A few months ago, while combing the depth of the internet for information on electric bikes, I stumbled across a peculiar vehicle called the velomobile.

I instantly fell in love with the idea of a small, enclosed vehicle that I could use to commute daily to university or to work, even in the harsh Michigan winters. (It's not very fun on my regular bicycle in all that snow and cold...) I began doing research on these vehicles, and realized that buying one was well over my price range, especially one with all of the features that I wanted. I figured I could probably build one (Eventually... You know what they say: "Give a thousand monkeys a thousand typewriters...") so I started looking into what features I would want my velomobile to have.

After some more digging, I came across another interesting vehicle, the Toyota i-Road.

I thought it was fantastic. If you haven't come across this vehicle before, you really need to see it drive! Once again, I poked around for where I could get this, and once again was disappointed to find out that it is only a concept car, test-driven only by a lucky few members of the media.

At this point, I knew that I definitely wanted my vehicle to lean into turns the same way as the i-Road, and that the basic frame would be similar to a bog-standard velomobile. I was able to track down a few leaning designs for three-wheeled motorcycles and ATVs, and even for a trike, but none of them had any real information of how to make such a mechanism. Apparently, there used to be some plans for a vehicle similar to what I wanted, but they seem to be lost to history. Time to design my own!