Fake FXX Ferrari pedals into insanity

Published May 10, 2012

Share

At first glance this may look like a Ferrari FXX but the spidery wheels, no wider than your thumb, are a dead giveaway - it's a pedal car.

Only this one's not for kids; it's an accurate full-size replica of the track-only original with seating (and pedals!) for two adults. A chain and belt-drive transmission with 11 gears gives it a top speed of 16km/h - depending on how fit the occupants are.

It's called the Fahrradi Farfall FFX (fahrrad is a bicycle in German, farfalla a butterfly in Italian) and has a plastic body over a tubular-steel chassis.

SERIOUS FEAT OF ENGINEERING

The Butterfly Bicycle took Austrian artist Hannes Langwelder nearly a year to build and weighs only 100kg, which is a serious feat of engineering in itself.

It's not Langwelder's first pedal-powered supercar; he previously built a Butterfly Porsche in which Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson refused to be seen dead, so it was driven for the programme by Richard Hammond, on the grounds that he was both lighter and fitter than James May.

As 'performance art' it's questionable, although it makes a rational statement about alternative energy - which is rendered null and void by the fact that it is standing in the Lentos museum of art in Linz, Austria, for sale at the utterly irrational price of €1.5 million (R15.4 million rand) - which is about what the real FXX cost new.

Related Topics:

Ferrari