This bike booster will probably come in at less than half the cost but the Bimotal kit is another option that doesn't have the tire wear issue, offers better performance, and the form factor is much nicer.
Wow, $2k? You could get a decent ebike for that money. And the installation doesn't look any easier than a hub motor... Only seems worth it if you already have an extremely nice bike. I think of friction drives as being aimed at budget-conscious commuters, not serious mountain bikers.
I think in nyc I'd prefer to lock my $100 dumper of a bike on the street and be able to take the expensive component with me, if this thing is as detachable as it seems
It may just be that I’m comparing to the Bay Area, but I’ve never been that concerned about bike theft in NYC. If you lock your bike with a good lock and leave it somewhere with plenty of foot traffic, it’s quite unlikely to be stolen. Most people don’t even bother locking the wheels! Just a U-lock through the frame.
In the linked page it shows the battery as easily removable.
If the potential thief , realizes the battery has been removed, "I think" it would sharply reduce?? the attractiveness of ebike theft to the thief ?
I was shocked by the price, too. I mean a motor and a battery can't be so expensive, especially such a "small" battery (300Wh).
That being said, having driven electric bikes for a while, here in France they're ridiculously limited in speed and power. 25km/h limit on flat land usually makes sense (except on long straight lines), but when you get climbing even slightly you get down to ~10km/h and have to provide more effort. I guess that's where the 750/1250W 70Nm unrestrained motor comes in handy, and if you live in a place with lots of small hills the choice is either that kind of motor or a car, not the 1000€-total Decathlon/Carrefour electric bike.
The whole European Union has that limit. Without it it's not an electric bicycle anymore, it's a moped or electric motorcycle, that sort of thing, and you have to register it, have a driving license and so on.
Switzerland lets 45km/h bicycles on bike lanes. The requirements are higher, but boy, do they dart through the city. They seem to make long commutes (or fast shorter ones) appealing to a lot of people.
Vienna bike-rider checking in.. we get those e-moped guys on our bike paths too, and they are becoming a real menace.
There is some sort of complacent attitude that results from, what is normally a road-only moped device, exploiting the privileges of the bike paths. I hope this law changes - I ride a 'normal' electric moped and motorbike also, so I guess I'm a bit biased, but I'd like to see those 45km/h limited e-mopeds classified for road only. It makes no sense to let them use the bicycle paths, in my opinion. They're road-ready, so let them stay on the roads.
do they enforce it? California has similar laws but they are not enforced. People ride 40mph (64kph) down bicycle trails and bicycle lanes. And, they still ride like most cyclists here, ignoring red lines, stop signs, and all other traffic laws.
The Romanian police is kind of lazy and does not enforce a lot of other things like cars or motorcycles using the bicycle lanes, cars parked on pedestrian crossings which hide pedestrians from drivers etc.
Though sometimes they take action.
They also organize prevention PR stunts where they check lots of people passing by.
In my experience the issue is one of torque, not of power. Most cheaper electric bicycles (including most Decathlon models) have a hub-mounted motor which cannot deliver power effectively at low speeds -> it stops assisting when you most need it. For hilly terrain you need a motor that's mounted on the crankshaft so that it can take advantage of the gears.
To compare: a tour de france runner outputs 400-500W on mountain climbs while keeping up to 20-25km/h. So a 500W motor (plus 100W power output from yourself) should be enough for smaller climbs!
I have a heap of ebikes, all 250w and 25km/h limited. A Bosch performance line motor on a MTB going up a steep hill is effortless compared to a budget shimano motor where it can barely make it up no matter how much effort you put in to pedalling. Torque makes a big difference.
I’ll add that none of these motors are actually “250 W” in any meaningful sense. That’s just the nominal figure, the average power over something like 30 minutes. That’s why there are such differences between the lines and makes of e-bike motors, even though they’re all legal and within the 250W limit.
Not a single country in the EU limits a speed or power of the EV motorcycles. They do limit these vehicles to an appropriate places which are called "roads" and do require a proper vehicle license and registration. A person can ride their Suicide Killer 9000 Pro Max with any motor power and any speed in the whole EU area really, no problem. On. A. Damn. Road. Where. It. Belongs.
> but when you get climbing even slightly you get down to ~10km/h and have to provide more effort
I've ridden bikes with Bosch 65Nm motors and with a 80kg rider plus 20kg of cargo they're perfectly fine even up steep hills. As in 18kmph or more with only a moderate amount of effort from the rider. Your bike was really underpowered (50Nm?).
Mountain bikes one level down from professional tier start at 6-8k. If I could pay 2k and get a nice electric bike from my nice muscle bike it would be a bargain.
However bimotal is not that nice - adding a motor to rear triangle alters weight distribution and adds unsprung weight. Also unlike actual nice MTB e-bikes it cannot use chain/casssete for gearing, so gearing is fixed at the factory. If you’re used to nice bikes you will want your ebike to be dialed in just right.
One place where it makes sense is as an alternative to shuttling on forest roads / lifts for downhill-focused riding. F you’re going strictly downhill you can move the motor to the backpack after finishing the climb to reduce unsprung weight. This opens up a large number of trails where forest roads are blocked to car traffic. It also allows dh riding on trail where motor bikes are prohibited.
Your existing bike hopefully fits you great rather than having to modify a low-mid grade ebike. Perhaps you don't have space for more bikes. Perhaps you want a bike made of good components that are easy to repair. It's a significant amount of money but there are absolutely reasons.
I have a ebike that cost ~1500 in 2018 and is probably comparable to what $2k would buy you these days. It's very heavy and while the drivetrain is repairable, there are important pieces of it that I would struggle to repair/replace if they died today.
I have a steel touring bike that's significantly lighter, has standard sized parts that can be repaired, replaced and upgraded (many of which I have already upgraded in the last 15 years) and fits me like a glove. If I didn't own an ebike and you asked me whether I'd rather spend $2k buying something like my ebike or adding a 750W motor to my Surly, I'd upgrade my touring bike.
It really depends on your standard for "good." Some people spend $5-10k+ on their mountain bike. If you're looking at getting an ebike of similar quality, then I could see this being an attractive alternative.
Bimotal is removable after the installation: the motor and battery can both be taken off in under 30 seconds and you're left with just the cables and a specialized brake disc. I'd say that's its main differentiator. It is definitely more for premium bikes though and even then isn't for everyone.
As a mountain biker I don’t see the appeal of this. Yes, this rather expensive solution could transform my nice bike into a shitty e-bike, but the point of having a nice bike is to avoid a shitty experience.
A proper e-bike needs to be designed as an e-bike from the beginning.
Shuttling? Once you remove the motor and put it into a backpack downhill riding should be quite decent. Decent enough I think to make it worth it for the space and cash saved.
About tire wear, I know a guy who did custom "Solex" type bike racing, with a small, friction drive petrol engine on the front wheel.
It was so bad that the rear wheel ended up getting bigger at the end of the race, as it picked up rubber deposited by the front wheel!
Keep it mind it was custom bikes though, the front tire just had to finish the race, they used a roller made of hard materials and knurled. I don't remember the reason, but it probably had to do with the fact their engines were quite a bit more powerful than traditional ones despite having the same displacement.
That made me question who this is for. Looks like it's only for racing bikes that have taken off the rear mudguard. And those bikes are typically used to exercise..
Which makes me wonder about the cleaning after it rained..
