Bicycles with electric-assist motors are now a common sight on city streets; they allow commuters to pedal long distances, even up hills, without arriving to work soaked in sweat. But a new version, coming soon to Finland, has been turning heads at demonstrations.
The Scouter is actually a quadricycle, its appearance a bit like a dune buggy. It can carry 550 pounds of load-two passengers and a lot of gear, or two adults and two kids, for instance. And it's possible thanks to the HP 4200 3D printer, which created parts for the prototype and will generate customized versions of the bike when it rolls out in 2020.
The Scouter
The Scouter is the brainchild of Finnish entrepreneur Pekka Ketola, who is passionate about reducing carbon emissions. His company, Rideascout, promotes both cycling and 3D printing as a way to bolster sustainability efforts in urban environments-eliminating car trips as well as long supply chains that burn massive amounts of fossil fuels. Using a system called co-creation, the bike's design received crowd-sourced input from hundreds of enthusiasts around the world.
"Sustainability is in the DNA of everything we do," says Ketola. "There are now about a trillion cars on the planet, and most people only drive 10 or 20 kilometers a day. People in cities need to have mobility, but our current car culture is not sustainable."
Pekka Ketola, Rideascout founder
A Bike for Everyone
Ketola, 53, has been obsessed with human-powered transport since he was a teenager and saw a picture of an amphibious bicycle that two men pedaled over the sea from Finland to Sweden. "So, I built my own in my garage," he recalls, "and I could actually pedal it on the water. That was the starting point."After studying user-centered design in college, he spent 17 years in product design at Nokia. In 2012, Ketola and a Nokia colleague, Petri Pitk?nen, founded a consulting firm called Ideascout, which helps companies crowd-source business solutions and product ideas. "We saw very early that 3D printing would be important, especially for industrial applications," he says.
Ketola and Pitk?nen also saw how 3D printing could make it possible to build, and customize, an innovative e-bike locally. In 2014, that led to the spinoff bike company Rideascout. The Scouter was born.
The Scouter is unique in that pedaling charges the small, 13-pound battery (a Tesla Model S has a 1,200-pound battery) and there's no direct linkage from the pedals to wheels like with a traditional bike. Instead, riders electronically adjust the resistance of the pedals (similar to a stationary bike machine at the gym), which, in turn, varies the charge speed and thus the motor's range. It can also be charged through an AC power port. But Ketola stresses it is not necessary to charge from a port, which likely supplies power generated from fossil fuels. "If you are active, you can use your feet to make all the energy for riding," he says. "Everybody can drive it. If you are very small, you can drive it. If you want to go with a friend, you can both pedal. If you cannot drive a car, you can drive a Scouter."
Scandinavia, and Finland in particular, is a prime market for sustainable-friendly businesses. According to a March 2019 study conducted by Finland's Ministry of the Environment, three-fourths of all Finns believe climate change is a security threat to their country-and they're willing to make personal changes. More than half of Finns say they are reducing electricity use, and nearly half are buying less stuff in order to fight climate change.
Young people with Scouters in Tampere, Finland
Rainer Lindqvist, Marketing Director, Kotipizza
With a population of 5.5 million, Finland has about 3.4 million cars; about 2.7 million of those are used in cities and for commuting. The survey suggested that nearly 20 percent of Finns plan to give up their cars over the next five years, in favor of more sustainable transport like bicycles and public transportation.
"The impact would be enormous," says Johanna S?rkij?rvi, Head of Climate and Environmental Research at the Ministry of Transport and Communications. "even if only half of them went through with their plan."
Rideascout's bike is being manufactured in a partnership with Valmet Automotive, Finland's largest auto company. But many of the plastic components are generated by Rideascout on the HP 4200. This type of 3D printing technology, along with innovations in digital manufacturing, is helping to accelerate a more sustainable 4th Industrial Revolution by reducing the environmental impact of parts production and simplifying traditionally lengthy supply chains. "We can manufacture whatever kind of parts we want right here in Finland," says Ketola. "We can add a roof, a color, a logo, child carriers, or specialized storage containers."
Already, Rideascout is partnering with Finland's largest pizza chain, Kotipizza, to build Scouters designed to haul hot pizzas around Helsinki and other cities. "We use gas-fueled cars to deliver our pizzas, but we're looking for new ways of doing it, and of course electric power is where we want to go," says Rainer Lindqvist, Kotipizza's marketing director. So, Ketola and his team built Kotipizza-branded Rideascouts, which have been deployed at promotional events and a franchisee gathering. The reaction, says Lindqvist, has been universally positive-at least in part due to Finns' deeply ingrained commitment to sustainability. "The environmental impact is one of the most important things about the Rideascout concept," he says. "In some senses, this is the beginning of the future."
Kotipizza-branded Scouters on the streets of Finland
Small Company, Big Impact
By 2016, the Ketola and Pitk?nen were fielding so many requests for 3D printing commissions that they formed a third company, 3DStep, which makes plastic and metal parts for some of Finland's largest manufacturers, including the tractor company Avant Tecno. "3D printing allows a small company like ours to have big clients," says Ketola.
He recalls the day Avant Tecno asked for help: "They were launching a new model in two weeks, but they were missing most of the parts they needed for the cabin of the prototype; the design came in too late to be made conventionally in Asia. So, we worked with their engineers and proposed some changes to conform to the requirements of the HP 4200. Just a couple of hours before the launch, everything was ready and polished and in place."
Another client is OptoFidelity, the Finnish company that performs independent testing on smartphone screens and virtual-reality headsets for manufacturers. Of course, human heads come in all shapes and sizes, so OptoFidelity commissioned 3DStep to print dozens of custom dummy heads, to their specifications. "They define the shape and then we print this head, which has places for the optical sensors," explains Ketola. "We can produce whatever type of skull they need. Obviously, this is not mass production, but if you think about it, 3D printing for the testing business could be quite big on a global scale."
Indeed, 3DStep has plenty of room for growth. "Less than one percent of manufacturing companies in Scandinavia use 3D printing," says Ketola. "So, we are marketing to that 99 percent."
The Scouter prototype, unveiled earlier this year, features many visible parts generated on the HP 4200, such as mudguards and snazzy hubcaps with the Scouter logo. "Within 24 hours we had eight million clicks on the internet; that's not typical for a company of our size," he says with characteristic Scandinavian understatement.
Family having picnic in park
As Rideascout prepares for the 2020 rollout of the Scouter in Scandinavia, Ketola sees economic and social benefits to 3D printing technology: His company hopes to manufacture Scouters remotely in "microfactories" all over the world. The business model is still being developed, but Ketola cites Local Motors, the Phoenix-based creator of open-source cars that also use 3D printing, as an inspiration.
"Our design rule is that it has to be simple," he says. "There must not be any requirement for complicated tools or parts. So, it can be duplicated; there could be many manufacturers, and we are going to support those local businesses and workers. This is the promise of 3D printing."
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