To help finance the early stage research efforts of Wildfire HPV towards producing a velomobile in the US, I am auctioning off a number of Human Powered Vehicle related items on Ebay. I hope that you will help support this project by bidding on this Flevobike Alleweder velomobile.

Click Here to find out more about the Wildfire HPV project.

Click Here to find out more about velomobiles in general.

The Alleweder VM was originally developed by a Dutchman named Bart Verhees in the late 80's and into the early 90's. To help get production of his design off the ground, Verhees collaborated with Johan Vrielink of Flevobike, and together they developed a kit version. Verhees took employment elsewhere shortly after development of the kit, however. After making some additional modifications, Flevobike continued production until 2000.

The Alligt AW (left) next to it's close relative the Flevobike AW

The existence of the two different strains of the Alleweder came about when, in the late 90's, Verhees returned to the velomobile market with an improved version of his machine. After deciding that he wasn't able to sell enough of them at a reasonable profit, he sold his design and equipment to Nico Pluijmers of NPC. After about a year, NPC sold production to Leo Vischer of Alligt Recumbents. Leo made a number of refinements and resumed production with the Alligt Alleweder (A-AW), which is the machine that is currently being produced in the Netherlands.

Lohmeyer Leichtfahrzeuge in Germany also builds and sells the Alligt Alleweder under cooperative agreement. They specialize in equipping the AW with an electric motor.

In 2000, Johan Vrielink decided that with 11 employees, Flevobike was getting too big. Rather than being constantly occupied with the business, he wanted to focus on the technical and creative side of the bicycle business, so that year he made a big decision. Flevobike sold off the licensing to all of their cycles, including the Alleweder. One of the projects undertaken by Flevobike after 2000 was the development of a new Velomobile, incorporating the use of CNC machining and other production oriented technologies. This machine is called the Versatile. After the Flevobike restructuring in 2000, Ymte Sijbrandij and Allert Jacobs, two of the former Flevobike employees started their own velomobile company. This company, now known as Velombiel.nl produces the Quest and Mango Velombiles. They also obtained the licensing for the F-AW and currently produce parts for the A-AW, existing F-AW's, as well as a number of other production velomobiles. Velomobiel.nl also takes F-AW's in trade for the Mango or Quest . These trade-ins are then refurbished and re-sold. Wildfire Human Powered Vehicles is working towards producing the Quest in partnership with Velomobiel.nl here in the United States.

In February of 2003, David Eggleston of Midland, Texas traveled to the Netherlands and while there purchased one of the refurbished F-AW's. He also spent a week at Alligt building his own A-AW. At the end of February he returned to Texas with the license to build the F-AW Stateside. He then started Velomobile USA to manufacture and distribute both lines of Alleweder in the USA.

As for myself, after speaking with David, I ordered a refurbished Flevo AW myself which arrived in May 2003. This is the machine that is currently up for auction