This Is Kleine Johanna, the Heaviest Rideable Bicycle in the World

Kleine Johanna, which means Little Johanna in German, is a bicycle – a pedal-powered one, at it. It tips the scales at 4,800 lbs (2,177 kg) and it looks just like you’d expect a bike of this size to look: giant tractor tires on custom-made wheels, a custom steel frame, and a sidecar that rides on a dually and matches Kleine Johanna in style.

This incredible bicycle is the creation of Sebastian Beutler, a self-taught welder and fabricator from Köthen, in Germany’s Saxony-Anhalt state. It was recognized in March 2023 as the heaviest rideable bike in the world by the Record Institute for Germany – a sort of local Guinness Book of Records, if you will. To quality for the record, the bike had to meet certain conditions, including the fact that it had to be set into motion by pedal power alone and that it be operable.

Kleine Johanna is over 5 meters (16.4 feet) long and almost 2 meters (6.5 feet) tall, and is ideal for couples, thanks to the sidecar, Beutler jokes. It moves by pedal power because the bike gear is assisted by the gearbox from an Opel Blitz 3.6 truck, also recovered from a nearby junkyard. To be more precise, all of Johanna is built from scrap, starting with the tires that Beutler and a friend found near his garage, which became the basis for his project. That is to say, the entire bike was built around the tires.

Beutler is no regular dude, as you might have inferred from his monstrous and now record-breaking contraption. He is a fabricator coming from a long line of welders and fabricators, but who also picked up most of the skills he boasts today on his own, after falling ill in 2011. He says his illness prevents him from getting a regular day job, and since idling away in front of the TV is no life for him, he builds stuff from junk, mostly bikes and bicycles.

Beutler says he makes his dream materialize in steel. He’s not selling them, though. When he runs out of space for storage in his garage or when he needs new parts but can’t get them, he goes through his old projects that he no longer uses or that no longer work, tears them apart, and incorporates them into new ones. He makes functional art, but with a much shorter lifespan than most objects of art, because he’s constantly cannibalizing them. Very Mad Max, indeed.

Kleine Johanna started in 2020, with the discovery of the tiers, and was completed in 2022, after an estimated 2,500 work hours in the garage. Everything on it was built from scratch – and junk – by Beutler.

The bike has 35 forward gears and 7 reverse gears, and can actually hit a top speed of 18 kph (11.1 mph) – while going down the hill, we assume. Usually, it gets a constant 8 kph (4.9 mph) at full throttle, which is hardly fast enough to get you to safety in Mad Max, but very impressive in the real world, for a pedal bicycle that can also tow 15 tons.

There is an engine on Kleine Johanna but it’s not used during pedaling, except to power the alternator that helps Beutler charge up his phone while riding. Considering how slow the machine is, no wonder he runs out of battery on his phone: he has plenty of time to kill.

The wheels on the sidecar actively steer, allowing the bike to corner with less friction. Beutler is demonstrating the operation of this unique bicycle in both videos available at the bottom of the page. In first gear, the bike allows you to tow those 15 tons or, if you’re looking to flex, to operate it with just two fingers. Let’s see Mad Max do that.

Now that Kleine Johanna has been crowned the biggest and baddest bicycle in the world, you might wonder what’s next in store. As it turns out, Johanna also got proper industry recognition last month, when it made its way to Dusseldorf, to be put on display at the Cycling World bicycle trade fair. It didn’t travel there under its own power but on a trailer because, duh, it would have never made it in time, crossing 500 km (311 miles) at that speed.

But that’s not say that Kleine Johanna couldn’t or wouldn’t do long-distance travel on its two massive wheels. In fact, Beutler plans to head to the Baltic Sea for a vacation this summer, a 389-km (242-mile) ride that he estimates will take him a month, give or take a few days. Now that’s what you call a proper vacation!