Cars Made From Two Motorcycles Are Sort Of A Thing

Have you and a friend ever been side-by-side on a pair of motorcycles, and looked down at the pair of them and realized, hey, we're almost a whole car here? No? Well, if not, that's okay, because others have, and some have even given it a go.

I started looking into this after we were sent this link about an enterprising car hacker from Shantou, China, who turned a brace of scooters into a jaunty three-seat little car. Unlike many attempts at this, the builder here added a middle seat where you drive, like the world's slowest McLaren F1.

The roof has a sort of solar-panel-on-car-port feeling to it, but the overall creation looks pretty serviceable. It triggered a visual memory for me, of a similar creation I'd seen before... black and white, in print, in a book... ah! Raymond Loewy's Industrial Design!

The motorcycles-into-car in this case was a pair of Russian bikes (Urals?) that had been industriously joined together, then sheathed in a hand-built body. The year was 1974, and the car was spotted in Moscow. Loewy felt the design was meant to mimic the Avanti; while it certainly does resemble an Avanti a bit, I'm a bit skeptical that was the original goal — it wouldn't have been a likely car for a Soviet citizen to encounter back then, and Loewy was always a bit self-absorbed. Still, maybe, and it's certainly cool either way. I especially like the little hump on the hood to clear the driving bike's handlebars.

The most advanced thought I found of the two-bikes-to-car concept is from an auto design student named Ramesh Gound, from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, India and sponsored by Renault India.

Gound's design involves the use of a pair of individually-owned, inexpensive scooter-type two wheeled vehicles. The scooters appear to have plug-in electric drivetrains, and would be used as reasonably conventional scooters normally. If two owners of these bikes get together and decide they want a more sports car-type experience, however, they have the option of joining their bikes in the center to form a very sleek-looking sports car, for fun or easier highway cruising or whatever.

It's a pretty novel idea, and not something I've seen before.

Anyone else seen some good pairs-of-bikes-into-one cars tooling around? Throw them into the comments, please, so we can all scrutinize and speculate and all that fun stuff that starts with an 's.'