It depends what you use them for. I use one as my commuter. Most days I ride it with the motor set to just overcoming the added weight of the system plus my heavy backpack. That is uphill, against the wind both ways, of course. I only use more engine power when I have a bad day or am just done pushing hard. But I am on my bike, not in a car. Life is good.
On the flats, I get no benefit since the motor cuts off at my normal cruising speed of some 20 mph. It just feels like a solid bike in that mode, a bit heavy, of course.
I have taken it on a few regular non-commute rides as a test and must say it did not make me lazy or weak, or suffer less. Easy of riding is not me. In the end, it is the rider that makes the ride.
We get old boys in our cycling club that want to keep going out on the Saturday social ride.
I don't have a problem with them riding an eRoad bikes, I like that they can keep coming out with us, but like you say I wouldn't want to ride one myself.
Only commuter and bikepacking bikes have mudguards, almost nobody puts one on a mountain bike or a proper road bike, regardless of whether they’re electrified. This looks like it’s more for these “sporty” categories of bikes.
If you see someone with mudguards on a road bike it's a sign they're a proper cyclist.
I don't think you're allowed to entry audax events without guards and you definitely won't be allowed on a club run without them. Getting a face full of oily road water for the guy in front is not exactly fun. Even small clip on "racing blades" will get you a sniffy look.
You must be from somewhere where winter means rain vs. large amounts of snow. I can see if you're doing a road ride with a group (where they often run tight) they'd ask for fenders. Here a road bike would be useless once winter hits.
That’s interesting. Our winters are often wet and annoying. You don’t see many roadies out there before at least February. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a proper road bike with mudguards in the wild.
I suspect people who are enthusiastic enough cyclists that they're doing 20mph+ club rides even in the winter have separate summer and winter bikes.
And yes, once your winter 'proper road bike' has mud guards, tyres with treads, and an all-weather-riding design people might start calling it an 'adventure bike' or 'gravel bike' instead.
What I've noticed in my area is that people just don't ride on rainy days. If I'm at work and it starts to rain, someone will offer me a ride. It doesn't occur to people that a bike can get wet.
Bikes are sold without mudguards, and the aftermarket ones are flimsy and don't fit very well. (The steel ones that came with my 1983 Schwinn frame being the exception).
"Who this is for" is the great un-answered question in American cycling. The reason is that our biggest untapped market is people who don't ride at all. The marketing looks like lifestyle marketing: Here's what's wrong with cycling and how we solve it. Here's what you will look like.
A Skarper system [0] that drives through an adapted brake rotor sounds [1] like it is the way to go if really want [2] a well thought close to non-permanent conversion solution.
Only because there are so many targets to steal from. And by Asia you mean China, where E bikes are rarely very fancy and often the size of a moped (except for the ride shares, which are still bricks and GPS tracked). And judging by the noise level at the hotel I stayed at in Chengdu a couple of weeks ago, they definitely come with theft alarms.
False. I recently saw a bike frame tied to a railing and there were not even wheels left. If it was not tied there would be no bike
They will even steal a helmet off a parked bike and that's way cheaper. Just look how many helmets are left on bikes in different parts of different towns (because there is literally no advantage to take your helmet anywhere other than for theft protection)
"A team of Vidyadhar Nagar police arrested a bicycle thief and recovered 19 high-end cycles stolen from various neighborhoods in Jaipur Monday. DCP (North) Karan Sharma said that the accused, Rahil Swami alias Kabbu, is a resident of Old Vidyadhar Nagar and admitted to stealing over 50 bicycles." (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/police-arres...)
I'm curious what the implication of this blatantly false* statement is.
*At the very least, you have to worry about Jackie Chan "borrowing" your wheels for a wacky chase scene. Based on my knowledge of Hong Kong cinema, this must happen at least once per week. Dude is a menace and a fiend.
Yeah. I don’t see weather or theft addressed in this design.
I recall a wheel-mounted rotor system from a few years back that did address theft, tire-wear, and weather, but it suffered from far too little torque and very limited battery life.
It looks like their solution is to make it easy enough to install and remove you take it with you. My thought would be security bolts so the pool of thieves is at least limited to people with the right bolt head. Also it has a big battery built in so
That's a problem people already deal with in a lot of ways mostly by being better locked up than other more stealable bikes. Bikes being stealable isn't exactly a knock against this if you can take it off easily either...
Then maybe society should be improved upon so that a few dollars or a few minutes of "fun" or "street cred" isn't seen as such a boon to their life that people risk jail time for it.
The US tried "tough on crime" approaches, what has it resulted in? 25% of the entire world's prison population and it still has higher crime rates than its peer nations.
Nobody goes to jail for stealing bikes. Here, the cops will take a report but that's it. It doesn't get investigated. There's a very good chance any homeless person with a bike is in posession of a stolen bike but they don't even fish in that barrel.
That's right, people steal bikes because they are inherently evil and want to make baby Jesus cry.
I think it's ok to define "survive" as an addict who needs (<-also loosely defined) a fix.
You don't generally commit serious white collar crime, tax fraud or do crypto grifts to survive. For petty street crime, I don't really see any other motivation.
There are a lot of teenagers stealing bikes and other stuff for fun. It's common, and in many circles very "cool". Doesn't have to be inherent, really.
> Theft is solved by making society better, not worse.
Phew, good to hear. Here I thought it would be a hard and complex problem, with lots of unknown unknowns, difficult political compromises, a generation-spanning efforts and many potential solutions with uncertain outcomes, partially contradicting each other.
Instead, we just have to make society better. So, what's step 1?
Step 1 could be not turning the world into a an Orwellian nightmare and outlawing mass surveillance, from both government and private corporations.
And if you are still worried about theft in the mean time, you could try looking at wage thefts which has a value greater than all other forms of theft combined.
> Step 1 could be not turning the world into a an Orwellian nightmare and outlawing mass surveillance, from both government and private corporations.
That would make society better, I agree, but I don't see how that would lead to a reduction in theft, or crime in general.
> And if you are still worried about theft in the mean time, you could try looking at wage thefts […]
I'm not worried about wage theft, no. I am worried about theft of my personal property, though. And I notice that you haven't proposed any credible path to reducing it, beyond an incredibly generic "make society better", whatever that means and however you want to achieve that.
Prisons are full. We have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. No cops, prosecutors, or judges are interested in putting a bike thief in prison. We've just decided it's an acceptable cost in our society. It's another reason that cycling is not a useable mode of transport in many places: if you don't have a secure/indoor place to put your bike at work or while shopping, it will get stolen. So you either ride bikes that you can afford to lose, which sucks if you have to go any real distance, or you drive.
There's usually a fairly small number of criminals in the population and they have short careers. Otherwise, the whole enterprise of society wouldn't be viable.
So once you take them off the streets for a couple of years, or decades for the more hardened ones, it's fine. It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods.
"It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods" is probably the most naive thing I've ever heard.
I also think you have no idea how much it costs per prisoner per year.
I also think you have no idea how much harder it is for someone to get a job, housing, a partner, etc after they have a conviction. Or how much whatever life they had falls apart, which includes partners, friends, family. And guess what happens when you strip away all of someone's social connections? They lose that safety net, and are now dependent upon whatever society as whole provides. And in the US we have people saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" non-ironically, not realizing the whole fucking point of that phrase is that recovering from poverty in the US is extremely difficult.
That money is better spent on helping people who are not able to afford basic necessities, because that is why a lot of people commit property crime.
I suggest you actually open up some studies on this subject because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Or just open up a chart reflecting the economy over the decades and compare it with property crime rates.
