Few things on YouTube get me as excitedly nervous as when the Garage Avenger drops a new video. It's tough to fit ICE powerplants into small machines due to the engines' size, weight, and cost, but you need to try not to go over the top if you do an electric build. And at the Garage Avenger, he never tries to calm things down—quite the opposite.
When I watched the bearded engineer behind the Garage Avenger build an electric drift shopping cart, I wasn't sure if his designs could get ludicrous or dangerous. But then, he bolted two 1,200W hub motors onto a toddler's balance bike, strapped the battery and control unit into a backpack, and wore it.
Just that last sentence is enough to make me squeamish, but watching him put it all together is far more nerve-racking because you realize nothing works quite as it should.
For starters, he needs to bend the bike's frame so that the wheels will fit, even though they have a smaller diameter than the original ones—the bike comes up to his shins. Once the Micky Mouse wheels get a very DIY fitting and it's time to make sure everything works, we see the bike has a potential top speed of around 60 mph, but that's without anyone on it. This DIY project gets more terrifying as the video progresses. Once we know it basically works, it's time to test it—in the rain.
As the engineer was pulling out of his workshop, it left me wondering how he could possibly ride something this small. And that was a fair thought because he realistically couldn't. It was time for this project to go back to the workshop for some custom foot pegs.
And once the foot pegs were in place, it was time to see what the world's fastest balance bike could do. It never got to the 60 mph that its speedometer showed in testing—thankfully—but it got as close as you'd ever want to go on something this small, hitting an indicated 46 mph. That's not where the video ends, but I'll let you find out how far he pushes this bike for yourself.
Would you throw a leg or maybe a foot over this thing and take it for a spin? Let us know in the comments.
