I looked into getting one of those. Turns out it was cheaper to buy several used cars than getting a second hand bike like this. I’m not spending €9900 on a banana moped when you can get a Citroën Ami for not that much more.

These velomobiles are unwieldy to ship and produced in small quantities, often by specialist companies. They’re also difficult to see in traffic, even for other bikes; for visibility, velomobiles are required to have a little flag at eye height on them, but the people spending 10k on these things don’t seem to care much about this law.

They’re not fast enough to join main roads at normal speeds, but dangerously fast for bike paths. The people in them have to either pull dangerous manoeuvres to overtake people, or constantly brake and accelerate. I don’t think you get regenerative breaking for those things. They also can’t take sharp corners that you’ll find in some bike paths.

I’m not opposed to them, but they need to gain popularity to drive down the price before they’ll work, and even then they require infrastructure changes.