on a bike, on well-maintained paved road, is mostly a matter of ergonomics - measurements, essentially.

Safety on a bike is mostly a matter of maintenance and fairly basic requirements of the materials and construction. Can it stop when you want it to? Will it stop suddenly when you don't want it to? Will the frame remain the same shape for the lifetime of the bike? Are the fasteners secure? This stuff isn't expensive and doesn't need to be.

I personally would never spend more than 200 USD equivalent on a new bike as a practical form of transport. Any more than that and thinking about security starts to dominate use, creating anxiety wherever you've chained it up, etc.

Oh, and cheapest brake pads? Here are some sold in the UK, free delivery, for 3.84 USD equivalent: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B002VWP0FK

Too expensive? Here are some sold from Hong Kong, free delivery again, for 1.92 USD equivalent (half the price): http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270...

I'm fairly sure you could get these for a tenth the price buying them in bulk further upstream.

pbreit3• 14 years ago

That's your objection? The $20 version is a fixie. What's your next objection?

DanBC• 14 years ago

A neat idea. I'm gently worried about how good it is to ride.

Give people a bike that rides well and they're likely to continue to ride it. Give people a bike that they don't like and they're not going to ride that bike, and will be less likely to ride any bike in future.

Still good luck to them. Some places have horrific road accident death rates so getting people out of cars, off mopeds, and onto bicycles could help.

rileycrane• 14 years ago

Check out the video. It actually seems like a nice ride https://vimeo.com/37584656

debacle2• 14 years ago

Really overstated headline from NPR - that seems to be a trend lately.

Regardless, I don't think the cardboard bike is going to change the world. People have been experimenting with cardboard bikes for years, and they've never caught on.

Vivtek• 14 years ago

Yeah: "<amazing headline claim>, inventor says" is the first sentence, and my heart fell.

krosaen• 14 years ago

more on this from the TQ:

http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21567200-...

utopkara• 14 years ago

Consider this as a demonstration of cardboard as a material, not that of a bike.

Now, if we are to prefer cardboard bikes for their environmental friendliness, we would probably want to look at what else is used to make the material strong. If it only works in combination with a bunch of toxic glues and solvents, then one will need tons of marketing to create a hype with smoke and mirrors to cover up that part of the picture.

I am excited about this project though. Because, in the end, even if we don't get a $20 bike, we might get the knowledge of converting cardboard into a cheap and easy to shape material we can play with at home for our own projects.

tjic4• 14 years ago

There is a trend that cuts through the industrial design world (you can see a new instance of it pop online every few hours) - the idea that the regular market economy is missing the boat on some GENIUS idea that involves recycling / underlooked materials / sustainability, and that this genius idea can also drastically cut costs.

I happen to love the Lego-block nature of cargo containers, and while doing research on them first stumbled into this pattern: it seems that every third design major comes up with the idea to use cargo containers as cheap pre-fab houses. Well, it turns out that while cargo containers are relatively cheap, they're really not all that good for housing - they're too small, they're uninsulated, they need as much (or more) build out on the inside as a regular house, they're harder to put windows into, etc.

The same sort of pattern appears with all sorts of other materials: people get the idea that left over offcuts of wood at house construction sites can be laminated into tables or bathtubs, that asphalt shingles and be ground up and used as a flex fuel, that cardboard can be folded into bicycles, that what the third world really needs is a cheap laptop with a hand-crank on the side, etc.

All of these schemes fail in similar ways:

* they ignore the huge amounts of evolved-in wisdom that long-held solutions have

* they ignore production costs

* they ignore labor costs (the "Earthship" underground house plans are great...but they implicitly assume that a thousand hours of labor swinging a sledgehammer is free)

* they ignore the costs of ancillary features (brakes on a bike, insulation on a house)

* they pretend that some materials are "green" and others are "anti-green".

* they often assume a superior attitude to people in the third world, assuming that first world design students have better ideas than millions of third world people who actually know what resources are available and what features are desirable.

Steel bicycles have a TON of evolved cleverness in them. They are the end result of a fierce evolutionary winnowing.

