These 7 crazy bike designs are completely unrideable… and we love them

Take a long, hard look at the bike in the picture above. Have you spotted what’s wrong with it? We won’t give away the secret quite yet (head to the bottom for the answer), but we will tell you how it came about.

A few years back, an Italian designer realised that whenever he asked people to draw him a men’s bike from memory, they would nearly always come up with imaginative, outlandish creations that bore little resemblance to reality. But in a really good way.

So he decided to start collecting these flights of fancy and make them into lifelike 3D rendered pictures. So real in fact that at first glance most people would think they’re photographs.

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Psychological tests

We particularly love this track bike with jaunty yellow flag

“Back in 2009, I began pestering friends and random strangers,” says Gianluca Gemini, an assistant professor of product design at the University of Ferrara. “I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart. Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request most people have a very hard time remembering exactly how a bike is made.”

Apparently this is actually a test that psychologists use to demonstrate how our brains sometimes trick us into thinking that we know something, even though we don’t. 

Gender patterns

Brilliant inventions

You can read more at BikeRadar.com