Antic: When Future Motion Looked at Gravity and Hit “Snooze”

Somewhere in Santa Cruz, a Future Motion engineer stared at a Onewheel and thought, “What if this… had two wheels… but still be awesome?” Then someone else says, “That’s stupid.” And then they high-five and build it anyway. That’s how we got the Antic, the latest entry in humanity’s ongoing effort to turn the entire world into a giant playground while pretending we’re still, you know, responsible adults.

The Antic looks like someone took a 1970s minibike, fed it protein shakes, gave it a lithium-ion soul transplant, and whispered, “Do wheelies.” And it listened. Because this thing has a wheelie mode. A mode like a microwave has popcorn, And this bike has “wheelie.” If you ever needed proof that we’re living in the peak timeline, here you go.

Future Motion basically harvested the weird magical guts of a Onewheel and stuffed them into a tiny motorcycle frame. So now you get that same “I might die but in a wholesome way” feeling, except with handlebars so your mom feels slightly better about it. The hub motor is stupid strong. The torque is the kind of torque that makes you say, “I’m in control” right before realizing you were never in control at all. Perfect.

And the design. Retro minibike styling that looks like what the cool 14-year-old in your childhood neighborhood rode while your parents made you wear a helmet just to sit on the couch. Except now you’re the 50-year-old who buys it because buying toys is the only real upside of adulthood.

But the real genius of the Antic is the cultural niche it fills: the world has e-bikes, sure… the world also has motorcycles, fine… but it didn’t have a joy machine! Something built purely to make the little dopamine goblin in your brain throw confetti. The Antic exists for that goblin. It’s not practical. It’s not solving climate change. It’s barely pretending to be transportation. It is a rolling “What if?” made real.

And honestly, Future Motion deserves some kind of Nobel Prize in Mischief for this. They already made humans ride magic skateboards. Now they’ve given those same humans a minibike that pulls perfect wheelies on command.

Humanity didn’t deserve this bike. But wow, are we lucky to have it.