If you're ever tempted to announce to the world that everything that's gone before has been mistaken and you've got a solution for other people that's a ton better, take a moment and think through all the OTHER criteria that these people might consider relevant. You may have come up with a wonderful new idea (it happens!), but chances are that there are good reasons that the idea has not already been adopted.

m_d3• 14 years ago

Thank you. You've just described one of the top three reasons I left my industrial design program for computer science.

tjic4• 14 years ago

Would love to hear the other two!

samstave• 14 years ago

You better be sure that all your. Ode is built using 100% recycled electrons.

Make your app receive LEED accreditation!

anonymfus• 14 years ago

Also serious ethical problem of targeting such solutions for third world problems is that such products are not really intended to be produced in it.

Real third world bicycle is same as first world but with hand made steel frame, because frames are most overpriced components: http://i.imgur.com/qpw0a.jpg People use bicycles for decades and can afford to buy or exchange it by parts ever in third world countries. If such conventional bike cost 100 dollars and can last 20 years then cardboard bike must last at least 4 years to be competitive. And people with unstable income prefer long lasting solutions because there is probability that there will be no money in future to buy replacement.

sukuriant• 14 years ago

This isn't really on topic, but that bike with the rebar frame looks really awesome and is a really neat design --- looks a lot more sturdy/reasonably priced (if it's $100 total) than a cardboard bike.

blhack• 14 years ago

That rebar bicycle is completely a joke. This isn't "low cost engineering" it's "bike nerds got ahold of a welder and some rebar".

Rebar of that diameter isn't even commonly available.

It's also unusable heavy, and a needless waste of valuable steel scrap.

Sell that several hundred hunk of rebar, and buy yourself a brand new bicycle.

Here is a guy that did one as a sculpture at his university: http://rebarbike.tumblr.com/

detst• 14 years ago

> If such conventional bike cost 100 dollars and can last 20 years then [$20] cardboard bike must last at least 4 years to be competitive.

No. We're talking about poor people. A $20 bike that lasts less than 4 years is much more attractive for many people than a $100 bike that lasts 20 years because they don't have $100 to spend on a bike.

> And people with unstable income prefer long lasting solutions because there is probability that there will be no money in future to buy replacement.

Prefer? Sure, but I think you're overlooking the fact that poor people often can't afford that luxury (sometimes due to their own poor decision making resulting in a vicious cycle but that's still the reality).

nl3• 14 years ago

Sorry, but that bike is stupid and you are wrong about the frames being overpriced.

[1] is a bike designed by people who know what they are doing for 3rd world conditions. It has evolved over years to something that will last 20 years easily in Africa and can be serviced by people on the ground there with no special infrastructure.

the result is a robust bicycle engineered specifically for rural African terrain and load requirements. Branded the World Bicycle Relief Buffalo Bicycle, it is designed, tested and assembled in Africa with close attention to end-user feedback and rigorous quality control.... Furthermore, World Bicycle Relief Buffalo Bicycles are compatible with locally available spare parts, ensuring that with proper maintenance they will last for years.

The frames are mass produced in Asia (I assume China) and I'd be surprised if they are more than $10 each (based on priced of frames available on AliBaba).

If you are interested in this then http://worldbicyclerelief.org/ does a pretty good job of not only distributing bikes but making sure they train mechanics and providing tools etc to avoid reliance on external parties.

[1] http://worldbicyclerelief.org/pages/the-bike

azundo• 14 years ago

Shipping containers do however make amazing retail shop fronts. They're all over the place here in Northern Ghana.

Obviously there is still a ton of room for innovation on the industrial design front and it's great to see your focus on how much work actually goes into solutions that scale. That lightning bolt idea you get may be the start of something if you have the persistence to work out the details.

