It turns out that somebody has. Toyota, in cahoots with Saatchi & Saatchi, Parlee Cycles and the boffins at Deeplocal, has come up with the PXP, or Prius Bike. The “Prius” part might be mere branding, but the bike itself is pretty damn awesome, right down to the thought-controlled gears. Yes, you read that right. Thought-controlled gears.
The frame and most other parts are fashioned from carbon fiber, shaped to be aerodynamic and integrate almost every component: cables are routed internally, brakes are built into the forks and the stem is indistinguishable from the headset. This not only makes for a bike that barely distracts the air as it slices through it — it also results in a bike that is so gorgeously minimal that it makes many fixed-gear machines look fussy. There’s even a hole ready to be filled with your smartphone, for the usual kind of cyclo-computer shenanigans.
But we’ve seen this stuff a hundred times before. The real meat is in the gears. Human/digital interface specialist Deeplocal has built a helmet that lets you shift gears just by thinking about it. Just like Clint Eastwood was able to blast enemies out of the sky by thought alone in the Firefox movie, the PXP’s rider can flip up and down through the electronically shifted derailleurs with his mind.
Ten minutes of training is enough to tune your brain to the EEG in the helmet and allow seamless shifting. The thought-control system is built from off-the-shelf hardware and custom software, so it could actually be put into production pretty soon. And fear not. There are levers for manually shifting should you need to do so.
Thought-controlled shifting is clearly mind-boggling sci-fi tech, and could probably be very helpful for pro riders. But for us bike-riding proles, maybe it’s a little too much. After all, one of the biggest advantages of a bike is its simplicity. With a basic toolkit and a connection to Google, you can fix anything.
Are these fancy electronic advances going to ruin home-maintenance the same way that electronic engine management spoiled things for the home car mechanic?
