Ever felt like your hiking could do with a little bit of power assist? Well, you could spend thousands on a futuristic hiking exo-skeleton to give your muscles a boost. Or you could just pimp your hiking boots with some caterpillar wheels and a motor.
Because that’s going to work, right? If cyclists can have e-bikes, surely walkers can have e-boots?
Well… not is this video is anything to judge by.
It’s a clip from the latest online episode of Failure Is An Option, a series in which host and former aircraft engineer Brendan Carberry comes up with various mechanical hacks designed for outdoors adventures. In previous episodes he’s built a bike that can pedal down rivers and tried to use helium balloons to lighten the load of a backpack.
This time he’s made some motorized self-hiking boots but the initial results are about as successful as a tissue paper tent. He can’t even get them go in a straight line and moss and twigs prove near-insurmountable obstacles.
But Carberry perseveres in the actual episode, even adding remote control. And while things improve (he gets them up to more than a walking pace on very level ground, and without having to do anything too complicated by changing direction) they’re still utterly useless even on the slightest of uphills.
And they keep breaking.
As Carberry himself puts it: “Humans have been hiking since we first stood upright but since then? Nothing. No innovation, no new ideas, just ... walking. In this episode, I set out to fix that, just as soon as I can fix these boots...again.”
We’ll stick to walking.
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