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world by both headcount and percentage of the population. How's that working for us? We have one of the higher property and violent crime rates among developed nations. Far higher than nations where criminals are imprisoned for rehabilitation, not to punish. Things like giving them a cell that looks like a bedroom, not pen in an animal shelter.
Police here don’t even care to help if your car is stolen and you have GPS on it. Cameras and jail do nothing to help protect your property if the police refuse to work.
Aside from the fact that there's little to no actual evidence (not funded by flock cherry-picking, and doing a lot of extremely thin correlation/causation nonsense...
No, it's actually solved by providing social safety net programs and managing the economy to have entry level accessible jobs that pay a living wage. People steal because they run out of other options. The cost of flock contracts would be far better spent on food pantries, job counseling, emergency housing...
There is nearly zero correlation between the number of police and the amount of crime.
UK has ton of cameras, still plenty of thieving. You're solving wrong problem by solution that WILL be used against you the second govt takes wrong(er) turn
I learned this. I had what I thought was a pretty good lock, but the chain was cut very clean. The cut was almost perfect flat, so I assume they used a power tool.
They will still steal your seat, lights, wheel, and any other bit they can get.
Sure you can use all number of locks, security bolts, and stripping the bike down yourself every time you leave it, but it’s sucks. You’d rather public spaces just be safe.
Yes that's the compromise we have had to live with. But some countries like Singapore and China are showing it is actually possible to just solve theft so you don't have to deal with your bike being stolen.
Cameras don't solve crimes, Flock or otherwise, unless the cops consider the crime serious. It is almost universal that cops don't consider bike theft serious. This is beginning to change in a few cities but not most.
From what I can tell, they are mostly fully occupied with dealing with emergency situations and domestic violence calls. There isn’t the resources allocated to searching for bikes. Especially when there often isn’t much to go off.
Making the search process easier makes locating stolen stuff becomes more of an office job that’s cheaper to do so the math works out better.
I just got a new bike for my son (he's going to secondary school and needs a better bike), and was surprised to see how many kids' bikes came without fenders. What's up with that? Who wants a serious bike without fenders?
Of course most bikes still come with fenders, but that's also a major limitation for this device: you've got to remove your rear fender. Maybe this device acts somewhat as a fender, but the site says you can't use it in heavy rain, exactly when you need that fender the most.
Being cynical I would say it is yet another way to upsell.
Here in Germany if you want to get a cheaper bicycle, other than flea markets, usually they make you mount the pedals yourself, doesn't have fenders, lights might also be missing, depending on the offer.
Oddly in the UK pedals are a legally required to be included with any new bike sold. Well, technically it's pedal reflectors that are required, but they obviously need pedals to mount to.
Are you looking at performance road bikes? Fenders and lights are removed for weight savings, and for pedals there are multiple clip-in systems, you are supposed to install the pedals that match your chosen system.
If, however, they are doing that for commuter bikes...
I guess that’s the reason you don’t understand why bikes are sold without these things. €400 gets you a very, very, very low-end new bike, like just one step above “unsafe to ride”.
You often don’t get pedals on new bikes because you have your favorite pedals that work for you and anything that’s included with the bike goes straight to the bin, because it’s useless trash. You don’t get fenders, because you don’t usually use those on any kind of sporty bike. They’re heavy, they don’t usually work that well, they are often hard to use in bikes with suspension with longer travel or and they can rattle or simply break and fall off if you ride hard. You don’t get lights and reflective elements, because they’re heavy plastic crap that breaks and falls off. If you often ride at night, you probably own some kind of night gear, high powered LEDs, reflective stickers or spokes…
And obviously once that is the norm for “bikes” in general, then why not save a few cents on supermarket bikes.
> €400 gets you a very, very, very low-end new bike, like just one step above “unsafe to ride”
I don’t agree. After my last bike was stolen I decided to buy the cheapest Decathlon had to offer - 240 - for getting around town and there’s nothing unsafe about it. It’s heavy and has cheap components but everything works fine for light city cycling.
I don't need to be educated on the increasing lack of customer service for anything below 2000 euros, having got my first bicycle in 1984, upgraded to a cycling one in 1986, had plenty of others since then.
And from all places I lived in Europe, only around here this upselling seems to be a thing.
I think it’s just “cheap bikes”. Nobody wants to work on or with cheap bikes. And bikes are getting more and more expensive (quite fast). A solid bike built with brand name components is quickly approaching 2000€.
I wonder how good the lock has to be, or the break cables and wire frames cutter resistant, for it to be worthy of leaving alone while shopping on the city centre.
I live in the city considered to be one of the best to live in Europe. Bike theft is absolutely an issue here. I'm afraid to imagine what happens in other countries.
Looks like you can't have a passenger anymore either. I like to have my kid on the backseat of my e-bike.
I'm not in the market for this, but I am in the market for making my cargo bike electric. Having to slow down at a traffic light and then start from zero absolutely sucks. It goes very slow, it is rough, and you won't have time. I'd use it just for that specific use-case.
Conversion kits that add a front hub motor are relatively affordable and easy to install. Should work with most cargo bikes if you can find one that's compatible with your wheel size. Something like: https://swytchbike.com/
Here's my cargo bike: (non-e variant): [1]. The company got bankrupt a couple of days ago.
It has three wheels. Two smaller ones at front, one back. As such, I'd prefer to install the motor on the back. We do have that speed limit of 26 km/hour (my current e-bike has it as well), but since more force is required, the kit would need to know this as well.
I got it second hand, same as my e-bike. Otherwise, these aren't affordable for me. 6k EUR for a cargo e-bike is just insane IMO.
Also an owner of a non-electric Babboe. We looked at converting it to electric but very few companies would actually do it and the one that we finally got to give us a quote basically said it wasn't worth it. They would've had to replace the whole brake system due to the higher speed of an electric bike. We ended up just buying a different electric cargo bike.
I believe your story, the thing is... once my Babboe is driving, I can reach 20 km/hour. The problem is, it takes some time, and I'm fine with the 15 km/hour to 20 km/hour taking time or effort. I'm cool with staying at 15 km/hour as well. The problem is only after I am completely at 0 km/hour at a traffic light or stop sign, getting velocity. I wouldn't need better brakes there. Since I would never go higher than 20 km/hour electric, I wouldn't need better brakes. If they say I shouldn't go faster than 15 km/hour, I'll stick to that, no problem.
But for people who'd reach the max 26 km/hour, if they'd need better brakes, then if they reach such speed manually (going downwards, for example) would suggest my current brakes aren't adequate either. But I'm not interested in going from to 20 km/hour ASAP. I am interested in getting a little of help at 0 km/hour going forward. After that, the electric part can go off for all I care.
Also: I'd not recommend hub motors with cargo bikes. There is a reason all cargo bike makers switched away from hub motors. They're low-power and often not strong enough mechanically.
Swytch are great in marketing, not so much in engineering. Very proprietary system that keeps changing every year or so. We have one kit, but I'd not buy from them again.
Do they work with mountain bikes? As stupid as this sounds I like mountain biking but I don’t have stamina to climb up hills and then keep doing for a long time. I have an electric bike but designed for road
I'd be quite worried about breaking it in the not unlikely event of a crash, additionally it looks like it could quite significantly limit how low you could put your seat down on a mountain bike, so that would get in the way. Even if you got your seat down, it would add a significant amount of height above the tyre so you mighn't be able to move your arse far enough back to shift your weight property. It's also adding nearly 4kg weight relatively high up which probably isn't the end of the world but would be better if it wasn't so high up.
