Direct-Drive Bicycle | Hacker News Reader

Direct-Drive Bicycle

velotegra.com

7 pointsaaronetz9 comments

Interesting, but:

1) I'm not seeing the "impressive" cargo-carrying capacity at all. I don't see any room here at all to, for instance, add a cargo basket for carrying groceries. Maybe if there were more room behind the seat, but this would make the wheelbase ridiculously long, and it's already probably too long for use in a city environment.

2) I wonder how reliable the transmission is, and how much it costs. It seems like he's basically outsourcing a lot of the complexity into that one part. From what I've seen of geared hubs before, they tend to be very expensive compared to traditional derailleur transmissions.

May not be scientifically valid, but I've driven hub-geared bikes daily for years at a time without any problems at all. Usually the bikerack I store the bike ends up being stolen before the bike has to be repaired

From what I've read about the well-known commercial ones (namely Rohloff), basically the tradeoff seems to be that they're very reliable (thanks to the enclosed, sealed design), and have the nice feature of being able to change gears when not moving, in exchange for greater weight, a more limited gear ratio range, a little less efficiency, and a much greater cost.

Rohloff (or similar ones) is the luxury model if you really want the same gear ratio range as a derailleur gear, but with a hub gear, or respectively the maximum possible efficiency possible with a hub gear.

For regular everyday city biking something like a Shimano hub gear still works well enough, and much more reasonably priced. You lose some gear ratio range and a bit of efficiency, but it's still very reliable.

It looks like you should be able to fit two baskets under the seat. The question remains whether it would interfere with your riding or reduce ground clearance too much. Using larger wheels could help.

Not affiliated in any way --- I was just wondering whether a direct-drive bicycle with gears was practical, and found this.

Looks great, until you can't stand to climb a hill.

The latest iteration is a really slick looking piece of kit.

How are you supposed to lock this bike when parked?

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