Motorcycles are great.  The wind in your hair.  The acceleration.  The maneuverability.  The gas mileage.  There’s a lot to love.

But there’s also a lot to not love so much.  Like bugs in your teeth, rain, and being turned into hamburger when some jerk in a car does something stupid.

Which is why one of my next automotive feats of engineering would be a hardtop covered motorcycle convertible.

The cover isn’t really that hard to imagine.  Two lower panels clip into place into sockets built into the bike.  These two lower panels then hold in place an upper panel that is the “door”.  I figure the upper panel would shift upwards a few inches, and then swing open on a hinge in the front so that the back end lifts up, allowing you in and out.

That part is relatively easy.

The hard part is, how do you make a completely covered motorcycle not fall over when you come to a stop?  You can’t put your feet down.  Something has got to balance the bike.

That’s where a strange idea I’ve had for a while now comes in.  The rear wheel is actually two wheels.  At high speeds they’re compressed together to act like a single wheel.  You get all of the maneuverability and driveability of a motorcycle.  But at low speeds the wheels separate enough to safely balance the bike like it was a trike.  That way you don’t have to put your feet down to balance at a stop.  You don’t even need a kick stand now.

Nifty, eh?  I’m not sure if the rear wheel expander should work by a spring (which I’m afraid might wear down over time) that the forward movement causes the spring to compress so that it expands as you slow down by mechanical force, or just a small hydraulic system that’s tied into the speedometer.  Or maybe there’s another better way to do it.  I don’t know.  Not having a shop to R&D in and tons of money to throw at projects, I can’t actually test anything.  All that I can do is dream.  But I’ve already thought of two ways that might work well.  That’s a start.

So why would you want a motorcycle that has a cover?

Well, for starters, remember this is a hard-top convertible done by removable panels.  By day it’s any ordinary motorcycle.  Well… almost.  Any ordinary motorcycle that has an expanding rear wheel so that at 10mph or less it turns itself into a trike so that you don’t have to hold up your bike at a stop sign.  But by night … or well, really, by bad weather, it offers all of the amenities of a car.

What do I mean “of a car”?

Well for starters no more bugs in the teeth.  The wind is out of your hair, so rain and windchill are no longer factors.  On top of that I figure there can be a heater and AC built in, so that especially when covered, you have those simple creature comforts.

But it’s about a lot more than comfort too.  It’s also about safety.  The panels aren’t just simple panels.  They’re a lightweight external shell suspended from a motorcycle roll cage on the inside.  So now when bike meets car, or bike meets road, the rider is offered a lot more protection than a brain bucket.  For the first time the bike actually protects from impact.  And to that end, I can even see miniature air bags arrayed in the frames to further protect the rider.  So now you not only have an all-season biking option, but you’re infinitely safer from Bad Things That Happen.

And again, when it’s a nice sunny summer day, just take off those panels and it’s basically any other motorcycle.

It’s about options.  It’s about safety.  And it’s about smaller vehicles that have better fuel economy and don’t congest the roads quite as much.

Maybe it’s crazy, but at Arah’s Automotive … who cares? 

Do you ever have ideas about things that you are dangerously undereducated on? Like you know just enough to be dangerous? Yeah, I do. And one thing I’d love to learn more on, through hands-on experience if at all possible, is exploring new and innovative automotive designs. Mostly I’m drawn to cars and motorcycles, which considering I’ve never even ridden a motorcycle may seem a tad weird. But just because I’m not an expert doesn’t mean I don’t have any ideas.

If I had millions of dollars, one of the first things I’d love to do is start my own out-of-the-box automotive design business. And one of my first R&D projects? Electric disc brakes.

Instead of a hydraulic system that pushes pistons into calipers that grab a disk, why not simply have a capacitor-backup (for safety) electro-magnetic caliper system? Imagine how much better response time an electromagnet has compared to a hydraulic piston and what that could do for traction control, anti-lock brakes, and so forth. But for that matter, imagine a system where water can’t get into a brake line because there is no brake line.

Toyota is already replacing their hydraulic power steering system with the electric power steering system that they pioneered for the Prius hybrid. They liked the electric system so much better that it’s moving into other cars now. It has fewer parts. It has less ways to break. It needs less maintenance. And best of all, it works better.

I think the same type of move could easily be done for brakes. More responsive brakes with less maintenance and failure points? Who wouldn’t want electro-magnetic brakes? Especially as more cars become hybrids, more cars are going to have electrical systems capable of supporting new ideas like this. The general concept is still ultimately the same anti-lock disc brake design. You just replace a complex and high-maintenance hydraulic system with simple maintenance-free electromagnets.

Yep. If I could open up Arah’s Automotive, electromagnetic antilock brakes would be one of my first projects.

Since I don’t have the money to do that in real life, I’ll just have to imagine. So I’m imagining Arah’s Automotive here, on my blog. This is where it begins.