and many years of hard work later,
the C-1 was born, the brain child of 35 year old Daniel Kim,
it may look like a car, but it has in fact just 2 wheels, the all-electric C-1 looks like a motorcycle, but has a steel and composite outer body, like a car, He invites
a visitor to sit inside the C-1 and sway from side to side, the vehicle,
emitting a steady hum stays upright, no kickstand props it up; no third wheel
adds stability, 'when was the last time you balanced on a motorcycle at zero
miles an hour?' Kim rhetorically asks, 'never', a patented control system featuring two gyroscopes that spin in a compartment beneath the driver’s seat is the secret to the C-1’s balancing act, the gyros provide the torque to keep
the vehicle upright no matter what the driver does and to hold it at the
precisely correct lean angle when the vehicle turns, this idea has been tried
before, but mostly failed because of the size of the gyroscopes, the C-1
instead employs the foot-wide, high-speed, computerised technology of devices
known as control-moment gyros (CMGs), which are mostly used for positioning
satellites in space, Kim hopes that in 2 or so years the finished product will
be on the roads as a commutator people carrier, all of the comfort of a car but
taking up just the space of a motorcycle.
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