Cars, Bikes, and the Feeling Between Them

People love to pit cars and bikes against each other — like you’re supposed to pick a side. And I don’t just mean people on the outside, either. Get in a driver’s seat or hop on a saddle, and most times you feel it personally — that quiet tension between the two. As if enjoying one means you’ve betrayed the other.

I get it. In most cities, cars take up too much space. We’ve built around them so completely that it’s hard to imagine streets any other way. But that’s not what this is about. This isn’t an argument for or against anything. It’s about a love of motion, design, and the way machines can shape how we experience the world.

I’m an enthusiast of both cars and bikes — driving and cycling. They’re not opposites, and while the stereotypical cyclist and gearhead might seem like rivals, the truth is they often overlap. Both care deeply about how things move, feel, and sound.

Inputs and Outputs

Sports cars and bikes share a language — a conversation between inputs and outputs.
Every movement means something: a pedal stroke, a steering correction, a throttle squeeze. When it’s right, the machine almost disappears. You stop operating it and start feeling it. That’s what makes a well-designed car or bike more than metal and mechanics — it becomes an extension of you.

When I ride a great bike or drive a great car, there’s that same clarity of feedback: you know exactly what the machine is doing, and it knows exactly what you’re asking of it. It’s the kind of design that rewards attention.

Mechanical Obsession

I don’t know when I learned to love bikes. Maybe I was too young, or maybe it happened too gradually to notice.

But with cars, I remember the moment.

I had my learner’s permit. My mom drove a 2006 BMW 325xi — a base E90 for the car nerds. I assume I was annoying my parents, because they handed me the keys and told me to go for a drive. Oddly enough, I was in West Cape May, and I drove to Higbee Beach (it just keeps showing up, I swear).

Cape May is mostly short, straight blocks — small grids that intersect at odd angles — but back by Higbee, the roads open up, long and curving. I drove that 325 a little faster than I’d ever driven before. I was afraid I’d get pulled over. At sixteen I probably looked thirteen. I’d accelerate through a bend grinning, then slow down terrified I’d see flashing lights.

From that day forward, cars became an obsession.

I found the Top Gear segment where Jeremy drives the Peel microcar. Then I binged every episode I could pirate. I watched Jay Leno’s brand-new YouTube channel, every video about old Alfas and Lotuses and Citroëns.

My uncle had an Alfa Spider that had belonged to my dad. I learned to drive stick in it — in a cemetery, of all places — and that’s what got me hooked on older cars.

Eventually, my dad and I set our sights on a Lotus Elan: the epitome of a pure driver’s car. After a few failed auctions, we bought one sight unseen on eBay. Bring a Trailer hadn’t started doing auctions yet, and “Daddy Doug” DeMuro was still writing for Autotrader.

Since then, I’ve learned the Elan is probably the worst car to whet your whistle on with classics.. They’re cheap-ish to buy, expensive to maintain, and fragile in ways that would make a watchmaker nervous. “Simplify and add lightness” — the Lotus philosophy — has a corollary: things will break.

We still have it, and I’ll never sell it, but boy is it a pain in the ass.

Where classic cars are difficult, bikes are blessedly simple. At least my favorite ones are. When a car breaks and you’re impatient and clueless like me, it’s stress. When a bike needs work, it’s usually something you can figure out.

Freedom in Scale

Both cars and bikes expand your world — just in different ways. On a fundamental level, both contribute to greater overall mobility — a significant benefit for the labor market and quality of life. When it comes to negative externalities... well, let's not go there

A car expands it physically. It stretches your radius. You can go farther, faster, across towns, states, and countries. It turns the map into something you can actually touch.
But it also puts you in a bubble. Glass, sound insulation, and climate control are all designed to separate you from the world: You see places, but you rarely feel them

A bike does the opposite. It doesn’t stretch your world as far, but it pulls it closer. You’re in it, not just passing through it — breathing it, smelling it, hearing it. The same motion that carries you forward keeps you connected to everything around you.

A car makes a big world accessible. A bike makes a small world infinite.

I feel this infinite small world every time I take out a Higbee. Replacing a car ride across center-city Philadelphia with a Higbee trip opens up the entire town. You spot new places to try, you don’t dread the potholes and dips crossing Broad Street – you have fun dodging them while looking up at Billy Penn.

Why It Matters for Higbee

The head badge was the last thing I designed on the bike.

Not because it was an afterthought — it just stumped me.

For a while, I thought a sheep would be cool. A sort of mascot we could use across the brand. I mocked up a few versions, but there were problems.

First, I’m not a proper designer or illustrator, so I could never quite capture what I had in my head.

Second, a mascot felt forced — something to add personality rather than reveal it.

And third, when I mocked up different badge sizes on the Martini, they looked lost on the tall head tube. It just wasn’t working.

Then, one day, while under the hood of the Lotus (no, it hadn’t broken down I was just checking the oil!), I noticed the chassis plate. I’ve always loved those — stamped aluminum plaques listing the make, model, serial number, and suggested oil weight . Simple, purposeful, beautiful.

That was it.

It was something I could design myself, something we could personalize on every bike, and something that would actually fit the proportions of the frame. The idea of giving each bike its own number — its own identity — felt right. The head badge wasn’t about branding anymore; it was about craftsmanship and lineage.

Then there were the colors. Ah, the colors.

Everyone has opinions on paint, and thankfully, I have a few people whose sense of color I really trust — they became my “color board.” So I added a step to my favorite morning ritual: scrolling through Bring a Trailer and Cars & Bids listings. I started taking screenshots of the best colors — not the wild ones, but the timeless ones that made you click through all 128 photos of the exterior of car.

I’d send them to the group like swatches: a British Racing Green from before it had a that name, a white 300SL with a red interior, and, my favorite of all, an Alfa Romeo GTV 1750 in Rosso Amaranto — the most beautiful car ever made, in the most beautiful color ever mixed.

Those became the foundation for our first palette: three finishes that balanced energy and restraint, nostalgia and timelessness.

The Martini’s design language — from its colors to its head badge to its chrome and silver details — is where my love of bikes and cars fully converged. Both are about the same pursuit: taking something functional and making it feel personal, emotional, and worth keeping.