It says on the website it will fit hardtails but not full sus, and that it isn't recommended on knobby tyres due to performance which isn't ideal either.
I could be wrong on all of this but those are just the concerns coming to mind as another mountain biker.
When going downhill, any bumps which result in severe movement in the frame that bring the rear wheel closer to the saddle might be problematic, even without full suspension. Hard to say. I’m a road bike guy but I’ve definitely seen some forms of non-full suspension when working on mtbs which would result in that kind of movement.
I think the tyres would limit the power output most. Probably quite annoying to have no rear mudguard in anything but the driest conditions. You’d be spraying a lot of crap up at the motor (and probably your back).
Attaching and detaching it looks relatively simple, though - removing it for downhills doesn’t look arduous. You could probably 3d print a clip for the frame.
Given the likely reduced power, and that the spec seems to be saying ‘500w peak, but 250w is sensible’ - probably up to the user’s needs whether the hassle is worth the extra watts per kilo. For those without mobility issues or longterm injuries, it’s usually best to optimise the rider rather than the bike for that.
I feel like off-road climbing would necessitate really wide, sensitive speed variance that this motor is likely not great at supporting. It strikes me that you’d want more direct pedal feedback.
The lack of mudguard wouldn't be an issue, almost no mountain bikers fit them to their bikes. There may well be enough space in the frame without a bottle cage to attach it given it's incompatible with full sus bikes anyway, so that may not actually be an issue, could always shove it in a backpack afterall.
The biggest issue to me is the inability to put the seat all the way down given that's quite important, and obviously this won't work at all with a dropper post (which are fairly common nowadays), honestly actual ebikes are quite popular in the mountain biking scene at the minute and they seem like a significantly better fit to me.
I wonder how much torque the motor could put out though without putting a lot of wear on your (probably fairly soft material on mtb) tyres or slipping on knobby, possibly dusty/muddy, tyres; that itself might kill it off for offroad climbing.
> severe movement in the frame that bring the rear wheel closer to the saddle might be problematic, even without full suspension
Sorry but what? The only alternative to a FS frame is a hardtail. Where “hard” means that the rear wheel doesn’t move relative to the saddle. Your road bike is a hardtail.
If the rear wheel moves relative to the saddle, it’s full suspension (full meaning front and back)
Personally I also don't see the niche they serve. If I'm going far away I take a train or a car. I pretty much exclusively use my bike to ride to a nearby grocery store or do other close-by errands. If I'm doing short errands like this, I really prize being able to get on and off quickly and lock my bike up quickly. A device like this needs to be taken with you when you leave your bike to prevent theft. It's a whole nother step and a lot of extra weight
Pedal-assist electric rental bicycles are huge here in London.
It’s a relatively big city geographically, and it’s really nice to be able to do 5 - 10 miles in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and not arrive at a social event in a sweat. The tube is really hot (high 30s!) in the summer and generally quite unpleasant (fleas in the upholstery!). So cruising around in the sun is a really big urban niche for rentals. Those that do lots of miles per day seem more likely to own e-bikes - delivery guys who probably average 50+ miles/day will absolutely feel the difference in their legs, and need to control their tiredness for their safety.
When I read your comment before the article I thought it was some sort of complicated contraption in multiple parts. Instead it seems pretty compact and easy to disengage. I’m not sure what you’re missing in terms of a niche either. Anyone who just wants to ride with less effort but use their existing bike?
You mean ebikes in general? I use one to commute to work in good weather. It's 8km and I'd be quite sweaty and impresentable for my work day without electric assist. In the evening I'm happy to ride back home with minimal or zero assist as my shower's waiting for me once I arrive.
People who already invested in an expensive traditional bike and want to have the option to add electric support to make trips easier and faster without having to deal with selling their current bike and buying an even more expensive e-bike.
There’s also the fact that many people have bike racks that are fine for traditional bikes but not the additional requirements necessary for some (most?) e-bikes such as weight and strength.
—-
Just because it doesn’t work for you and your specific worldview doesn’t mean others wouldn’t see value in it.
I had a gas powered goped that worked that way years ago. Had all those problems but it was fun. The second you hit any water the drive shaft would just spin against the tire.
There's a bunch of motors installable instead of the bottom bracket. E.g. from Bafang. You just connect it to a battery and that's it. The controller's inbuilt.
I remember back in the 90s some guys at my school fitted a whipper snipper motor to a 12” kiddy bike with a friction drive (I think it was a skateboard wheel fitted to the output shaft).
Chain moves side to side with gear changes, and adding extra chain tension with an extra drive sprocket could make the deraileur angry. Also, chain-tube geometry varies a lot. Not impossible, just more complicated than it might seem.
I ride an all-original 1970s steel-frame road bike, which seems like a prime candidate for this sort of product. I'm certain no sprocket-based design would fit it. I'd buy one of these if there was any way to lock it up.
Yes, but a tiny minority of bikes use those, and the product is meant to go on existing bikes. Also, even on hub-geared bikes (or single-speeds) you’d still need to switch to a longer chain or significantly move the rear wheel to be able to mount the powered sprocket in the right place, so that it wouldn’t skip.
Go ahead, sit down with a piece of paper and try to design it in a way that doesn’t prevent shifting, doesn’t skip under load, doesn’t require you to use a longer chain, works with rear suspension and doesn’t interfere with your legs.
It seems to me this is a product for almost no one. Inefficient delivery of power, bulky, "smart" detection in stead of reliable operation and most importantly, the only target market I could imagine cannot use it. Not sure about other places and climates, but over here, most bicycles have fenders.
Bicycles without fenders are typically used for specific recreational activities and those sure as heck do not want this clumsy thing attached.. If they want any form of electrical assistance they would want it a lot more sleek and efficient.
Other than that, it reminds me of the Spartamet, a Dutch piece of tech from 1985 which added a small combustion engine to an otherwise regular city bike.
> Bicycles without fenders are typically used for specific recreational activities
I'm guessing you are European? Bicycles in the US almost never have fenders except for old timey / retro style models. Fenders fell out of style in the 1980s and never really returned. People who do have them usually install them themselves as an upgrade.
Speaking as an American who owns a basic beach cruiser bicycle and
- puts less than 50 miles on it per year
- has zero desire nor space for a full electric bike
- would never use their bike in any kind of inclement weather
- would never use their bike for anything other than leisure
I think it might be aimed towards my demographic specifically?
Like this thing seems pretty neat, just strap it to my bike and go? Sign me up.
> Bicycles in the US almost never have fenders except for old timey / retro style models. Fenders fell out of style in the 1980s and never really returned.
Counterpoint: Portland OR, where I live — enormous bike city (in some rankings, the highest in the country) — and most have fenders due to the rainy climate much of the year.
I suspect you underestimate the number of utility cyclists. People on bikes take a lot less space than people on SUVs and pickup trucks, so it is easy to underestimate their numbers.
If the road is even little bit wet like after rain or morning mist, the dirt from the road ends up in your backside without fenders unless you drive very slowly.
Find a bicycle without mudguards and ride very slowly, or just ride on clean roads on a sunny days.
Once you try a (good!) electric bike, you don't really want to go back. Life is just so much better. For urban commuting, you no longer think about heat (getting sweaty), distance, inclines, wind, etc.
Obviously I'm talking about good electric bikes, with mid-mounted engines that detect pedaling strength. These feel great, unlike electric motors strapped to bikes, which feel like, well, electric motors strapped to bikes.
