If you ever watched Wacky Races (or almost any other cartoon), you'll be familiar with cars whose wheels extend on stalks so they can drive over the top of traffic and other pesky obstacles. What you have probably never seen is a vehicle doing this in real life. Get ready to be amazed:
It's not a car but–possibly even more impressive–a bike. The Russian Transformer Bike converts from low-rider to tall-bike while the rider is still sat on it, thanks to some clever hinge-work and doubtless some acrobatics from the rider himself.
Details are sparse (not much seems to exist on the web apart from this video, which has a rather spammy YouTube description), but the mechanism can be seen best at 50 seconds into the clip. The action is concentrated around the elongated rear triangle, which swings between two angles to make the bike grow or shrink.
Ingenious? Gimmicky? Worthy of Dick Dastardly himself? You decide.
Russian Transformer Bike (Transforms As You're Riding) [YouTube via Andrew Liszewski]
