Now this takes the concept of electric assist to a whole new level!I’m not too sure I would want to ride around with one of these, but it’s a very cool idea nonetheless. According to Joules’ creator,
The build resulted from a challenge by my son, a former pro bicycle racer, and is purely for fun. Could I build an electric tandem based on actually pumping the pedals? Would it climb the steep hills where we live? The result of the challenge is Joules, who sits on the stoker seat and does all of the pedaling. The fun part was coming up with a drive linkage that would use human-proportional legs to pedal in a circle matching the pedal cranks. The linkage delivers force tangent to the crank circle through the whole pedal revolution. The kinematics of the result are interesting to watch.
I found this video over at Bicycle Design.