If you lead a car-free lifestyle, then you likely have to transfer your groceries from the store’s shopping cart to your own hand cart or bicycle trailer in order to get them home. Austrian entrepreneurs Gudrun and Harald Buschbacher have decided to address that situation, with their multifunctional shopping trolley.
In shopping cart mode, the device gets folded out horizontally, and is pushed or pulled along on all four of its wheels. As the user is shopping, they place their groceries in the trolley’s two side-by-side removable cloth bags, which have a combined capacity of about 45 liters.
The groceries get unpacked to go through the checkout, and are then packed in again once they’re paid for.
Once it’s time to leave, the trolley gets folded back in, causing the two bags to move so that they’re sitting one above the other (while remaining upright). It can then be pulled along on its two larger wheels as a hand cart, or hooked up to a bike and towed behind.
Gudrun and Harald tell us that they use the patent-pending prototype on a weekly basis, and are open to hearing from business partners who are interested in developing it commercially. They hope to have a product on the market before 2020, at a price “similar to a rather simple baby stroller.”