DISASTER ...!! (Attention: Jim Mueller; you will want to know about this, sir!) My girlfriend and I have found an apparent safety / design problem with one of TTs new products, the Wider Seat: an increased ability to roll or flip a TT Rover in a turn. See, for the longest time, she was riding _my_ rover ... often, as she lacked confidence to ride on the roads near our home, just doing laps around our semicircle driveway; roughly fifteen laps to the mile, and shed do three miles in one session. She did this many, many times - Id say at least ten or twelve, possibly as many as twenty times. And even saying twenty, I suspect the count is WAY lower than reality. And she did it all without incident - no falls, no crashes, nothing. ... Yesterday, we picked up HER new Rover Nuvinci, and this morning, she decided to go out and do just one mile, fifteen laps around the driveway. And on her FIRST lap .... FLIPPED the trike. D: Now, let me explain how: the western terminus of our driveway has a bit of an upslope right by the road edge. On MY rover, she was able to make this turn without applying her brakes, and never felt unsafe, unstable, or anything else un. On HERS, doing this causes the right wheel to lift off the pavement ... and, for her, she rolled on her left side. So, Day One of owning her trike, its got damage - the mirror sheared off entirely (and we have NFC where it went), the front reflector snapped off, the front accessory mount bent (though I was able to pull it back into proper shape), and her left brake lever is bent (and no way do I have the strength to un-bend THAT) and scraped up. SHE, luckily, is unharmed. A few bumps and probably a bruise or two, is all. ... So, I went out, and with both trikes, tried the same turn. On mine? No problem, easy peasy. On hers? Up came that right wheel, and I had to lean right (hard) to bring it back down. ... The trikes are both Rovers; identical in wheelbase and width. Hes is LESS top-heavy than mine, Id say, because she doesnt have the cargo rack and had-sided trunk case Ive put on mine - nor those bar-end grips I put above the handlebars. Both have wide handlebars, speaking of those. Theres only two significant points of difference that _might_ contribute, and the first one I can discount purely on past experience: we have different tires, but shes done that same exact turn, in the same exact manner, on my Rover AT LEAST two hundred times ... _before_ I put those Big Ben tires on there. So, even with stock tires on both ... one flips, the other doesnt. And, the other difference? She got the newly-available Wider Seat. And I think that its narrowing the envelope for how the Rover handles in a turn. Riders on those Wide Seats need to be more cautions turning - do so at lower speed, and lean into the turn more aggressively. I honestly think TT needs to affix a safety notice to those seats. Additionally, TT should consider redesigning the seat to sit a bit LOWER than the standard Rover seat, to lower the riders center of gravity. Do note, I will be contacting TT directly, as well - but the members of this group deserve a heads-up, in case any of them have the same wider seat on their trikes. :) For Jim: hers is the purple one ... apparently its the first of that particular color TT ever sent out:
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 14:43:53 +0000
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