Even though enclosed motorcycles have been around, in some form, since the 1920s, Eco service agent Dan Whitfield said he feels the Eco, developed by a former Swiss airline pilot and aircraft manufacturing entrepreneur named Arnold Wagner, is the one that combines the best elements of a true car-motorcycle hybrid.
“I’m a passionate motorcyclist, and this is like skipping into space,” Whitfield said. “It’s like taking 1936 technology and jumping into the future.”
Whitfield’s eyes light up when he tells you about the time Wagner discovered–the hard way–just how safe and durable the Eco was.
At a big German motorcycle show last year, Wagner was driving the Eco for a piece being filmed by the Speed Channel. Attempting a U-turn on the rain-slicked Autobahn, the notorious expressway where cars routinely travel at the speed of sound, Wagner’s Eco was creamed by a car.
“Knocked [the Eco] skyward,” Whitfield said. “He was hurt, got a few cuts and bruises. But he made a meeting an hour after the accident.”
Whitfield first heard about the Eco a few years ago and looked it up on the Internet. He started a correspondence with Wagner that led to an invitation to drive the Eco at a Formula One racecar course in the Czech Republic.
“It’s far superior to any vehicle I’ve ever driven,” he said. “It’s a very agile machine–more agile than a Porsche.”
Wagner’s company, Swiss-based Peraves A.G., has sold nearly 100 Ecos worldwide. Right now, those owned by Whitfield and Philadelphia-area dentist Tom Mohn are the only two known to be in the U.S.
A third Eco is set to be delivered to a Denver businessman whose wife, so the story goes, was so incensed with her husband spending so much on the new contraption that she left him.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale ([email protected]) and Kris Karnopp ([email protected])