On the other hand, a motor you can strap can also be unstrapped, and then you can use the bike as a normal bike. When you have an electric bike, it is usually too heavy to work comfortable without battery (ime).
I am not sure if this is enough argument for having this instead of having a decent electric bike plus a normal bike, but it is an argument I guess.
There are cases one may not want to use an electric bike, eg when going out for a coffee, a drink etc and you may not want to carry the battery or risk theft, in contrast eg to biking for 40 minutes every day for work each way.
How do you get exercise without sweating. Or asked another way, of you don’t get your heart rate up while riding, what’s the point.
Or put a different way: I use electric Lime rental bikes all the time, it’s super fast and convenient. But I’m keenly aware they don’t give me any exercise, so I do want to go back to unpowered bikes as much as possible.
Biking does not have to equate to cardio! You can commute to work on an e-bike with your heart rate similar to walking quickly (what I do). And you can go exercise later.
Not sure how these two things got tied together in the common culture. Something I hear all the time is "but you have an electric bike, what's the point, it doesn't get you any exercise" and people saying that commute to work sitting in their cars.
Do you sweat a ton when you walk? Yet walking is exercise. The point being, of course, there’s a correlation between how hard the exercise is (plus other factors like clothing and weather) and the amount of sweating, but to claim that not sweating equals no exercise is incorrect.
Depends on the ebike and the setting. In Europe (at least; I'm not so clear on rules the US) in most cases the motors on ebikes respond to pedal input, so riding along purely by electrical power isn't usually possible. As such, you can choose from different levels of assistance, from lots to very little or nothing at all, which also correspond to different ranges.
This may be true for your average pizza-delivery rider, but it's not an automatic property of e-bikes. I recently crossed a mountain range on a regulation e-bike (i.e. a pedalec with capped motor and a limited battery) and I can confirm that it took some effort.
This is a typical comment I get from people who don't use E-bikes. Also from people from the US, who get sold POWERFUL E-bikes that are not pedal-assist type. You click a button and you ride, like on a scooter. That's not what I mean by E-bike.
A smartphone app to change motor speed, really? Not even talking about your motor getting hacked (with the S in IOT standing for security and all), getting out a fragile device that captures all your attention while biking is really dangerous for you and the device.
So they say there's a button on the thing itself which is not so much more practical. If they insist on wireless controls, the cost of a waterproof battery-powered button to stick on the handlebars sounds worth it.
What do you mean by changing motor speed? It has a cadence sensor so should work like normal ebikes. Pedal faster for more speed, stop pedaling for less speed.
The web page tells that the app can be used to switch between eco/normal mode but that seems to be the extent of it.
Power, not speed. Exactly because these kinds of kits don’t have a way to measure your power (effort), they need an external way to tell them how much you want them to be helping. So there are power levels (often 5) that change the power curve of the motor when it’s helping, usually helping more at lower speeds (likely uphill) and then fading out at higher speeds.
The strange part is that they already have wireless communication in the system, so adding a simple handlebar remote doesn't seem like a huge engineering leap
Throttled motors on ebikes are terribly unsafe, compared to pedal assist central motors. I just got rear-ended by an illegally hot-rodded fat bike with a throttle, when the asshole lost control of his bike after hitting my rear wheel trying to pass at illegally high speed without bothering to ring his bell, and he flipped over and spilled onto the bike path.
I was fine, but surprised he so carelessly and thoughtlessly sneaked up on me and tried to pass when I was already going fast downhill off of a bridge over a canal, on my legal eBike with 25 kph maximum assist.
Pedaling makes you pay attention and gives you direct control over the speed, and the assist drops out once you're going >25 kph. The asshole who hit me from behind probably didn't have time to find the throttle with his hand, and was never really in control of his bike or paying much attention up to when he freaked out and hit me.
Throttled motors on ebikes are terribly unsafe, compared to pedal assist central motors.
Feels like an overgeneralization. I have a perfectly slow Ride1Up Roadster V3. It's a PA bike with a throttle, but it's not a hot rod. Max speed with my weight is around 20MPH. I use the throttle to just get moving on inclines or at stops when I forgot to downshift.
That said, there are plenty of idiots around on bikes and cars.
This drives me mad as well. Electric bikes should be limited to 25kph and non throttled in Europe, yet half the bikes I see are both, and drive recklessly.
I don't really get that logic. Cars can do way over 100 yet no one calls for limiting all cars all the time, because some drivers drive reckless.
And if we want to limit cars - you know, the number one thing that actually kills a lot of people directly - then I don't think it helps artificially limiting alternatives like E-Bikes.
The only difference is with enforcing the rules, but there are solutions for that. Police on E-Bikes doing patrolling, mandatory number plates, E-Bike driving licence, .. not that I want all those things, but I much rather have that and not crippled bikes so cars stay the norm.
You are being confused, vehicles by themselves are not limited, their category is.
You can have an electric vehicle that runs at 100kph if you want, but that is not a bike, that is a motorcycle.
The problem here is people having vehicles assimilated as ebikes, but with radically different specs.
I have no problem with these guys driving their vehicles on the car lane, like motorbikes do, but that's not what we're talking about here.
These vehicles are running on the bike lane, drivers are without helmets, they cross pavements, and enjoy all the slow vehicles perks, while being far more dangerous for their surroundings.
Ok, but I am talking about being able to drive in city traffic and keep up with cars and not be a blocker - and then go to the forest with my e-bike where I do mind the other people walking around there and drive adequate. Not possible with current legislation.
I can only drive my E-Bike with my car to the forest (like to many people do), or drive slowly there myself.
The other day I was passed by one which kept up with the cars on the main road, which has a speed limit of 80km/h. Most cars don't go full speed there, but will reach at least 60km/h . On it were two young boys without helmets. It's insane.
To be clear, when i said we need controls on the handlebars, i was talking about an "assist level setting" like you have on the app, not a throttle. I had this on all my electric bikes: a button and a small LCD to indicate assist level 0-3.
Although in my experience when your bike/cargo is heavily loaded, a throttle is nice to get running, especially when stopped at a red light going uphill. Borrowed one like this and it was really useful. But i agree with your sentiment i see many people with throttled bikes going really fast and careless.
I really think ebikes, and things like this, would have a much better reputation if they really only supported up to maybe 10 km/h or 6 mph. This is a normalish running/jogging pace. Basically, they helped up hills and when tired but were not "motorcycles-lite". At least around us, in an area with lots of kids, people want to have them but there are so many injuries and problems that sentiment is generally very negative. And I think all you need to "make biking easy" is low speed assist. You don't need support up to 20 mph for that.
Ouch, love to see a great product like this. However, hate to see that bike theft wasn’t discussed at all.
“Easy installation” with two screws seems like a benefit to customers except when they come back to their parked bike only to find their expensive mod also had a hidden feature: “easy uninstallation”.
That is the same for most bicycle parts that you can remove with a small multitool and optionally a cable cutter yet most thieves just grub the whole bike as it is more convenient and it provides the getaway vehicle.
This is an inherently inefficient design, where that inefficiency means increased 1) battery use and 2) tire wear.
From a cyclist’s perspective, this is fundamentally a stopgap product for “curious” customers dipping their toes into e-bikes. I don’t say that necessarily to criticize it. There’s a place for a product that someone can put on any old bike and see if they want to buy a more expensive long-term solution. But that doesn’t make it a product I’d recommend.
