Motorcycle as tall as a giraffe and heavy as an elephant is still fully rideable

A motorbike-mad dad has held on to his record for more than 10 years after building a monster bike six times bigger than a standard model.

Fabio Reggiani (Italy) set the record for the tallest rideable motorcycle in 2012 with a bike standing at 5.10 m (16 ft 8.78 in) from the ground to the top of the handlebars.

That’s just slightly smaller than the Statue of Liberty’s face, which measures 5.18 m (17 ft) or about the same size as a fully grown male giraffe which reaches heights of 4.8-5.5 m (16-18 ft).

Fabio led a team of eight people to create the mammoth motorbike.

He rode the bike over a 100-m course in Montecchio Emilia, Italy, to claim the record from the previous holder Gregory Dunham (USA), who had held it since 2005 with a bike standing 3.429 m (11 ft 3 in) tall.

Fabio’s bike measures 10.03 m long and is powered by a 5.7 l V8 motor. It has 280 horsepower and three forward gears as well as reverse.

The bike is 2.5 m wide and weighs 5,000 kg (11,023.1 lb), also making it the heaviest rideable motorcycle. 

So you can picture that a bit better, the bike weighs as much as an elephant.

It’s six times bigger than a standard-sized motorbike and has wheels that were taken from industrial excavators.

It took Fabio six months to build the motorcycle after first coming up with the idea for the project.

The dad-of-two, who runs his own airbrushing and spray-painting company, told us: “I wanted to challenge myself and build something almost ‘impossible’! I love challenges and my team was amazing! We had so much fun in this project… great memories.”

Fabio is thrilled that his record still stands more than a decade after he set it and joked it would be very hard for someone to build a bike bigger than his.

He explained that almost every piece of his bike had to be hand-made, and the most difficult part of the build was installing the rear wheel as it weighed a whopping 1,200 kg and no commercial rims were available.

When it comes to riding the bike, he said: “You need a stair to get up on the bike. Visibility wise, you can see the road from just over the tank in front of you. Driving was made possible with a joystick connected to a hydraulic piston to make turning possible… no hands steering!”

Fabio entertained people with his record-breaking motorbike for years, taking it along to many events and shows.

He later sold it to Tony Gullo, a Texas millionaire with a private museum of classic cars and motorbikes.

In a video released on our YouTube channel 10 years ago, to mark Fabio’s inclusion in Guinness World Records 2014, he said people would go “crazy” when they saw his bike.

Vroom, vroom!

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