Philippines launches electric tricycles, reignites your infatuation with Big Wheels

The lowly tricycle: occupying some hazy middle ground between car and bicycle, all too often it’s dismissed as a novelty, a lark suitable just for children and dedicated iconoclasts – see, for instance, T3 Motion’s R3 . But some places recognize the tricycle’s usefulness, and a kind of places is the Philippines, where the 3-wheeled wonders are a keystone of public transit. Now the rustic is taking another leap forward by upgrading its gasoline-powered trikes to electric. Obviously not designed to compete with, say, electric motorcycles on speed or style, they do have a definite yellow-school-bus charm. More important than aesthetic concerns, the hot electric models may have one-quarter the carbon footprint in their gas-burning predecessors; in a nation where tricycles burn nearly five billion dollars worth of fuel every year, emitting ten million lots of carbon dioxide, that’s a big effect. The govt. also hopes to avoid wasting millions of bucks by upgrading; it’s already committed to twenty,000 trikes for the capital, with more to follow nationwide. If electric tricycles achieve the Philippines, maybe we’ll all be one step toward eliminating the stigma of the third wheel – no less than in the case of transportation.