A bike that you can carry in your backpack- a Bangalore company's innovation

The News Minute | August 7, 2014 | 04:05 pm ISTBicycle lovers will agree that the joy of riding a bicycle often exceeds the thrill of racing a car or zooming ahead in a motorbike. Although today due to various constraints, riding a bicycle is restricted to children, professional cyclists or few of those ardent cycle lovers who simply cannot give up on their eco-friendly two-wheelers. However, once in a while many encounter a craving to roam around in a cycle, but carrying a bicycle everywhere doesn't seem like a possibility. Lucid Design, a design company in Bangalore, has come with a concept of a Kit Bike, which they describe as a “bike in a bag”. You could ride this bicycle and when done, put it in a backpack and carry it. The bike can be assembled by attaching aluminum hollow tubes from simple twist joints. This is, however, just at a conceptual level now. Amit Mirchandani, creative director at Lucid Design who spoke to The News Minute, is of the view that ‘conventional bikes are awkward in every way except when you ride them’. â€œWe often go to a lot of places to travel where we think if only we had a bike. Renting one is not always an option. At such times, a Kit Bike could be of a lot of help”, he states. So how did Lucid Design come about creating such a concept? â€œWe wanted to work on a pro-active project, which was not bound by any limitations and not connected to financial interests. We were trying to work on an idea that hadn’t been tried before”, Mirchandani asserts. And this not the first time that Lucid Design has created a conceptual product. Earlier, they also worked on a device that would include all the technology we use on the go; a phone, watch, television, music-system, wallet- one device that would fit all of these. These concepts are created in the team’s proactive capacity. They usually decide to come up with such ideas once in a quarter or once every six months.Future of the Kit BikeThe creative agency does not harbor any plans of taking the concept of the Kit Bike towards a commercial way for now. “Commercializing the concept is not our primary focus as of now, mainly because we have a small team and limited resources. But I won’t say it is not a possibility in the future. We could look into it when we feel that we have the resources to pull it off”, states Mirchandani. His team is confident that if this concept is further engineered, it will definitely work. Will the concept of the Kit Bike work as thought of after the initial execution? â€œThe Kit Bike won a Red Dot design award in the design concept category, among some 5,000 entries. I think the award is an acknowledgment of our work. It validates that our design and concept could be successful in practical use”, he asserts. People’s reaction online to the concept as of now has been highly positive, with some saying that they’d love to own such a bike. The bike has a few limitations too, which can be worked upon at a later stage. An aluminium bike usually costs anywhere between $500-$1000, and Kit Bike could be priced at a similar range, though it is difficult to give it a price tag at such a stage.The concept is truly innovative and could open up a whole new arena for cyclists if it were ever to take a real form. Over the years, a few other efforts have been made to create a bicycle that would fold into a compatible form. Read: This bike folds down to the size of an umbrella