The tire wear problem is significant enough that there are heat resistant tires specifically for this type of drum application (designed for old-style indoor trainers, not for use on the road), because use on a drum will cause premature wear for normal road tires.
it's also likely mildly more dangerous than a standard ebike, as ebikes typically overprovision their brakes. A customer putting this on a standard bike (especially a disc brake bike) might have less stopping power than they want on an ebike.
Why “especially a disc brake bike”? They’re the most reliable and resilient system so far, especially compared to rim brakes (V-brakes or cantilevers).
I wouldn't worry about it in this application, because the added weight and power is so minimal. Also: many of the cheap ebikes ($1000-1500 range) have absolutely terrible, underprovisioned brakes.
The requirement for better brakes is more a myth. Yes an e-bike is heavier but the rider + bike pair is not significantly heavier so e-bikes don't really need better brakes as most of them aren't going significantly faster than regular "muscular bikes", especially the legal ones that have an assistance speed limit. Rider weight makes a much bigger difference yet bike brands don't insist on speccing more powerful brakes on bigger riders.
I think this is basically correct, although ebikes shift the distribution rightward -- the average rider+bike system is marginally heavier, average speeds are marginally higher -- at the margin, someone is going to be unable to brake to prevent a collision they would otherwise be able to. But it's also true that heavier riders on manual bikes should often consider brake upgrades.
As an experienced mountain biker I’d love if the downvoters could engage with the comment. I agree with it. A proper legal e-bike, especially when clamped to 25 km/h or a similar limit, doesn’t really need that much stopping power than a comparable regular bike. Maybe the sum of all the factors (often less experienced riders, slightly more speed in some situations, slightly higher weight) warrants going to a bigger rotor diameter or a different brake pads compound, which is how it’s usually done. But it’s still nothing compared to speccing cargo bike brakes or tandem brakes, there you really have to account for the weight and go all the way to like 200mm rotors and four-pot calipers.
Nothing Tokyo specific about that, biking in the rain is dangerous and generally sucky. I have good all weather gear, but I still end up with wet shoes/socks and muddy spray up my back and legs (yes, I have a mudguard, but it's not 100% effective).
Funny little gadget but I feel like ASUS is about 5 years too late. With so many alternatives for the same money a friction drive just looks like a solution to problems that don't really exist anymore
I can see who might actually buy this: some guy with an old Specialized that he can't bear to throw away, but who doesn't want to show up at work all sweaty. Strap it on, ride in. Take it off, toss it in a backpack. There's something cool about that. But 3.7 kg in a backpack... yeah, no thanks. I'd probably just get a proper city e-bike instead of messing around with this contraption
Solex got used much longer than post WWII, the engine is very easy to service. I had one when I was 15, and most of my friends did as well. Everyone in the village had either a "solex" or an old "mobilette".
I actually bought one of these and love it. My road bike is indistinguishable from any other normal road bike with the exception of it being much easier to get around now.
From experience I can say that it seems like a lot more common sense to simply replace the front wheel of your bike with a wheel containing an electric motor, rather than attaching whatever Asus is selling to your bike.
Note that this is the most common and cheap approach: a hub motor, battery, controller, Hall-effect cadence sensor. There are renowned Chinese companies that sell those and you can find great deals if you shop around.
So, this won't work on any regular bike that has a fender, which is most 'regular' bikes people would use for city-driving/daily commutes. (At least in area's that get rain occasionally.
It says it has a wireless cadence sensor. With that said, torque sensors were an improvement over cadence sensors.
To elaborate a bit, friends of mine have had bikes with both cadence and torque sensors. And I've tried their bikes out. Agreeing with one friend, the bike with the cadence sensor seems to decide how fast it wants to go.
The bike with the torque sensor behaves a lot more like what you're used to from riding a conventional bike. After all, the control input to a conventional bike is torque.
> The bike with the torque sensor behaves a lot more like what you're used to from riding a conventional bike
I agree, but would like to point out that sometimes this might not be what you want. I had a bike with a front motor and a cadence sensor that I used for my commute for a few years, and was very happy with the motor just pulling me along while I lazily pushed the pedals with ~zero torque, barely enough to let the bike know I'm there. Basically like pressing a throttle. If all you want is to get from A to B comfortably, I've found this to be superior to a torque sensor, and it was also dirt cheap.
With a torque sensor you can just raise the assist level and drop your gear to get the same effect, no? Seems like a torque sensor would be the best of both worlds.
> the bike with the cadence sensor seems to decide how fast it wants to go
Well yes, because there’s no other input. It’s an on/off switch, the bike just knows that you’re pedaling. Usually there are multiple power levels you can switch between with a button, and those decide roughly how much of a push you get from the motor, but the power curves are all “hardcoded”. It doesn’t feel great for active riding, but it’s adequate for commuter bikes. Torque sensors are actually kind of expensive on their own.
"The noise is higher than a conventional e-bike motor and is high-pitched, similar to an RC car, although quieter than some other conversion kits they had tested."
That might be the easiest ebike retrofit/conversion I've ever seen. I have concerns about the grip in wet conditions but this looks like a great way to get that ebike I've wanted and not put my perfectly good frame to waste.
Similar friction drives have existed for a while. The battery is very small compared to a regular ebike (typically they start at about 300wh.) Also, IIRC the friction drive is not very efficient.
I think the number of people who want to use something like this when it's icy out is pretty small. You'd want studded tires, for instance... and it's generally those who are really committed who ride in those conditions. This looks more like 'dipping a toe in the eBike water'.
I saw. Most entry-level ebikes have at least 10ah * 36v batteries; a few lightweight models have 7ah. So this has about half the battery capacity of the cheapest ebikes.
If I'm carrying around a giant battery I ought to be able to charge my devices from it, but it is silent on that front.
The design doesn't work if you have a mud guard or pannier rack. Also unclear how easily it is detached. Do I have to take it off everytime to prevent casual thievery? How do I take it off to charge inside? Does it have anti-theft bricking?
I'm struggling to understand who the target market is.
A couple other people here mentioned that theft is an issue. That's yet another reason why folding bikes seemed like the best use case for this. Not as good as a folding bike that's made for being an E bike, but if you've already got a good folding bike and a bit more zip on your commute is what you need, this seems like a interesting product.
*“VéloSoleX is a moped, or motorised bicycle, usually just referred to as 'Solex', […] originally created during World War II and mass-produced between 1946 and 1988, came in various iterations, while keeping the same concept of a motor with a roller resting on the front wheel of a bicycle”*
This powers the back wheel, though. I think that’s better for propulsion but it seems you’re giving up carrying stuff or a child on the back of the bicycle. Can’t even have a rack there with this contraption.
It’s interesting in terms of the economics of development.
This product takes advantage of advancements in lithium-ion battery technology driven by phones and cars, benefiting from improvements in both performance and cost at scale without requiring extensive additional research. Looking forward to trying it.
I kind of like this. Not because it's necessarily the best way to electrify a bike, but because it's removable enough that your bike can still just be... a bike
It looks like you have to remove your rear fender thought. I would rather just use the rye bread engine a little more, than not being able to bike on wet roads (or being sprayed with mud).
As a cyclist, I thought this was a joke. Cycling is very efficient mode of transport, if anyone needs this kind of assistance (like those people on the stock photos), they are insanely out of shape.
« This kind of assistance » allow one, even in shape, to go to work by bike in many places where your employer has no shower, or you don’t want to be drenched in sweat twice per day. Not all the word is flat. My work place was 540m elevation lower than my house, and before good electric bikes it was quite hard do that by bike.
Wait until you hear how many people drive a car every day.
