(WBIR-Market Square) If you stop by Market Square you may notice a new shop. Local Motors recently opened it's first stand-alone retail store with a focus on innovative vehicles. If it flies or drives, Local Motors probably has it covered. Its shelves are lined with everything from RC cars to quad copters. However there's one toy on display that's really catching the eye of consumers.
It's called a drift trike and its popularity is quickly spreading across the country. The looks kind of like a big-wheel for adults. James Earle, one of the engineers with Local Motors, helps in the design of these trikes. "Drift trike is a relatively new idea. It's been around for a little while, but traditionally what people would do would be to make these bikes themselves and have a friend that would tow them up to the top of a hill behind a van or something like that and they would use gravity to travel down the hill and as they would go around the corners they would drift the trikes around the corners and we thought it was a really cool idea so some of the engineers at Local Motors came up with the idea to professionally manufacture them and then we created a power version."
Drifting is a technique where the driver over-steers causing loss of traction in the rear or all wheels while trying to maintain control of the vehicle. The back tires of the trike are sleeved in PVC to aide in the loss of traction. It's also comes with a 1,000 watt hub motor that powers the front wheel. It can propel the bike close to twenty miles per hour although you don't need to do nearly that fast to do the drifting.
For more info go to www.localmotors.com.
