UCL Masters Students Build a 100kg Electric Bamboo Cargo Bike

UCL's Mechanical Engineering department chose Bamboo Bicycle Club not as an enrichment activity but as an annual research partnership. For three consecutive years — 2016, 2017, and 2018 — Masters students completed live engineering projects with BBC, each one building on the last.

Year One: The 100kg Cargo Bike

Five Masters students — Pranoy, Thomson, Arvin, Avinash, and Safiyyah — built a bamboo cargo bike designed for agricultural use. The specification: hold 100 kilograms, remain structurally viable under dynamic loading, be buildable with hand tools in a low-resource environment. They completed it.

Year Two: Testing the Material

The second cohort took a research-oriented brief: test the structural properties of bamboo as an engineering material, then design and build a cargo frame to hold 150 kilograms. Six months of materials testing — tensile strength, joint load distribution, fatigue performance — translated directly into a frame designed around the data. This is research-led practice at its most direct.

Year Three: The Electric Bike

The third cohort built a bamboo electric bike: full integrated battery, rear electric motor hub, compliant with UK electrically-assisted bicycle regulations. The project required electrical engineering, frame geometry adaptation for motor torque loads, and battery housing design — all in bamboo.

"Project with UCL, working with Master students on a 6-month project testing structural properties and building a cargo bike to hold 150kg. Our education programme has grown and we work with schools in the UK and abroad."
— BBC Facebook, April 2017

Outcomes

• Year 1 (2016): 100kg bamboo cargo bike — completed, named student team
• Year 2 (2017): 150kg cargo bike — 6-month project including structural testing
• Year 3 (2018): Bamboo electric bike — integrated battery + rear motor hub, UK-compliant
• 3 consecutive annual projects: sustained institutional partnership
• Structural data generated: bamboo tensile properties, joint load distribution

For BBC, the UCL partnership generates structural data that informs product development, trains engineers who carry BBC's methodology into their careers, and positions bamboo bicycle construction as a legitimate subject of academic engineering enquiry. The three-year series is the most comprehensive university engagement programme in BBC's history — and the foundation for subsequent partnerships with Oxford Brookes and the University of Manchester.