The Swerv: A Three-Wheeled Vehicle Designed Purely to Provide Thrills

The mobility space focuses on moving people around for practical purposes. But as a student at Imperial College London's Dyson School of Design Engineering, Kerim Taskin designed a vehicle purely to provide a thrilling experience for the rider. His Swerv electric trike has a quite unusual riding position: So what's the point of this? Taskin explains, and it sounds like more of a mental health aid than a vehicle: Do you ever feel like your mind is going through a thick fog? Or like you just want your racing thoughts to stand still? Or maybe like the walls are closing in and your internal world is like a broken record, stuck on repeat. The Swerv breaks you free from that by providing a pleasant, engaging and unique experience. It forces your brain to break free from its usual patterns by giving you such a unique experience that it doesn't know what else to do. Your mind becomes still, you feel instantly present and alert. Life energy rushing through your every cell. That combined with the sense of speed, feeling of flying, exhilaration of going head first and the small vibrations of the ride felt around your whole body, riders often break out in laughter and big smiles. I often found myself sat at a laptop trying my hardest to complete assignments that were stressing me out from my university degree. My brain just didn't tick well enough to get the simplest tasks done. That's when I realised that there was an imbalance in my life. I was sat way too often at a desk trying to do tasks requiring a lot of focus. Eventually my brain felt depleted. Running and cycling helped but it took too long and too much discipline to be able to cross over from frustrated and stuck in my head to feeling relieved and being more in my body. I realised I needed to boost my brains neuroplasticity, the ability of my brain to develop new connections and neurons. And I needed a fun and easy way of doing this pretty much on demand. I discovered from an online course that the #1 thing that boosts the brains neuroplasticity is for us to do things in new ways. Using my new found skills from my design engineering course at Imperial College London, I started my process of design for a tool that would help me to instantly feel alive, invigorated and refreshed. I combined the design of the "Tron bike" from the movie "Tron" and a simple trike to sketch out the first ever Swerv. It took me three months to design and build and it did work. But my budget was really low and my time was limited so it was very rough around the edges, BUT IT WORKED! However I had tested the concept, it gave me the boost I was looking for, I validated the idea and as soon as I tried the first prototype I was completely HOOKED. Now graduated, Taskin attracted enough investors to commercialize the design through his company, Sweren. For £25 (USD $33), you get a 30-minute riding session at the Preston Park Velodrome in Brighton. Reviewers have written "The adrenaline hit is insane," "Pure dopamine" and "My nervous system is still buzzing." While it looks a bit dangerous to ride on roads, Sweren does sell a street-legal (in the UK) version of the trike for £4,990 (USD $6,587); an off-road version for £3,490 ($4,607); and a kid's version for £2,299 ($3,034).