Vintage plastic bike Itera from Volvo Sweden, 1980s

Rare Itera plastic bike, 1981.
The Itera bike was in production from 1982 -1985.
Manufactured by Volvo, Sweden.
30.000 examples were made.
100 pieces were imported to the Netherlands and only a few were sold.
It was not a great success, the plastic parts broke easily and replacements were hard to come by, with slow sales and unhappy customers, the production ended in 1985.
The bike has been described as heavy, flexible and fragile, and is considered as one of the worst bikes ever made.

This is one in a very good condition.

Recommanded to only look at (great wall decoration) or only to use once.

A brown or beige coloured plastic bicycle. The design team who created the Itera bike were first brought together in 1977 with the intention of producing a minicar. The team comprised: Lars Samuelsson, product managers at the Volvo Car Division, Claes Nordenstam, graphic designer at Swedish Television, and Jan Olsson, sales manager for all Volvo products in the People's Republic of China and North Korea. They began to look at plastic composite materials to replace steel in many parts of the car. The team looked at what other products could be made using composite materials and focus on the bicycle. A prototype of a ridable all-plastic bike was created in February 1980. The look of the bike moved away from traditional bicycle design because of the constraints of the manufacturing processes used: standard injection moulding could not produce a tubular frame. The wheels could be made in a single process in minutes without the need to manually tighten each spoke like on a standard bike. Unfortunatley, the Itera was not a success for a number of reasons. It was relatively expensive to buy. It was too stiff where it needed some flexibility and parts broke. The handlebars were perceived as not stiff enough making riders feel insecure. It is relatively heavy where it was expected to be lighter than a steel bike and the styling was unconventional.

The bicycle boom which followed in the wake of the 1974 oil crisis inspired a small group of engineers in Gothenburg to develop a bicycle in fibre composite plastics. All essential parts, such as frame, wheels, fork and handlebar, were designed to be produced by automatic injection moulding, requiring very little subsequent finishing. Substantial grants and loans were obtained to start fullscale production in 1982. In spite of intense advertising and unusually high interest in the media, the new bicycle was never accepted in the marketplace. The bicycle boom was already fading out, and few people were prepared to pay the relatively high price at which it was marketed. The bicycle was just as heavy as a standard bicycle, but it was slightly more flexible, which gave some people a sense of insecurity. The appearance deviated from the archetypal shape of a bicycle, and this is believed to have been the major reason for its rejection.