But less facetiously: there are large demographics that might ride bicycles more if it was slightly easier for them, including older people and people with mobility issues. I don’t have opinions particular to this product, but expanding the feasibility of cycling seems like a generally good thing to me.
All these sites have hype about AI features like AI Chat. however I use the chat, and it wastes about 3-10 seconds just to load, then I ask for the price, and it fails to understand even the page we were on (edit: "I don't understand what product you're referring to, please tell me the product"). Then I literally paste the page's product from the page into the chat, and it finally wastes my time more and sends a whole essay blob about why it can't tell me the price.
Is this what investors sell to the board about how they are using AI for greater efficiency? Just to waste consumers time even more?
The friction-drive approach is interesting, especially at 3.7 kg. I’d be curious how the drive wheel affects tire wear and performance in wet conditions over time.
I just bought a Boost conversion kit from the UK and am excited to install it in a couple weeks. If anyone has installed this kit would appreciate a comment on the experience.
(I'm in the US and have been unimpressed with the kits available here. The Boost one looks compact and well designed).
Hah, my dad made something like this for me when I was a kid using a weed eater engine, with a makeshift lever as a clutch to engage/disengage it. This looks about as makeshift, I wouldn't trust it for serious use.
This would be great to add to my 9 year old's bike. We couldn't do long bike tours anymore because he would stop biking after 100m, telling is he is completely exhausted and must go home. I was looking for something like this!
I’m pretty sure I’d have preferred a poorly controlled motor over staring at my dad’s ass at 9 years old. Luckily we didn’t have either, we used a dog leash for towing.
Yes, we already have this (Follow-Me - the swiss company). However, my 9yo and his bike is too heavy for that. I was able to carry/drag his bike from about 3y till about 6yo.
> Oxiis is a universal, friction-drive motor system that transforms any conventional bicycle into a smart e-bike. Its name fuses the Greek Oxis (agility) and Axis (pivot)—perfectly reflecting how its high-performance drive core delivers ultimate acceleration and instant, nimble responsiveness right to your ride.
This sounds like LLM-generated to me, but I find it difficult to point out why.
People really owe it to themselves to try an ebike from an recognised road bike brand. They've been at it for a decade or so now, and even early 20's efforts are a different class in terms of riding experience, refinement and practicality.
Summers ending, watch your bike dealers for deep discounts!
It feels like a great product but targeted at a surprisingly transient customer base.
The cycling guys won't buy it, they want the watts from their legs.
The commuters will just get an ebike eventually.
The getting started crowd will eventually become one of these 2 or stop riding a bike altogether. Since I didn't see how much this cost, if it cost as much as a commuter bike, I really don't know who would buy something like this.
Haha, I like all these adapter designs though my favourite was the Copenhagen Wheel[0]. I saw someone ride one near Mission and S Van Ness and loved it. Sleek device. This particular one in the OP is definitely built for safe societies, right? Definitely not for the North American market, haha!
Basically, the Copenhagen Wheel moved all the complexity of setting up a hub motor drive system - motor, battery, controller, sensors, computer - into the hub shell itself.
Which made it seem neat and clean, but meant it had serious reliability issues, couldn't handle wet conditions[], wasn't really repairable, and was expensive compared to more reliable alternatives with better battery life, etc.
Psst, you can escape an asterisk [*] with a backslash.
Hub gears work quite well though don't they? In particular respect of being sealed and protected from the weather. Unclear why there's an opposite effect for this wheel.
Thanks - I'd have to have noticed that I used an unescaped asterisk first... too late now.
Did you mean hub gears or hub motors?
The Copenhagen had an ungeared hub motor. Comparing it to other hub motors, theirs was only IPX4-rated, which is basically splash-proof, not waterproof. Decent hub motors are IPX5 or 6.
On top of that, when your hub motor leaks and bearings seize up, fixing it is typically simple and cheap. Pop in a new bearing and new seals and you're done. Most bike shops can do it. With the Copenhagen Wheel, the manufacturer's advice was to throw it away.
The waterproofing rating seems to have been a design decision they made to simplify the design, keep costs down, etc. Since it all had to be custom, they couldn't benefit from the decades of experience, millions of units manufactured, and standardization that hub motor companies like Bafang or Bosch rely on.
> "MistyWest had to work around the constraints posed by fitting a heat sensitive component next to a heat generation component in a closed system that allows for very little heat dissipation. The engineering team’s understanding of thermal physics enabled a stable battery system to be designed and adopted for the smart wheel. The inventors of the wheel were the first to ever fit a motor and a power source into a fitted bicycle wheel."
It was a challenging level of complexity. Even if they'd had more funding and stuck with the product, it's hard to see how they would have made it efficiently repairable.
It seems to me that the fundamental issue is that almost every other design is preferable from an engineering perspective. The only attraction of the Copenhagen Wheel was that it made for a quick and easy drop-in upgrade. But at the $1500 price it sold for, you can now buy a whole, much better ebike.
(As for hub gears, they're sealed and filled with oil, grease, or traction fluid, which helps keep water out.)
I see. The way I spoke made it seem like I was talking about the Copenhagen wheel with the phrase “this particular one”. I was talking about the OP device. Obviously since Mission and SVN is in the US I would have assumed it was not the CW but I can see that I was unclear so I have clarified. The Copenhagen wheel is pretty integrated. This one is a thumb screw and off you run with a valuable battery. I wouldn’t buy it here and I bike every day in the city.
People who don’t bicycle in North America won’t quite get it. It’s not exactly Taiwan. Theft is rampant and it’s societally sanctioned in most major cities.
10 km Sports and 50 km Eco range is a no go. Plus they explicitly deny carbon fiber bikes, bikes with suspension, and tire choice is rather limited. You could've invested in a decent trekking bike with a standard motor instead, at least you get that hind wheel storage space free.
Me: when's the bike booster available to purchase?
ASUS AI: For the most accurate and up-to-date product release information, we recommend following our Facebook and Instagram channels. We share all our launch announcements there first, along with exciting product previews.
Hilarious advice given both Meta products are notorious for not showing everything from the accounts you follow.
I absolutely would not give up my double panniers and rack. I put a small Tom Bihn Bag "Daylight Backpack" with my laptop in one, and the bike charger and food and other junk in the other, empty my pockets into the zipper bag, and then I'm totally unencumbered for riding and have unlimited distance since I can plug in and charge the battery if it gets low. Riding with a backpack on my back or even stuff in my pockets is a drag. The panniers are also great for grocery and other shopping.
In the USA, there are more than 52 jurisdictions not including towns and cities and counties, but most (not all) states think of ebikes as being slightly restricted bicycles rather than motorcycles, as long as:
- they have functional pedals (otherwise it's a motorcycle of some kind)
- they require pedal assist at all times and have some kind of power or speed limitation (anyone can use this, or at least it is least restricted)
- they have pedal assist available and have a different, higher power or speed limitation (usually reserved for 16+ or something similar)
- they have a power or speed limitation that makes them suitable for adults only but doesn't require a driver's license or inspection
There are efforts to regularize these, and also efforts to make things more chaotic. For example, New Jersey decided that all ebikes require a new ebike license and vehicle registration. Across the river in New York, no ebikes require a license or registration, and may be operated on any street which has a 30mph speed limit or less... but cities are allowed to make their own rules.
California's laws are mostly regarded by bicyclists as being sensible, at least in every discussion I've seen that didn't feature a twelve year old trying to convince his parents to buy him a 70mph electric motorcycle. See https://thecyclistchoice.com/resources/california-ebike-laws...
