This is a nice one. A super-rare Swedish early 1980s all-plastic Itera bicycle, spotted on a Finnish online auction site. I actually remember when these were around, how could you forget something as cool as this? I was pretty young back then but that was the days of Tron, remember?
"The Itera Plastic Bicycle was an attempt in Sweden in the early 1980s to modernize the bicycle by replacing metal with plastic fiber composite materials and using injection moulding. The project ended after three years as a commercial failure..."
If you read the bike's history on Wikipedia, you realize that it just was like IKEA furniture, only 20 years before IKEA went big:
"... The bikes were delivered unassembled with tools provided in the box. In autumn 1981, more than 100,000 Swedes indicated they were interested. ... However, sales were slow and the news media lost interest. The fact that not every box contained every part to assemble a bicycle frustrated many customers. ... Boxes of bicycles piled up in shops. Among them were returns, mostly with broken. Where metal bends, plastic breaks."
Anyhow, there was a kind of a happy end to the story of Itera:
"Production ended in 1985. The stock was sold to the West Indies where they became popular as rust is a problem with metal bicycles."
Oh, I would so like to see a picture of a Rastaman happily riding that bike in Kingston's Shanty Town back in 1986.
But who will buy the one linked above, just for the front wheel? The fork is also pretty funky.
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