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Comment by pmccool | Hacker News Reader

"In an interview with Newsgeek, Gafni said that the production cost for his recycled bicycles is around $9-12 each, and he estimates it could be sold to a consumer for $60 to 90, depending on what parts they choose to add."

Assuming they're talking US dollars, that's roughly the price of a bike from the supermarket. Granted, it'll be a truly dreadful bike, but it'll be OK as basic transport. I don't understand the emphasis on cheapness. Making cheap bikes is a solved problem.

Don't get me wrong, I think a cardboard bike is cool. I'd be particularly interested to hear about what they've done about things like bearings and attaching tyres.

The green side of it is interesting, as is the idea of an explicitly disposable bike. If it's easier to manufacture locally, or on a small scale or whatever, that'd be something. But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.

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Yes, I'm a bit confused about how much you get for the $9 to $12 if the retail cost would be $60 to $90. Is that just an $81 markup, or does $9 only get you a frame without pedals and a chain?

On the other hand, Boston's Hubway cycle hire scheme [1] costs $12 for three days of membership. A bike for $12 could open up interesting avenues for similar bike uses as you wouldn't have to worry about getting the user to return it.

[1] http://www.thehubway.com/pricing

> as you wouldn't have to worry about getting the user to return it

I'm sorry, but bicycles abandoned after a few days of use seems like an incredibly wasteful idea.

The $9 figure is the cost to make the bike, but doesn't cover the cost of moving it around, storing it or selling it. Given it's size and awkwardness to handle, it would be hard to charge much less for it. You have to factor in the opportunity cost that when you sell such a bike you are giving up almost 100 Square Feet of retail space that you could be using to sell products that are smaller and more valuable.

Don't confuse data used to persuade investors with end-user features and benefits. The article has quotes where Gafni talks about initial feedback from investors; I think it's reasonable to assume that the $9/$60 figures are efforts to establish a notion of expected margin, not a marketing pitch.

The bicycle doesn't need to be cheaper than the traditional alternative. In fact, it'd probably sell better if it were slightly more expensive than the alternative, while emphasizing its apparently significant advantages elsewhere: disposability, fashion novelty, and "green"ness, the latter always being valuable social signal, perhaps especially among people I know that are enthusiastic about bicycles.

Ironic that being disposable makes it 'greener' than a steel bike that will last for 10+ years

And steel or aluminium is a lot more recyclable than cardboard.

I'm completely with you, but take it a bit further. Steel bike frames are basically perfect until they're useless. That is, if you don't let them rust, then they are literally as good as new until you fall over hard enough to crack or buckle them. Properly maintained, a quality steel frame could easily last 50 years.

A real eco solution would be to make cheap and simple 'supermarket bikes'

At the moment the $75 bikes in Walmart are terrible - but mostly because they try and copy $750 bikes with 24gears and full suspension. If you wanted a green solution make very simple, single gear, hub brakes, steel frame bikes in the same factory for $50 and make millions of them.

There is a city bike rental scheme here, but like all the other rental/free bike schemes around the world - it uses some 'novel' bike design which somehow end up costing $1000 each! And so either require credit cards and security or they only distribute 10 of them around the city.

They have them already, but the only people who buy them are hipsters who want to pay $300+ to look cool.

I didn't check it out much, but at the local sporting goods store in Seattle (Big-5) I saw a single speed with 700c rims, steel frame for about $110 I think maybe more maybe less.

If the crappy bike manufacturers of the world aren't making simple steel utilitarian bikes, they should be. I'd buy one and I already have 2 bikes.

Steel frame, steel handlebars (for safety), sealed bottom bracket, 5 speed rear derailleur and friction disc brakes. 25-30 lbs is fine. Doesn't need any aluminum except for the rims and the chainring.

I'd buy that - except I live in a city with 1:4 hills!

Here even the outdoor gear coop charges >$900 for a single speed and says it's ideal for "urban life' - which tells you everything about the market for them.

Sharks with lasers protection system included at no charge? That is reeediculous! Lemme guess, comes with a brooks saddle and flask pouche?

> I'd buy that - except I live in a city with 1:4 hills!

sitkack and I live in Seattle, where our downtown area has hills up to 19% incline, and other areas near downtown (considered bike-friendly areas) have up to 26%.

Source: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/steepest.htm

Admittedly, most of the city is not /that/ steep, but we're up there with you guys on quantity of hills. (I assume that you're from San Francisco.)

When speaking of tree-derived products, is recyclability a green feature?

