Bike Anti-Porn - When Things Go Wrong

Indeed! Just outside Edgware Rd tube is where I spotted it.

Do you know anything about these bikes?

That's a Itera. It's so notorious here in Sweden that it's pretty hard to study engineering or industrial design without reading something about it.

It's a plastic bike 20 years ahead of its time. Basically in 1980 a couple of Volvo engineers in Gothenburg thought they could make a bike in plastic. The bike was hailed as the next big thing in Swedish design by the industrial design establishment who were (and still are might I add) completely clueless when it comes to bikes, won a few prizes. They received a lot media coverage, and they got massive government grants to manufacture the bike in the north of Sweden, so as to generate employment opportunities in rural communities. It was all politics.

The bikes themselves were terrible of course, even the "super light" racing model weighed something like 19kg and was more flexible than an Eastern European gymnast, and only gets flexier as the weather becomes warmer. Not to worry though, the plastic gets harder when exposed to UV radiation in sunlight, and after a few months parked outside would become brittle. Pretty much nothing on the thing used bike industry standards (probably because the designers knew nothing about them), everything was proprietary. Even the tools included with the bikes were proprietary. The final product came out IIRC in early 1982, and the company folded in late 1982. The Swedish government invested a lot of money in the project, and to save face they took over the company and ran it till about the mid-1980s. It was all fucking politics.

Basically, it's like those terrible bike design concepts that are shat out by some clueless industrial design students every other month and are immediately praised by people who know nothing about bikes. Except in this case they actually threw a huge pile of money at it until it barely worked.