It's been a month now since the Spezi bike show in Germany, and we're overdue for a report on what we saw there. We had a terrific time on our trip --
triking through the tulips in Holland, riding through Cologne in a
Velotaxi, catching up on the European specialty bike scene at
Spezi, and visiting friends and relatives in Austria. It's taken us some time to process and edit more than three gigabytes of photos, and we've been back at work since the day after we flew home, but we have some videos up on
YouTube and some photos on
Flickr and in the
Gallery here. More will be coming as get them sorted and edited.
Velomobiles are cropping up all over, and some of them are quite different from the "standard" models.
The minimalist approach was seen in these examples of fabric or soft fairings for bikes and trikes:
Winter-Reisner of Hamburg offered some enclosures for trikes, including the blue one on the left.
Alfred's All-Weather Solution (seen in two versions in the center) is a fairing system for various recumbents. The
Velo-Kit (in red, on the right) fits a variety of trikes.
There were also new removable rigid fairings for trikes -- including one delta version:
The
Cabriovelo, seen above in orange with the roof down, and in blue with the convertible top and sides in place, is built on the Sinner Comfort delta trike. In yellow, the Ped3 fairing from Slovenia is made for the Berkut trike from Russia.
New velomobiles in the WAW and Leiba line both ended up with names that translate as "breeze" -- the
WAW Bries and the
Leiba Brise. Drawings of the WAW offering showed its 16" front wheels and newly-designed wheel-mounting system. A late prototype of the Leiba Brise was being test-ridden on the plaza. The Leiba Brise is more open than most velomobiles.
After Spezi, we stopped at
BikeRevolution in Austria and talked with Thomas Seide about his velomobile projects. His Thunderstorm velomobile wasn't ready for Spezi but will be introduced later this year. He'll be offering a lightweight full fairing that will mount on a Nomad or MadMax trike, allowing the rider to choose to ride a full-function open trike or a fully-enclosed velomobile. In addition, he will be producing Leitra velomobiles.
