If you like big wheels you’re going to love the Shane, a new electric vehicle concept with what looks like 60-inch-ish rims. Somehow, the wheels aren’t the wildest feature so much as the fact that there are only two of them.
Created by Shane Chen, its namesake, this two-wheeled five-seater EV almost looks like a super-sized Hoverboard. That’s not all that shocking considering that Chen invented the Hoverboard years ago. That device manages to balance the rider’s fore and aft through clever sensors and motors in the structure.
The Shane aims to do the same but this time with five people inside traveling at high speed. To accomplish that safely, it has to employ a number of fascinating technologies.
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Hoverboard riders will know that speeding up or slowing down on the craft requires a bit of tipping either forward or back. Of course, that sort of weight-shifting for control isn’t practical in a multi-person vehicle of this kind. Instead, the entire passenger body of the craft moves forward or back to dampen the experience of speed changes.
In fact, the wheels also allow the body to move almost independently from the wheels so it can soak up huge bumps with little cabin impact. While that sounds like quite a complicated system, there are some major benefits to this two-wheeled layout if it makes it to market.
For one thing, the Shane concept doesn’t have any sort of steering linkage. It changes direction simply by adding or reducing power and speed to one wheel or another. In addition, the layout allows the Shane to turn in place which makes parallel parking wildly easy and straightforward.
Bringing the rendering to production is something that Chen can’t do alone though. “I look forward to collaborating with partners to bring this concept to life,” he says. He also doesn’t say how passengers will enter or exit the vehicle, how much power or range it might have, or who’s going to make those six-foot wheels.
Interestingly, this isn’t the only two-wheeled car concept. Back in 1967, another car, the Gyro-X made its debut. It uses the opposite layout with one wheel at the front and another at the rear.
As its name implies, it uses a gyro to balance the car while it’s running. Today, it still runs and drives and sits at the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, TN. When off, the Gyro-X has two small wheels that pop out of the side to keep it standing. Hopefully the Shane won’t need something similar.