Incidentally this is one of the huge problems with work being done in the developing world - people think they've created a magic bullet idea but don't have the persistence to work out the details and eventually they give up, usually blaming some external factor.

justincormack• 14 years ago

Indeed. In London too. And Googles first data centre innovations. The best thing is they are very cheap especially in a recession when shipping is looking bad. For a few hundred dollars there is no real competition...

ansible2• 14 years ago

In general, I totally agree with you. The epitome of this was a recent design for a folding bicycle that didn't have any way to pedal it. I'm starting to think that for anyone to call themselves an industrial designer, they should be required to get an ME degree, and actually see how products work and are manufactured. Your design school degree means nothing to me.

I do disagree with this though:

that what the third world really needs is a cheap laptop with a hand-crank on the side, etc.

Cheap and widely available computing devices can do a lot to raise literacy and technical skill across the world. BTW, the latest iteration from the OLPC project just uses solar charging.

I also think there is still room to apply 1st world design techniques to 3rd world problems.

I've been quite intrigued by some of the projects I've seen, such as the cylindrical water container that can easily be pulled with a rope, or some of the other water purification devices which can be made with local materials.

There are some other projects than can help turn a mobile phone into a medical diagnosis tool. I'd like to see more things like that.

m_d3• 14 years ago

> I'm starting to think that for anyone to call themselves an industrial designer, they should be required to get an ME degree, and actually see how products work and are manufactured. Your design school degree means nothing to me.

There is a semi-controversial architect named Peter Eisenman who made a similar claim. His thought was that architecture should only be studied at the graduate level, leaving your undergraduate education for something more practical.

After getting a taste of undergraduate design education, I'm inclined to agree.

TallGuyShort• 14 years ago

Although I agree with your comments on the relevant design projects, I'd like to point out how meaningless engineering degrees can also be (note - I didn't say tend to be). When I was in college my engineering department did a joint class / project with the industrial design majors. I was blown away by how incompetent most of my classmates were compared with many of the industrial design students who seemed to have a much better grasp on how products ended up in the real world. No degree is ever a guarantee that the holder is not a moron.

tjic4• 14 years ago

> Cheap and widely available computing devices can do a lot to raise literacy and technical skill across the world.

Maybe yes, maybe no, but what I'm criticizing is the idea that a bunch of pie-in-the-sky academics are going to come up with a better solution than tens of millions of people working in parallel.

The OLPC programs was INSANE. First, there's lots of power in the third world - a hand crank is a crazy idea and makes it look like a toy while adding mechanical complexity. Next, instead of using cheap commodity hardware it designed things from the ground up. Did you know that they were so adamant against using the round wheel that they decided to reinvent it? Ah, excuse me. Not wheel. Firmware. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/OLPC_Firmware_q2d04

Craziness all the way down.

pbreit3• 14 years ago

Wow, I hope you're not in charge of the Earth's innovation budget. Replace "all" with "some" or at most, "many", for starters. But who anointed you the chief decider of what people should try to invent. And how do any of your proclamations apply to this bicycle? You do realize that there are billions of people who use bicycles different from you and me. I really, really don't like this reply.

tjic4• 14 years ago

> Wow, I hope you're not in charge of the Earth's innovation budget.

I don't want ANYONE in charge of the "innovation budget". Innovation budgets gets us things like the Soviet Union, or SEMATECH http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEMATECH or MITI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MITI

That's my whole point: good ideas bubble up from the bottom with tens of millions of people using local knowledge and refining and playing with existing ideas: not intellectuals working from the top-down.

TeMPOraL2• 14 years ago

> assuming that first world design students have better ideas than millions of third world people who actually know what resources are available and what features are desirable.

I agree with you that this assumption, especially with overzealous design students, can often be false. But (going a little off-topic) I sometimes see this extended here on HN towards the attitude that we don't have any responsibility towards the third world, and the best thing we could do to help them is to stay away. With that I disagree. First worlders have advanced maths and superior computing power which, in many cases, allows for strictly better design given the same materials. Take antennas for an example - there is a whole branch of science built around it that amounts to discovering even more imaginative ways of bending metal rods[0]. I do strongly agree with anonymfus below [1] that we shouldn't hook the third world up to our industry and sell them things they can't hope to produce or maintain, but we do have an enormous amount of knowledge about pretty much everything; knowledge they could use to vastly improve their lives. So I'm all for co-operation between people from both worlds.

