One Wheel Is All It Takes For This Bike To Drive Around

When Engineer Chris Hoffmann’s daughter asked if it was possible to build a one-wheeled motorcycle she saw in a video game, he decided he probably could.

Ft @InsightTV

[Music] the feeling is a cross between riding a magic carpet and riding two horses bareback so there’s a union between the machinery and the bike and your body itself hi i’m chris hoffman the inventor of the world’s first single wheel electric motorcycle so when i first started the rhino bike i was making it my garage and i finally got to a point where i needed a real machine shop and somebody support me make parts so i came to florian and we’d known each other for a while what do you think of this idea i was very serious about the fact that this wasn’t going to work and i’m like okay dude i will take that challenge no the idea of having a unicycle i’ve seen a lot of these ideas floating around on the internet it was very hard to believe that it can be done and and so that it can work after i cut my mountain bike in half and figured out that wasn’t going to work i built the first prototype i don’t build prototypes that are crappy i mean everything i do is beautiful so it took me almost a whole year to pound out all the aluminum pieces and take the machine shop class and make the machined parts for the gear yeah by the time i got all the way done with all that a whole year had gone by at the center of the bike is a gyro and it’s a little accelerometer that knows where the center of the earth is so that shows up in software as a tilt angle so if the bike leans forward it simply drives the wheel under the center of gravity so it’s very stable it’s also very powerful so you know it’ll do that really quick so left and right it steers like a bike so if i want to steer the bike i can turn around and go on corners really tight and it feels just like i’m riding on two wheels but it’s one wheel do we have to do something simple because if you add two wheels and flywheels it’s just going to get too complicated and it’s going to be too expensive so the only thing we could do was add steering like on a bike and my software guy’s like what sense does that make it’s one wheel like let’s let’s just build it so we just slapped some stuff together welded this frame put some handlebars on the front and added the steering linkage in the back so he puts the software into the spike we turn it on and i just ride off down the street like magic we build prototype 2 to add some level of steering just to prove that you know wood steering have an effect and that prototype was what i started riding around my neighborhood because it was so much fun um but at one point i’m riding that bike along and the gyro came unplugged and smashed into the ground and i ended up going into the ground pretty hard i mean i could have killed myself you know and there was a moment there where um the day after i hurt myself i’m standing in the living room of my house and the bike is laying out in the driveway and the pouring rain because the neighbors brought it home and i asked myself that question you know do i want to continue to do this and there was something in me that said you know i’m not done the fact that you were riding on one wheel which seems really counter-intuitive like it would make it really difficult but the magic of the steering and the balance technology together allowed the rhino to be this simple platform that you sit on and it moves you around the city you’re able to put your feet down on the ground when you’re stopped so my hands are free i’m at eye level with people so we can interact and hang out i can spin on axis and go in a different direction instantly unlike a bicycle where you have to sort of like make a big turn it’s hard to get your head around when you first see it because it’s so smooth when you ride it because most people that watch a unicycle rider they’re flailing their arms around and trying to stay in balance and this thing just goes by like it’s on a railroad track and they can’t figure it out i mean to get to this point it was probably about five thousand dollars out of my pocket and then you know to get to that point it was more like eighty thousand dollars you know by that time i had left my marriage and sold my house it’s really cool are you the inventor it’s like a dance it teaches you something about yourself almost after you’re done riding around you feel better it’s kind of euphoric kind of exciting as you move through an urban landscape and and find your destination i look for emerging technologies that will change our lives there’s a balance we all have between the future we envision and what we’re willing to give up you know to actually get to that future i just built it and it wasn’t until i started riding it around in the city did i discover really what it was and it just turned out to be an interesting platform to move the human body around in space [Music]