New wheel for your bicycle: The Copenhagen wheel | Hacker News Reader

New wheel for your bicycle: The Copenhagen wheel

senseable.mit.edu

38 pointsboskom22 comments

Elegant design, controlled via phone, on which your performance data and environmental conditions (pollution) are stored, and more...

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It's not that this isn't cool, because the gadget factor is pretty high... but normal (read: average fat American) people don't need this.

I'm a 230 pound dude. I'm probably 20-30% body fat. Heck, maybe more. I've put 5,000 miles on a normal bicycle in one year, including a 130+ mile ride in one single day on a mountain bike. I bicycle commute year round in Kansas City. This time of year I ride to the bus stop (5-7 miles round trip depending on my schedule and which buses I take) but quite often, I do the whole round trip by bike alone, which is 29 miles per day. I've driven to work once in the last 2 years. Almost all of my riding is for basic transportation, so I'm not one of those spandex-clad weekend-mile superheroes. I'm not fast, either. It's just efficient, and it makes sense most of the time. If I can do it without electric assist, pretty much anyone can.

That said, there's this whole "I'm Going Green™!" thing going on. And it's not that that's a bad thing either. Efficiency, sustainability and stewardship are great things.

This new wheel, however, actually makes the bike+human machine less efficient. It may have enough gee-whiz factor to get people to ride, but the chances of those people throwing their new hybrid-wheeled-bike onto the roof rack of their Hummer H2 and driving 3 miles to the nearest multi-use-path trailhead are probably rather high. I have my doubts it'll get many people to drive less and ride more.

If it stored energy when braking, it would be more efficient.

But on my bike, I only really brake in rare situations, for safety reasons (cars); unfortunately, friction automatically supplies adequate braking for me.

I also choose paths that minimize braking. I guess it's possible that that might change if I had a bike that efficiently stored/applied energy, so that it was as if the braking hadn't occurred. But I don't think so; for one thing, it would be no where near 100% efficient.

It's only more efficient if it regenerates enough energy from braking to compensate for the extra weight you're carrying which is highly unlikely, particularly extra weight on a wheel since that requires 1.5-2 times the energy to shift compared with the same mass added to the frame (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Kinetic_ene...).

You might still benefit if you need an electrical boost provided by energy from the grid but normal bikes hit a pretty sweet spot, so I'm thinking this is mostly gimmick.

Oh gimmick it is. It's just that the spring-sprung-brake concept has fascinated me since I was 5 yo. It would be cool to make this work; if sufficiently light, it would be a net win.

Yeah, it looks like something that exists so that people can feel like they're changing the world by buying something, rather than doing something that requires recurring effort and runs the risk of occasionally being boring.

(Also, 200+ lb. bike commuters represent!)

Very impressive commuter story. I'm way too much of a cold wimp to ride a bike in winter.

Switching from a petrol-powered car to hybrid power makes sense.

Switching from a human-powered bicycle to a hybrid is not as compelling.

It makes sense for hills, though it's not much of a win over a normal electric-assist bike. The energy involved seems like it would be a rounding error.

"You can use your phone to shift gears".

I'm looking at the calendar, and it doesn't appear to be April 1st...

Who wants this?

I've got $100 that says that this is just more grad student wankery that will never amount to anything, because it solves "problems" that don't actually exist (in the sense that no one would pay for the product).

"You can use your phone to unlock and lock your bike, change gears and select how much the motor assists you."

I'm guessing that "changing gears" is something that people in Copenhagen do rarely, perhaps using a wrench, like when you first get the bike or hook up a trailer. I miss flat cities.

On the other hand, a voice control gear changing app might be fun. I picture a dude on an all-white bike (tires too) wearing a clear-vinyl trench coat, telling his bike to "gear UP!" "gear Down...". The future is now.

Looks like, in addition to regenerative braking, the wheel gives you all sorts of statistics about your ride. Seems like this could be more easily accomplished with a bike computer (even one permanently attached to your back wheel would be lighter and less machinery than a regenerative braking system + motor).

The motor assistance feature looks interesting. Aren't bikes supposed to be light? I would guess that the benefit of having a motor and batteries that can provide worthwhile assistance would be counteracted by the fact that there's that much more weight to move around all the time.

Bikes don't need to be light, the bike + rider combo needs to be light. If you are 200 pounds, the difference between a 20 pound and 30 pound bike is a rounding error.

Anecdote: I don't notice much change in bike handling even when I have 40 pounds of groceries on the back. I do notice the difference between my 22-pound utility bike and 18-pound racing bike, though. Not because of the weight, but because of the very different geometry. (I think this is why people think light bikes are fast - racing bikes do feel faster. But it's not their weight, it's the very tight geometry that would be unsuitable for a touring bike.)

Just why would anyone really want to measure pollution on their ride. It's like measuring the temperature : interesting to know but precious little is added by the accuracy. You don't need to know the exact temperature to know when to put on a coat, you don't need to know the Nox readings to tell if one path has more pollution than another. Pointless gold plating.

So when will it be on the market?

I'm curious how much that thing weighs. If it adds a lot of heft to the bike that is going to make it require more human effort to drive it to begin with.

I wonder what the break-even mileage savings (to "cover" the cost of building one in the first place) for one of these would be?

This is real, not a joke, right?

As a cyclist, I just find this creepy.

I like technology but my bike has nothing on that I can't understand at a glance. Keeping it that way is good.

So if a part on your bike breaks then you're gonna cast a new one out of raw metal? Machine it yourself? How is this different than any other part you have to replace?

It's an electric motor, a battery and a cellphone in a red plastic shell. Nothing to get religious about.

If an analogy helps, think of a traditional hard-disk in your workout mp3 player.

That it retrofits without cables onto any bike is just it. Plenty of business for this wheel in Copenhagen itself, Amsterdam, and other cycle-able cities. The Facebook part they could have left out IMO.

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