Trees fix CO2, so having an excuse to grow more trees, sucking CO2 from the atmosphere, and depositing it in the form of bikes, may be a benefit.

It likely comes down to the amount of energy used in the manufacture. I don't actually know, but intuitively I'd guess that steel manufacture (or aluminum on lighter bikes) uses a lot more energy to manufacture.

For me the benefit of a cheap bike is that it then becomes disposable, meaning that no one wants to steal it and even if they did it would be no skin off your back.

Amsterdam has this problem solved in an interesting way. I am told there is a ring of drug addicts that steal and resell bikes for a living. You buy a bike from them for 8-10 euro, ride it around for a couple months until it gets stolen, then buy another stolen bike to replace it and repeat the cycle.

Granted, it'll be a truly dreadful bike, but it'll be OK as basic transport. I don't understand the emphasis on cheapness. Making cheap bikes is a solved problem.

But a bike for $60-90 is not a new idea. They're out there right now.

I very much disagree with your stance on this. I have yet to see a cheap bike that will stand up to more than a few months of daily commuting without various bearings wearing out. Use of non-standard parts makes fixing them uneconomical, as you could quickly buy a decent bike for the replacement value required.

I'd argue that the cheap bike problem is only currently solved in that cheap, good quality, second-hand bikes are available in most markets.

If this bike barely lasts as long, it'll at least have sold the problem of having all these useless lumps of metal lying around once your cheap bike has died.

> I very much disagree with your stance on this. I have yet to see a cheap bike that will stand up to more than a few months of daily commuting without various bearings wearing out. Use of non-standard parts makes fixing them uneconomical, as you could quickly buy a decent bike for the replacement value required.

Agreed, but the article seemed to be arguing that there was demand for a cheap, essentially disposable, bike and that's what I think is a solved problem

It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.

It's not clear from the article whether the bike is any better from a waste/disposal point of view than a traditional metal bike. I expect it could be, I just don't know.

Good point, I think you and I probably agree here, but I was presuming this bike would be a lot easier to recycle. The fact that there's no direct mention of this in the article is a bit suspicious, so you may well be right and there's no real advantage here.

Not necessarily. The costly part of recycling is separating materials. If this has cardboard with a waterproof coating or plastic skin (as it appears) or is glued to other components like the rubber tires then it could be very expensive to process. And at the end you are left with almost worthless cardboard.

An aluminium or steel bike is recycled in exactly the same way as a car - and we have got very good at that process - and at the end you have valuable scrap aluminium.

This bike is most likely (some large percentage) glue. It is basically a fiberglass and epoxy design only using cardboard. Recycling THIS thing is going to be a real bitch. I think it should be built, but it isn't an _answer_ to anything other than human curiosity.

It's interesting, I suppose, to know that his production cost is $9-12, but that's really pointless, isn't it? The important figure to know is what it's going to cost me to get my hands on one. That's the $60-90 figure. Which makes bizarre the later paragraph about it being pointless to lock up a cheap bike like this, because the lock is going to cost more than the bicycle it purports to secure.

Excuse me? I'm sure bike locks exist that cost a Century or more, but I've never bought one. The locks I buy cost $10-20, which is still well below the purchase price of one of these cycles. And even if I could somehow buy one for the $12 production cost, I'd still lock it up. Because in addition to the annoyance of having lost my $12 possession, now I also have the inconvenience of having to call someone for a ride, or pay for cab fare.

Maybe you don't live in a city with a big bike theft problem? Here in DC, where I live, there are kids who wander around with bolt cutters lifting bikes from bike racks, and at least in my experience, they're just as likely to go for a cheap bike as an expensive one, so you pretty much have to have a bolt-cutter-proof lock, regardless of your bike, if you don't want to get it stolen, which means a tempered steel U lock. I've never seen one of those for $10. It's especially frustrating because while the old rule of thumb was that you should spend 10% of the value of the bike on a lock, there's a floor of about $30, at least here, because of how easy it is to defeat cheap locks, which means you end up way over-spending on locks if you ride a cheap bike.

The goal here, as I understand it, is to make the bikes so cheap that there's no resale market for either the bikes or the parts, which might mean a "keeps honest men honest" $10 lock would be good enough.

I live and bike in NYC and often carry two locks, one which cost me $80-90 and another that cost me $40-50. My commuter bike is more expensive than my locks, but not by that much.

> The locks I buy cost $10-20

Have you checked Youtube for the make of lock?

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