Trends and perceptions

At work, two colleagues have in the past few years been shopping for cargo bikes/trikes and ended up with two-wheelers despite having me gently feed them testimony of life with a trike.  (The front brakes do make a Nihola a difficult sell in Oslo, so maybe that was blunting my otherwise smooth sales pitch.)  I don't think these two colleagues have made poor choices in the end, and I've never even riden a cargo bike, so who am I to judge?  People just love two-wheelers.  Related observation: trikes that tilt are trending (see Butchers & Bicycles MK1, Babboe Carve, Sblocs).  Generalized: it seems to me that the greatest challenge to trikes is the way people view them, which is apparently slow.  Maybe slow and boring, who knows.

Does a tilting trike actually address a real issue, or just a trike-newbie's perception of a real issue?  (The classic box trikes where the whole box rotates do have an issue.  Perhaps this is the root of the problem.)  I don't doubt that an empty tilting trike can corner faster than an empty Nihola, but who is qualified to say if that additional potential for speed makes any sense?  We are talking about a heavy machine either way, a machine designed primarily to carry your own kids.  My recollection of driving the Nihola with kids on board is that I could already drive dangerously fast (with a downhill slope to assist) and that I could hold the magic 25km/hr perfectly safely on flat ground.  It corners pretty well, and gets better with more load in front.

In case someone wandering the internet searching for opinions on this matter should find their way here, I want to state clearly that I think tilting trikes represent pointless complexity and have significant drawbacks, when compared to a one-piece design such as Nihola.  (Yes I know, these words will vanish into the vast vortex of the internet, where they shall be entirely irrelevant in the face of social trends.)  I must say I have never ridden a tilting trike.  I have heard from my colleague doing his shopping that the tilting hardware can make you suffer in difficult situations, and I certainly believe that.  I specifically like the feature of the Nihola that it is one piece and no nonsense, its good for climbing curbs, parking crooked on the roadside, starting again, climbing steep hills, and generally doing whatever is asked without a fuss.  I note the high load floors of the tilters, and I look at the additional moving parts, to me this all screams of a solution that is worse than the problem it was intended to address.

Now, I'm not just someone wedded to one particular manufacturer of trikes.  (Though my particular brand of choice does stand out.)  I saw this the other day in Oslo, looks like a fat-tire, no-tilt, disc brake, proper-steering trike.  Seems to be made in Asia, and sold as CargoKid in Denmark.  Comes only with electric assist, and I wonder if those tires can possibly be sufficiently durable.  Quite interesting, I would give it considerable thought if I was in the market.

its a CargoKid product, not a Nihola

I've been spending some time today catching up on the state of things, and I got reading in depth about the Swedish maker Livelo, which was openly inspired by Nihola.  I like a lot of their choices, although I would hesitate to choose a bike/trike that is too optimized for child transport, it should also work after the kids grow up, after all.  I could make a similar complaint about the CargoKid trike above.  My trikes have certainly gotten some paint damage from transporting awkward items such as wood and other bikes, don't imagine that would go well on fabric.

a picture grabbed from the Livelo page