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Personally, I love the idea but the execution was very strange.

Only offering automatic shifting (and lurch-y automatic shifting at that!) made the bikes basically unrideable for anything beyond a slow flat ride.

I guess the Dutch never see hills so gearing is sort of foreign to them anyway!

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Hills, sure, not too many of them. But there are sooo many bridges that require shifting. And the flat landscape can also give you terrible headwinds where again, shifting is very handy. So I don't think that /that/ is the reason for the lack of manual shifting.

There is a very small part in the Netherlands where that is not the case, called 'Heuvelland' (Hill land). It even has a 'Bergdorp' (mountain village). DAF, a truck factory, does their testing there, and I even met a professional Belgium cyclist who preferred it for practice.

But VanMoof, "born in Amsterdam", I can understand they missed it.

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