5 / 12

Trikes, especially Honda's ATC models, became so popular so quickly in the 1980s that no one thought them through properly. When they began as little balloon-tired back woods crawlers with a top speed of 25 mph, their dangerous handling characteristics didn’t really matter. When they became the hottest Christmas toy (blame James Bond) for middle and high school kids who went out goofing around with no gear or supervision, is it any wonder a bunch of them got hurt? Because we are Americans, we clamored for bigger and faster trikes and the factories made them, and lots more people ended up pinned under a heavy trike at the bottom of a ditch, often with broken limbs. Because in the 1980s there were still leftover activist regulators from the Carter Era, 3-wheeled ATVs were nearly recalled and outlawed completely. In the end there was a compromise: the companies agreed to stop selling 3 wheeled ATVs and offer free safety classes to anyone who had bought a trike, or the new 4-wheeled models. You still see these trikes occasionally and they require a bizarre type of body English to ride fast. These trikes are especially popular with guys who limp and talk about how they don’t let the government tell them what to do.