[0] - by the way, I find this to be an amazing example of the power of human thought - we're basically bending pieces of scrap metal, turning stuff that was worthless few hundred years ago into something very useful, and quite often expensive.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4871692

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

But in all fairness few inventors will tell you their invention is useless. That the guy in the article has apparently re-invented fiberglass construction is not too surprising. Its really cool, you make something out of cardboard, you soak is fiberglass resin (oh I'm sorry a bunch or organic (as in Chemistry) things) and it becomes a rigid structure you can use.

But it is better than an iPhone app that lets destitute people find educational and training opportunities near their location.

brudgers• 14 years ago

The feature of these patterns is that they are designed for other people. Nobody would reasonably choose to live in a shipping container if they had better options, and most conventional options are objectively better. Shipping containers have been relatively successful (in comparison with other shipping container dwellings) for student housing - a typology which is traditionally among the most dismal an educated mid-social class person is likely to have experienced for a prolonged period of their life.

Likewise, a cardboard bicycle. There are many circumstances where it is probably preferable to no bicycle, but probably few circumstances where it would be preferable to a typical bicycle constructed in a conventional manner.

Over the long term, the cardboard bicycle is likely to be an increasingly less preferable option as the availablity repairs and the availability of replacement parts becomes a greater concern than initial cost. There's a huge standardized infrastructure of dimensions and components which make the use of bicycles more practical.

Even the FP-45 Liberator was ultimately deemed impractical for any purpose other than psychological warfare.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator

Too• 14 years ago

For examples of what this guy is talking about, see http://www.yankodesign.com/

Every week someone invents a new hubless bike, electronics that can bend 180 degrees in any direction or folding power plugs and switches that ignore the physical fact that behind the wall there is not and endless amount of space

arjn• 14 years ago

Thank you for bringing this up. Too many times now have I seen such articles about seemingly brilliant ideas with little or no thought put into the practicality or implementation difficulties. In this particular case I question how efficient or economical it is to use cardboard and how ecologically friendly is it (doesnt seem it is if its using cardboard). Also how "waterproof" it would be after a couple of seasons in the rain and sunny weather ?

d0ugal• 14 years ago

There are actually houses in London created from these containers...

http://www.containercity.com/

flyinRyan• 14 years ago

>that what the third world really needs is a cheap laptop with a hand-crank on the side

What One Laptop per Child was trying to do was bring education and the internet to third world countries that don't have it. It wasn't a plan to get rich, it was people realizing that a lot of third world problems stem from poor education, and a technical person's solution.

I'm not sure why it failed exactly, but I know that Intel saw the laptop and made a "netbook" based on that concept that was naturally more expensive because it included all the things that OLpC was trying to avoid.

brador• 14 years ago

Is the cardboard still viable in wet weather? Does it have a special coating?

Bill_Dimm2• 14 years ago

"...the cardboard is treated with a secret concoction made of organic materials to give it its waterproof and fireproof qualities..."

jl6• 14 years ago

"Organic" - is there a "green baloney detection kit" that outs stuff like this?

circa• 14 years ago

watch out for those puddles!!!

error54• 14 years ago

As an avid rider, I really like the concept and applaud his effort but I have a few detractions.

-While it's a good idea to use recycled parts, no manufacturer is going to go through the trouble of creating a (conceivably multi-million dollar) factory to make these bikes and only sell them for twenty dollars.

-Let's not forget that $20 is still a heck of a lot of money in third world countries. Half the world lives on less than $2.50 a day[1].

-Bikes aren't that expensive or hard to come by, even in impoverished nations.

I think a real difference could be made if this guy set up a non-profit, sold these cardboard bikes to people who really like live "green", and donated the profits to the red cross or some other charity.

1-http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-sta...

colinshark• 14 years ago

This bike essentially requires the same skilled labor to build as a carbon fiber bike. Its only claim to fame is that it doesn't use the $8 (guess) of steel you need to build a standard bike frame.

