Video: Ever wanted to bring your child out training with you? Well, now you can

This is the Mac Ride; the first ever on-bike kids' seat designed so you can take your child off road.

The saddle is designed to enable a child benefit from the suspension already built into modern mountain bikes. The designers threw away the notion of a clunky molded seat with shoulder straps, because they believe such seats help conduct the bumps of a trail through to the child.

This design allows the child to sit as a rider sits; upright and independent, sharing the handlebars so the rider and child can move in unison. The designers believe the saddle-style seat allows children use their own natural shock-absorbers; their knees.

The seat is designed like a horse’s saddle, so it's comfortable and self-leveling. No matter the angle, the child will always rest in the lowest part of the scoop seat.

With their feet attached to stirrups with flexible foot straps, the designers say the children's legs will remain active and engaged, retaining blood flow and comfort, unlike more traditional child bike seats.

Mac Ride attaches at two points on the bike.

A clamp goes around the seat post, and a custom Mac Ride spacer also replaces an existing 10 mm spacer on the steerer tube of the bike, with the Mac Ride clamping to that spacer. The spacer needs to be installed and then remains on the bike.

It means the child’s seat is not attached to the crossbar of the bike. Instead, the seat is attached to its own bar clamped at one end onto the seat post and at the front to the steerer tube spacer installed just below the handlebars.

This design could also overcome the fact many modern road and off-road bikes have sloping crossbars to which a conventional kids’ crossbar seat could not be easily fixed; or certainly not fixed with any great degree of comfort for the child.

While the designers don’t make much of this point, it is perhaps one that will make the product very attractive to cyclists who want to occasionally carry their kids on a seat on their crossbar, but have bikes with sloped crossbars that don’t really allow this.

Here's another nice little clip of the new product in action

A few photos...

The bar holding the seat for the child's bum and stirrups for their feat is fixed above the bike's crossbar. It overcomes the problem of fixing a child's seat to a crossbar that's an unusual shape or slopes down.

The seat can be positioned anywhere along the bar and the stirrups can also be extended or shortened; both features that make the product suitable for children of different sizes and can be adjusted as the child gets bigger.

It definitely looks great and taking the child from behind the rider - where most conventional designs place them in a rigid seat - seems like a good idea. But we're not sure if we'll be popping any wheelies with stickybottle nippers on board any time soon.