The brilliant minds at MIT have done it again! They have come up with yet another device meant to make our lives easier, at the same time bringing multiple benefits to human kind and Mother Nature. I'm talking about the GreenWheel, which will turn any regular bicycle into an electric hog.

Despite the fact that there are a lot of electric bikes available on the market already, there are few people using them, as most of them cost small fortunes. This is why scientists at MIT decided to come up with a device that allows everybody to benefit from the advantages of an electric bike, with minimum costs.

 

GreenWheel is a self-contained unit that includes the motor and battery, along with a generator that can recharge the battery on those long downhill runs. Running on straight electric power, the GreenWheel delivers about 20 miles of pedal free riding, but you can double this by pedaling along as well.

 

"Just take the wheel off, put a GreenWheel equipped wheel on in its place, plug it in and it should work just fine," said Ryan Chin, one of the GreenWheel designers. "The whole thing has been designed so all the parts except the throttle are enclosed in the wheel."

 

The GreenWheel is also durable. The team estimates its range at 40,000 miles, or about eight years work of travel at an estimated 20 miles per business day. As MIT scientists brag, you would probably have to change the bike before replacing the batteries.

 

By this spring, the GreenWheel team hopes to pass out more than a dozen different GreenWheel configurations to both hard-core bike messenger types and novice riders and once the optimal configuration of power, speed and cost is determined, the team hopes to begin large scale production. The device is expected to retail for a few hundred dollars.

 
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