Riding a bike is excellent for those who are looking to create a healthier way to commute. It’s also great if you want to lessen your impact on the environment. One of the easiest ways to foil this idea is to add a bit of inclement weather. Luckily, DryCycle has created an e-bike that lets you ride around on those wet, windy, and cold days. This four-wheeled, completely enclosed, motor-assisted bike lets you get to where you need to go in any sort of weather. With the look of a small electric car, this self-described “eco-friendly, four-wheeled, electrically assisted pedal cycle” is sure to turn some heads.
Let’s talk body
The body of the DryCycle is crafted with a welded aluminum frame finished with crumple zones. The bike has been crash tested. As per DryCycle, the results indicate an extremely low risk of experiencing a head injury should there be a head-on collision. To get in and out of the DryCycle, riders can quickly raise or lower the poly-carbonate canopy. The canopy helps to keep you dry and safe from the elements. This feature helps to bridge the gap between riding your bike or having to drive your car on wet and cold days.
The specs
The DryCycle is crafted to allow riders to easily maneuver their vehicle without having to worry about precipitation or weather, but what makes it work? As you pedal, you are assisted with a 250-watt Shimano Steps E8000 motor. This motor can help the rider achieve an electric-assisted speed of about 15.5 mph. With its dual 500-Wh (1kWh total) Shimano batteries, the DryCycle can travel up to 50 miles on a single charge.
To power the lighting system and other electronics throughout the vehicle, a separate 870-Wh battery is used to power these auxiliary systems. The shifting system, also powered by Shimano, allows you to switch between 11 different gear ratios. Parking is possible with the DyrCycle thanks to the reverse gear, which makes it easy to pedal the bike backward. The entire vehicle weighs about 265 lb, which also happens to be the maximum payload for rider and cargo.
Other features
The DryCycle is rounded out with a slew of features to make this motor-assisted bike feel more like a fully functioning vehicle. The DryCycle is constructed with both front and rear suspension, sidestick-style steering, and hydraulic disk brakes for a smoother ride. Riders enter the cabin through the remote-operated electronic cockpit lock. For those looking to add a couple of bells and whistles, a heater and windshield wiper are available as extra options.
How to get your own DryCycle
The easiest way to purchase your own DryCycle is through the company’s website. You can reserve your DryCycle Mark VIII, available for delivery or collection in May 2021. The full price for a DryCycle is £14,995 (about USD 21,000) plus options and delivery.
Startup
A startup or start-up is a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable business model. While entrepreneurship refers to all new businesses, including self-employment and businesses that never intend to become registered, startups refer to new businesses that intend to grow large beyond the solo founder. At the beginning, startups face high uncertainty and have high rates of failure, but a minority of them do go on to be successful and influential. Some startups become unicorns; that is privately held startup companies valued at over US$1 billion.
Actions
Startups typically begin by a founder (solo-founder) or co-founders who have a way to solve a problem. The founder of a startup will begin market validation by problem interview, solution interview, and building a minimum viable product (MVP), i.e. a prototype, to develop and validate their business models. The startup process can take a long period of time (by some estimates, three years or longer), and hence sustaining effort is required. Over the long term, sustaining effort is especially challenging because of the high failure rates and uncertain outcomes. Having a business plan in place outlines what to do and how to plan and achieve an idea in the future. Typically, these plans outline the first 3 to 5 years of your business strategy.
Design principles
Models behind startups presenting as ventures are usually associated with design science. Design science uses design principles considered to be a coherent set of normative ideas and propositions to design and construct the company's backbone. For example, one of the initial design principles is "affordable loss".
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