In 1989 mountain bikes was the New and Hot. I got my first one in 1989. A purple CyclePro. Although that is of course personal to me, it is a very typical bike, and they came along the same insane colour schemes as skis, and skiing clothes so well presented in GZ.
Road bikes with thin wheels was also a Thing. (I traded my really crappy MTB for Crescent road bike after a year!!!)
Those who were too lazy to ride bikes, got a moped (“moppe”), in Sweden more specifically a Yamaha DT, 50ccm. They were limited to 30km/h, but by removing all the innards of the muffler, you could get a few km/h more, and by tweaking even more, you could make it go 50-60km/h. However, they were noise as hell!
My suggestions :
Make these bikes/moped several crowns and not easily available
Introduce an MTB, in horrible colours (authentic 1988 suggestions below), that are not fast, but move a little better in terrain.
Introduce a road bike, that’s faster than the other bikes, but only rideable on paved roads. Make you fall off the second you leave the road!
Introduce the Yamaha DT, make it slightly faster than the bikes, but really really noisy, so it attracts machines
I’d second that. Bikes are enough IMO, I’m not in the car/truck/tank faction, but slightly improved driving physics, a few different models, and maybe some panniers for additional ammo storage would be nice.
I Agree that the driving physics need improvements, especially the tendency of the vehicles to clip into the ground and the tricky interaction to get them back up, if even possible (often the interact key isn’t shown - tho that’s a general issue with this game, there are other objects in the world that are tricky to pick up due to this or can’t be picked up at all!)
About Bike suggestions i would like to add a racing bike for the streets, and an E-Bike/Pedelec as utility bike (like the flakmoped Bruksflak, with the scrapping & crafting station and plundra - but design wise with them being on the back or distributed between back&front)
E-bikes did exist from the late 1800s: E-Bike
Sadly the english version of the article doesn’t date back that far, but after a bit of search i found an english article about it too: Electric Bike History
Given this game plays in an alternate timeline, those could have been kept evolving instead falling out of favor due to the akku issues (wich could still serve as an explaination why the machines still use fuel cells instead of akkus!)
maybe ppl just use batteries instead, that way that bike can run on disposable&craftable car batteries (tho, they should be more common to be found in cars then)