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Concept
Tilting three-wheeler
Summary
A tilting three-wheeler, tilting trike, leaning trike, or even just tilter, is a three-wheeled vehicle and usually a narrow-track vehicle whose body and or wheels tilt in the direction of a turn. Such vehicles can corner without rolling over despite having a narrow axle track because they can balance some or all of the roll moment caused by centripetal acceleration with an opposite roll moment caused by gravity, as bicycles and motorcycles do. This also reduces the lateral acceleration experienced by the rider, which some find more comfortable than the alternative. The narrow profile can result in reduced aerodynamic drag and increased fuel efficiency. These types of vehicles have also been described as "man-wide vehicles" (MWV).
As with tricycles that do not tilt, there are a variety of feasible choices of how the wheels are arranged, which wheels are steered, and which wheels are driven. In addition, there are a variety of feasible choices for which wheels tilt and which do not.
Because this is an emerging field with many different vehicle configurations, many different individual contributors, and not yet any clearly dominant technology, there is a great deal of potentially confusing terminology in use:
tilt, lean, and roll are all used somewhat interchangeably, depending on the context and the writer, usually to mean rotation about a longitudinal axis of the vehicle.
stable and stability are usually used in this context to characterize whether the vehicle tilts, leans, or rolls as the rider wishes. As with directional stability, a vehicle is considered stable about its longitudinal axis if it returns to the vertical/ straight orientation hands free, and unstable if it does not. The stability of a vehicle may vary with its forward speed, and the stability might be inherent in the vehicle or created by the rider or some other active controller. For example, bicycles exhibit no stability when stationary, they simply fall over, but can exhibit self-stability if rolling forward at the right speed, even without a rider.
Official source
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