The rest of the components cost about $90. It's competing with Chinese bikes.

The plan has not been thought through, but it's great news bait.

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

But bicycles are already very cheap in India - a two second google gave me this:

http://www.fitjog.com/bicycles-for-weight-loss/atlas-bicycle...

At roughly 60USD that is a bike sold on the best SEO'd web site. What is sold out of local garages will be less.

I am not a Indian native and I am not a developmental economist, but I cannot see a cardboard bicycle doing this http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingpongong/7855376404/ or this http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidg/533780375/

The traditional Phillips style bike has a long pedigree - its brakes may be useless and its long in the tooth but everybody in SE Asia can fix one.

When a cardboard bike folds, you throw it away and get a new one.

I think the environment will still have a net win on steel.

rwbt2• 14 years ago

Yea, Bicycles are very cheap in India due to the large scale of production. They also have specialized bikes for farmers, which help them carry around multiple bags with ease.

Many, if not most of the young people in India own a Bicycle not for recreation, but as a serious mode of transportation.

I will take a $60 steel Bicycle over a $20 cardboard bicycle anyday.

jdietrich• 14 years ago

I would like to coin an axiom:

The practical impact of a new invention is inversely proportional to the attention it receives from the popular press.

Weird bicycles, 3d printers, "breakthrough" cancer drugs, alternative energy sources, etc ad nauseum.

duiker101• 14 years ago

Letting aside the real possibilities of the project, this sentence said by the creator to me has no value whatsoever...I mean find me a founder that doesn't think his product can change the world...

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

People in congested cities don't not ride bikes because they are too expensive. You can get a second hand one on craigslist for not much more than $20.

It's because:

1) They're lazy and don't like pedalling up hills

2) They're worried they'll get killed by a car

3) They're worried they'll get a puncture and be late or have their pants ripped on the chainring.

4) They have stuff to carry around and don't want to mess with a trailer.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

5) They don't want to arrive at their destination all sweaty.

Maybe it's only a problem for me (and I do tend to sweat a lot) but biking a hundred blocks to work without being able to take a shower after is not a viable option.

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

My first question was: what happens if you bump a curb at speed? How does the cardboard handle the impact?

sopooneo• 14 years ago

Which relates to a question I had about this bike when I first read about it. The article admits it has a shorter lifespan than a traditional bike, but why? How do you know it's no good any longer? Does it just get hard to pedal after n days? Or does it fail catastrophically after an average of n days of use? If the latter, that's a show stopper.

afterburner• 14 years ago

No-one seems to have mentioned that cross-winds would be tough on this bike, with its wide flat panels.

piyush_soni• 14 years ago

This bicycle is designed in SolidWorks, the software I make :) ... Just saying ...

webjprgm• 14 years ago

I think this is awesome in and of itself. I don't care if it turns out to be super cheap and green. $20 just seems entirely unrealistic to me. Half of that cost (at least) would be the tires alone (at least it looks like he's got tires on the outside of the cardboard wheel). But a cardboard bike? Just plain awesome.

gavindouglas• 14 years ago

The problem: Get more people to start using bikes worldwide.

The solution: Make cities more bike friendly.

Its going to come down to urban planning, incentives, and community programs. Cheaper more affordable bikes are certainly a component of increasing adoption, but if you really want to move the needle we need the developed and developing world to look a bit more like the Netherlands, and not Texas.

mixmastamyk• 14 years ago

Awesome. Was walking next to a bike store this weekend with $5000 bikes in the windows and was just plain gobsmacked. Could only utter "WTF" a few times.

Perhaps this one can restore some sanity.

nl3• 14 years ago

$5000 bikes in the windows

Clearly they were keeping the expensive bikes[1][2] away from the windows then?

[1] http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/03/worlds-fastest-bike-m...

[2] http://www.competitivecyclist.com/frame/2013-wilier-zero-7-r...

$20 Cardboard Bicycle Could 'Change The World,' Inventor Says

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