Huffy Wheel - Unsafe at any speed.

Kids' bikes have always imitated the vehicles of adulthood. In the fifties it was airplanes, due to the excitement of "the jet age". Also, bikes often had "gas tanks" that housed the batteries for the light, or maybe an electric horn. In the late sixties and early seventies, it was mostly cars and motorcycles. In my mind, Huffy always made the nuttiest gimmick bikes, like this thing: The Huffy Wheel.

Huffy likes to call themselves "America's first bike". This isn't a badge of quality. Huffys are the first bike any kid gets because K-Mart stocked little else and they were so cheap as to be disposable.

Huffys were shit. Frames were  welded together with uneven, messy beads that looked like metal boogers. Parts that should be cast or forged were stamped out of sheet metal, and the mouth-breathing staffers at K-Mart ensured that each Huffy was assembled and adjusted with the expertise that it deserved, which is none. Even if the parts were all screwed on the right way around, the bike would still be a rickety death trap because of the rock-bottom price point.

Check it out! It has a steering wheel like a car! Unlike a car, the steering doesn't self-center, so you'd have to look down to see where you were pointing the thing. Handlebars don't need visual reference to tell where they're aimed.

This steering wheel is like another of my favorite all-time shitty inventions: the perfectly round Apple mouse from the 1999-era Macintoshes. It was rotationally symmetrical, so you couldn't feel with your hand where it was pointing. You had to either look down or do "test wiggles" to see where your cursor moved. Well done, Steve. That's what I call "insanely great".

The Huffy Wheel also has a "drag brake", which is kind of like a parking brake on a car, maybe? Your car's parking brake only stops the rear wheels, which means that, if you're eighteen, you can use it to make lots of noise and possibly kill yourself. The Huffy Wheel has a normal coaster brake (push pedals backwards to stop) and a nutty "drag brake" down between your legs, which also stops the rear wheel for some reason, but with the added benefit of having only one hand on the steering when you use it. This way, you'll be off balance when your weight is thrown forward by a nice hard wheel lock, and you're pretty likely to lay the thing down with a pedal jammed into your ribs (unless, of course, the brake doesn't work well enough to do anything which is almost surely the case because it's a Huffy bought from K-Mart). Squealy tire noise or elbow full of gravel. Both are pretty cool.

The product shot shows the bike in midair, or maybe doing a wheelie. I wouldn't recommend doing either on a Huffy, unless you're goofy enough to want a bike with a steering wheel, in which case you get what you deserve.