Cycling in the city can be a genuinely unpleasant experience at times. As well as having to breathe in exhaust fumes for the duration of your journey, our car-centric cities often leave scant room to dedicated bike lanes, meaning cyclists have to share the road with vehicles big and small, often resulting in accidents and near misses.
Thankfully, Samsung thinks it may have a solution to city cyclists’ woes: its new Smart Bike, which incorporates a bevy of technological wizardry and is being built in conjunction with one of the best bicycle designers in the world.
A product of the Samsung Maestros Academy, the South Korean electronics giant’s forthcoming city bike features a special shock-absorbent frame made by master frame maker Giovanni Pelizzoli for smoother, safer travel, but is built from the ground up with technology in mind.
Once a user mounts their smartphone (using powerful magnets for minimal fuss) on their handlebars, they have access to a range of safety features.
Along with the usual GPS and map applications, at the touch of a button riders can enable a built-in rear camera to watch the road behind them, activate laser pointers to mark out their space on the road, and even turn on sensors that detect ambient light levels to automatically switch built-in lights on or off, increasing a cyclist’s visibility on the road.
▼ A simple interface ensures cyclists focus on the road
▼ Watching your back
▼ See who’s behind you
▼ Warning: local cats may begin chasing you upon enabling the laser pointer function
There’s a certain amount of PR fluff and cheese to filter out in this video (“protects the rider with its technological soul”? Easy there, Samsung…), and some of the features are described only as future possibilities at this point in the bike’s development, but we can’t help thinking Samsung is on to something here, and we’d love to see more dedicated technology being built into safer, better designed bikes for city use.
Now if they could include a feature that electrocutes would-be thieves when they inevitably try to steal the bike from outside our office, we’d really be in business!
Tokyo’s new rentable bikes are a great start, but the city is still far from bike-friendly…
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