How to Ride a Tricycle on a Slant or Slope: Stay Balanced on 3 Wheel Bikes on Slanted Roads

How to ride a tricycle or e-trike against a slant.

Hey everyone, I'm Dustin. I have nearly 20 years of experience in the bike and e-bike industry and today I'm going to show you how to ride a tricycle or an e-trike on a slanted surface. If you can see straight ahead here, this parking lot is sloping downward, and I know a lot of people have this issue with driveways as well. So I'm going to show you how to ride with that slant.

All right, I've got a few of the sixthreezero e-trikes here, our Electric Rickshaw, our folding Easy Transit Trike, and our EVRYjourney Trike, different wheel sizes, different motors. I'm going to ride them manually just for demonstration purposes, but I wanted to demonstrate how all three of these, I can ride them on this slanted surface.

The EVRYjourney has 26-inch wheels by two-inch. The Easy Transit has 16-inch wheels by two inches, and the EVRYjourney Rickshaw has 20-inch by four-inch in the rear and 20-inch by four in the front. Okay, so riding against the slope on a hill on a trike is a scary proposition, I know, but if you use the correct tactics, you should be able to do it depending on the incline. Now, you can see here, this is not a severe slope, but it's sloping downward and we've done a lot of test rides here in this parking lot and a lot of three-wheel bike test rides and I will say, a lot of people that get caught in this slant have a hard time steering their trike out of the slope. Now, there are two very key points to driving a tricycle on a slanted surface like this.

Number one, leaning your body will not steer the trike. What it will do is, leaning will keep all your wheels down on the ground, but it's not going to steer the trike, so if the slant starts to take the trike in a direction, the only way to get it is my point number two, which is you have to steer the trike. You have to steer the trike and counter-steer the trike against the slant.

Now, these are tendencies I've developed after logging thousands of miles on, oops, tricycles. You can see already it's taken the slant right there. Tendencies I've developed after riding thousands of miles on tricycles and e-trikes. It may not be a natural tendency for you at this point. It's something you have to be aware of and develop as you ride a three-wheel bike more and more.

So let me demonstrate what you're going to need to do. You're going to need to sit down and lean into the slope. So this is sloping this way, we want to lean our body this way to keep all of the wheels down because the tendency is going to be for the trike to lean this way. Now, leaning doesn't mean leaning like this, it's more of a bodyweight shift. So you can lean this way, but you have to make sure you're shifting your weight. So it's more of a weight shift than it is a lean because if you're just leaning, it's not moving your body weight this way. So let me go ahead and demonstrate.

All right, I'm going to go ahead and get on here. Okay. Now that I am mounted, you can see what I mean by leaning. Now, you can lean your whole body, and that's fine, but if you just lean like this, that's not going to work, so you want to make sure you're shifting your weight from your right butt cheek to your left like this and so you're putting that weight here. So I'm shifting on my butt first, then I'm kind of leaning off to the left a little bit, and from there, as long as you are riding on the slant, you're going to need to keep your body weight that way.

Now, you may feel the trike start to pull in the direction of the slant, which in this case would be the right, you need to steer. The leaning will not make the bike go in that direction. I see this every time we do test rides, people start leaning and they think, "Oh, why is the bike still going this way?" And they get caught rolling to the right and not realizing why they can't get the trike back because you have to steer a trike. That is very important. So let me go ahead and get going here.

Okay, so from here, I'm leaning this way, I'm pedaling, and if you see here, if I let go of the wheels, the bike goes this way. Let me show you again. If I let go, we go this way, so I have to physically steer to the left, okay? And now I come out of here and now I can ride straight up and down. Let me go ahead and come back the same way. Okay, so let me show you again. I'm leaning this way. Now watch, when I let go of the handlebars, start to go this way, I have to turn them myself. All right, let me go ahead and make a turn, okay, all right, now I'm coming back. Now, I'm leaning this way and watching this, I'm going to let go of the handlebars, start to go this way, and steer it back. So the whole time I'm steering, I'm keeping the wheel straight. Okay, there it goes. I need to keep the wheel straight. Very important to remember that. Okay, let me go ahead and push this bike right here, and now I'll demonstrate on the Easy Transit.

So everything is the same. I'll show you though, how similarly, if I let go of the steering, the bike will start to go to the right. Okay? So here we go. Okay, so all I'm doing, just keeping a little bit of my weight, now I'm going to let go of the handlebar. Okay, we're going off to the right. I'm steering it. Now remember, my lean is not preventing the bike from going to the right. Here we go, coming back. All right, here we go. Now I'm leaning to the right, I've shifted my body weight, and I'm going to let go of the handlebars. Okay? Now I'm just a little nervous because I don't want to cruise into the curb, so I'm just showing you, okay? Here they go, I'm back. So lean and steer. Keep the wheel straight.

All right, now lastly is our rickshaw, which has the fattest tires of them all. Now this one, in theory, with the big tires, should be even more grounded on an example like this. Oops, pull my parking brake off there. All right. Okay, now, yeah, on this one with these tires, you almost don't even have to lean as much because it's so stable, but I'm going to go ahead and let go of the handlebars. Okay, it goes to the right, so I'm keeping these bars straight. Okay, coming back now, I'm leaning this way. Now, watch me let go of the bars. Yep, keep it straight. So it's hard to tell, but I am keeping the wheel straight right now. One more time. There we go. Okay. All right, so there you have it. There's riding on a slant.

So if you are going to ride on a slanted surface, there's a certain limitation to it on a trike, you want to avoid very extreme inclines. Now, I don't think too many of those exist in certain locations. Now, if you're on a very steep driveway, it's up to you to determine if it's possible or not. All I have to say is if you're going to ride across the slant like this on a very steep driveway, you just have to lean as much as you can into that driveway to keep those wheels down on the ground. Again, it's a lot different than steering a two-wheel bike. You can see for me it's pretty easy all in all, I'm very used to it, and I'm very used to keeping the wheel straight. It's almost subconscious for me at this point, where I just do it and you could see where I let the bars off. It does pull me, but I was keeping the bars straight.

So you'll get used to it, I promise. If you have any other questions at all, please reach out to us at theteam@sixthreezero.com or call us at (310) 982-2877. Also, if you're in the market for an e-trike or a trike, take our proprietary body fit quiz, answer a few questions about your body and your life, and we'll recommend the perfect three-wheel bike for you. In addition to that, we have a 30-day test ride your trike policy. If you don't love it in the first 30 days, send it back, no questions asked, no money out of your pocket. In addition to that, we're going to warranty everything for a year. If anything goes wrong in the first year, we'll take care of it, and make sure you can keep riding, all the labor parts.

Lastly, join our Facebook group, sixthreezero Pedalers, there are thousands of members there. You're just going to pop in, you can ask other riders questions right now, and see how they like their e-trike, so you can get comfortable before you purchase yours. Then once you're comfortable, go ahead and post in the group and make friends, and then download our app in the iOS or app store. You can track your rides on the app and compete on the leaderboard, it's tons of fun. So thanks for sticking around and don't forget, it's your journey or experience, enjoy the ride.