Video: "World's first highway speed bike" launches on Kickstarter

Inventors Rahtmobile are billing the Raht Racer as the "world's first highway speed bike" - but is it a bike, or an electric car with a novel throttle control?

When is an electric bike not an electric bike? It's a question that legislators all over the world have had to deal with in drawing a line where electrically-assisted bikes end and electric motorbikes, or even cars, begin.

The team behind Raht Racer are looking for $75,000 from Kickstarter to get started building production versions of their three-wheeler, which they expect will sell for $35-45,000.

On the Kickstarter page, founder and CEO Rich Kronfeld says the Raht Racer lets you "pedal as you would an ordinary bike but go as fast as a car. The Raht Racer uses serial hybrid pedal-electric vehicle technology to give you the feeling of superhuman strength."

You sit in the Raht Racer in a similar way to a recumbent, with the pedals in front of you. But the pedals don't drive it directly, instead "pedal power is converted to electrical energy via Rahtmobile’s patent pending series hybrid flywheel generator technology".

Kronfeld, whose day job is acting, jokes that Raht Racer started as a project to build a time-travelling Delorean so he could go back in time and warn himself not to go into showbiz. Here he is on local tV show On The Fly talking about Raht Racer:

The first prototype does 70mph and Rahtmobile say production vehicles will be capable of 100mph with a 50-mile range. It'll have a 20KW motor powered by a 9.2kWhr lithium-ion battery. All that puts it well off the scale for electric-assist bikes everywhere in the world.

Even the US, which has fairly generous rules compared to the UK, generally limits electric bikes you can ride without a licence to a maximum assisted speed of 20mph and a 750-watt motor.

It's a little odd that Rahtmobile keep referring to the Raht Racer as a bike, then, as it's rather obviously an electric car.

And a sophisticated one at that. It has a carbon fibre body, roll cage, airbag and a second seat so you can carry a passenger. You can pedal as you drive so you can treat the Raht Racer as a mobile gym and get some exercise on the way to work even if it's chucking down or you're battling a Minnesota winter. Or you can sit back and let the electric motor do the work.

Fun fact: Kronfeld got a grant from the state of Minnesota to build the prototype. That money came from a deal between the state and the nuclear power industry to fund alternative energy products, so the Raht Racer is electric powered and atomic funded.

So far Rahtmobile has raised $23,856 of the $75,000 target with 38 days to go.

Oh yeah, the name. It stands for Recumbent Automotive Human Transport. "Everybody tells me they hate the name," says Kronfeld.