Suzuki

Suzuki's different take on the tilting trike
By Ben Purvis

The idea of tilting three-wheeled bikes has been with us for years now: Piaggio's MP3 kickstarted a market that has since grown to include rivals like Yamaha's Tricity and various Peugeot, Kymco and Qooder machines with a similar layout. Now Suzuki has its own leaning three-wheeled city bike undergoing R&D - but it's a very different style of machine.

Two patents for variations on Suzuki's idea have surfaced in Japan, showing a three-wheeler that, like the MP3 and its rivals, uses a scooter's combined engine/swingarm unit at the back and has two wheels at the front. But where the competitors all adopt a tall stance, essentially mimicking the shape of a normal scooter but adding an extra front wheel, the Suzuki design is much longer, allowing the rider - or perhaps driver - to sit low down in a position that's more like a racing car than a motorcycle.

There are still bars, or an aircraft-style steering yoke, rather than a steering wheel, and the design is intended to fall into the same class of vehicle as its scooter-shaped rivals, but the car-style seating and a suspension design that means it's impossible to fall over, should be attractive to customers who are wary of motorcycles.

Suzuki's patents make specific reference to the design's low construction costs, with a simple steel frame combined with an off-the-shelf powertrain. The front suspension is unusual, though, with swing-axles holding the front wheels and simple coil-over shocks. The clever bit is that the tops of those shocks are connected to a seesaw-style crossbeam, which in turn is linked to the bike's steering, so when the yoke is turned, the three-wheeler is forced into a tilting position. Release the steering and the bike naturally returns to an upright position.

The design - with its lean angle linked to the steering position - means that the machine won't be balancing gravity against centrifugal force like a real motorcycle. But with three wheels, that's not absolutely necessary - after all, non-leaning trikes like the Can-Am Ryker and Spider already exist. The Suzuki is a halfway solution, adding an element of lean to provide more cornering stability than a non-tilting trike, but eliminating the last vestiges of instability that come with designs like the Piaggio MP3. 

There are still a lot of stages to get through before this design could reach production, but the fact it's designed to fit inside a legal framework designed for motorcycles, while offering a level of stability that car drivers are more comfortable with, allied to a low production cost, could make it a tempting form of inner-city transport for some.