Meet EVO, San Francisco’s Answer To The Ultimate Urban Utility Bike

Every couple of years, the Oregon Manifest launches a contest designed to surface new ideas in bike design from teams across the country. The project this year has tasked designers from five cities to build what they believe is the “ultimate urban utility bike.”

San Francisco’s entry into the contest is EVO, a collaboration between HUGE Design, 4130 Cycle Works, and PCH International’s Lime Lab. The team built a bike that took into account new 3D metal printing techniques, while also creating a flexible system for adding modular accessories.

The plug-and-play accessory system will enable cyclists to easily add and remove things like storage racks, baby carriers, or even surfboard attachments, depending on what they planned to do or where they wanted to go on any given day. With a quick-connect mounting system and a symmetrical frame design, EVO can be used for carrying different loads of cargo, more or less interchangeably on the front or rear of the bike.

Because the lugs are 3D-printed, EVO can be very quickly assembled by just welding together a few pieces of straight tubing onto them. That reduces a ton of the man hours associated with fitting various pieces of the frame together.

It’s worth noting that this is very much a concept design and the cost to build would probably be a little out of the price range for average consumers. However, if the EVO came to be, it wouldn’t be the first time a designer took an Oregon Manifest bike and built it for real.

A few years ago, a San Francisco-based team from IDEO built the first version of the Faraday Bike, which went on to a successful Kickstarter campaign and recently shipped its first production run of its urban utility e-bike.

Anyway, check out the video above for more info on EVO, and be sure to vote for your favorite design on the Oregon Manifest website. Voting ends August 3 at Noon PST.