In most jurisdictions it's only a motorcycle if it can exceed a certain speed or has a motor over a certain power in kilowatts. Or some combination of both.
There's no restriction on manufacturing e-bikes anywhere that I know of, as long as they obey the speed/power limits. (That's why it says 500W "peak" power - the continuous power limit in the UK at least is 250W but manufacturers just make the "peak" last for a very long time.)
I see winter version of this. You need custom roller with holes for a particular stud pattern. So there is no slipping and no tire wear. And maybe the roller is made of metal so the snow does not stick to it.
If I bought this I might want a brake upgrade. Even though it probably provides only about 150W (I always assume ebike power ratings are inflated), the extra weight alone warrants disc brakes IMHO.
When I see obvious out of shape ebikers passing me uphill while barely moving their legs, I’m assuming that the power rating of their ebike is about right and the torque curve might be weird to stay legal.
I agree that rim brakes on an e-bike is extra bad.
some bike vendor told me that the biggest problem with regular to ebike conversion was that regular bike frames were not strong enough to support the additional forces that the electric bike imposed. And it was why the ebikes were much heavier than regular bikes.
Does anyone know if that’s true and if that applies to conversions like this one?
It's less of an issue for this device. The reason is that the motor is further from the axle than a hub motor would be. Thus, there's less force on the frame for a given amount of torque.
Depends on the bike and motor combo. Something like a mountain bike from the last 20 years would be fine, but I wouldn’t try and put one on like a road bike from the 70s or something. Basically anything that’s well built sturdy steel is going to be ok with the common sub kilowatt motors, but there are like crazy ones that will output considerably more power than that.
Also that’s going to be more applicable with a mid drive or a hub motor than something like this.
i have a folding cycle and a fat bike. my only two devices still analog and keep me reasonably fit. i dont wanna e-bike them. but if i wanna long distance, this could be nice.
not really interested in this weird thing, but does anyone know what kind of bike is in the top picture? steel frame, machined brake calipers, really looks very attractive and light for a commuter.
These would be great for many places that have storage restrictions on e-bikes, but not normal bikes. So you can easily detach and bring with you before storing it.
Specialized Vado SL 5 would be my entry level. But anything with a Bosch/Shimano Steps/Giant (same mfr as Specialized) mid-drive. Smooth as butter, and these brands still ride like a normal bike.
Anything for the world to actually avoid the health benefits of riding a bike. What is wrong with a standard human powered bike? I expect a global obesity epidemic in 10 years as people begin buying/building WALL-E-style beds.
People with knee problems, areas with hills. An ebike is still active movement; sure you're not getting any cardio, but it's immeasurably better than driving. If this (or any ebike) is a thing that gets someone on a bike that otherwise wouldn't be on a bike, it is a good thing. For some it might be a stepping stone, for others it allows them to ride where they can't/won't ride at all.
"Physical activity gains from active travel are similar in e-bikers and cyclists."
E-bikes make people who aren't fit enough to ride muscle powered bikes to start doing moderate exercise on local trips they would used cars for before.
How can they be the same? One requires much more physical effort. That sounds like junk science. Perhaps they are similar type of gain but the difference in actual result must be a canyon wide.
Following a heart attack, I got a pedal assist, I got hundreds of hours of exercise and outdoors. You always are exercising, just lightly, and you can adjust your input level upwards at will. Brake fluid issues got me back onto my push bike this week. It's different - there's definitely more effective strength training going on in accelerating and climbing hills. Otherwise, it's not THAT much of a difference. I just go slower. 10 mph rather than ~15.
Found the person who lives in Kansas. Sometimes I just want to ride to work without having to deal with that 2km hill on the way. And my bike is still human-powered, with electric assist. Do you not know how e-bikes work, perhaps?
I have ridden a pedal assist ebike and the amount of push I apply to a pedal is 100x less effort than I would to a standard bike. There is no way the physical benefits are remotely the same. Good for you for avoiding exercise though. Also I live in Brooklyn with plenty of long hills. I also have plenty of friends with ebikes here who swear by them like you do. They struggle with health issues related to physical activity. Obviously having some sort of engine, pedal-assist or not is convenient but do you really understand the cost. You might as well drive and move the non-gas pedal foot up and down for the same benefit.
I realize that you really, really want to think that we are talking about electric motorcycles, but you obviously have no idea how e-bikes work, so I see little benefit in discussing it further. My HR monitor says I get plenty of exercise on an e-bike.
The majority of ebikes people are riding are going to be pedal assist bikes like Citibike ebikes. It is very clear to me that you do not want to acknowledge the substantial decline in health benefits with ebikes compared to standard bikes and do not fully understand that while convenient for longer distances they are slightly less healthy than walking. But okay continue to claim that I’m ignorant of the magic of ebikes. Typical “you just don’t get it” response when pointing out obvious falsehoods. I’m glad you found something that gets you around and isnt a car and does give you a bit of healthy benefits as well (heavy emphasis on ‘a bit’). Maybe I’m a bit aggressive but I’m hardly wrong or lacking understanding.
I suspect not. Even though ebikes are common now, I often hear this comment. Ebikes assist your pedaling; they don't pedal for you. (Well some can pedal for you but you learn quickly that if you let the motor do all the work you'll run the battery down and then you will have to do all the work pedaling a 65-lb bicycle home.)
Lots of people seem to think if a motor is present, then the motor is doing all the work. Ebikes are not motorcycles. What the motor actually does is make the hills less steep and less long. It's a lowpass filter for terrain.
Not only does it remove the steepness and length, it removes practically any physical benefit you get from using a bike. As is stated in my original point.
Friction drive e-bike conversions were popular years ago.
They generally:
* Wear tires surprisingly quickly
* Absolutely suck in any form of weather or terrain condition (dirt, rain, etc.)
* Have ~20% less efficiency than any other drive form.
But, they are easy, and they do work.
This bike booster will probably come in at less than half the cost but the Bimotal kit is another option that doesn't have the tire wear issue, offers better performance, and the form factor is much nicer.
https://bimotal.com/products/elevate
Wow, $2k? You could get a decent ebike for that money. And the installation doesn't look any easier than a hub motor... Only seems worth it if you already have an extremely nice bike. I think of friction drives as being aimed at budget-conscious commuters, not serious mountain bikers.
I think in nyc I'd prefer to lock my $100 dumper of a bike on the street and be able to take the expensive component with me, if this thing is as detachable as it seems
It may just be that I’m comparing to the Bay Area, but I’ve never been that concerned about bike theft in NYC. If you lock your bike with a good lock and leave it somewhere with plenty of foot traffic, it’s quite unlikely to be stolen. Most people don’t even bother locking the wheels! Just a U-lock through the frame.
Hadn’t even considered this regional requirement. That makes sense.
In the linked page it shows the battery as easily removable. If the potential thief , realizes the battery has been removed, "I think" it would sharply reduce?? the attractiveness of ebike theft to the thief ?
I was shocked by the price, too. I mean a motor and a battery can't be so expensive, especially such a "small" battery (300Wh).
That being said, having driven electric bikes for a while, here in France they're ridiculously limited in speed and power. 25km/h limit on flat land usually makes sense (except on long straight lines), but when you get climbing even slightly you get down to ~10km/h and have to provide more effort. I guess that's where the 750/1250W 70Nm unrestrained motor comes in handy, and if you live in a place with lots of small hills the choice is either that kind of motor or a car, not the 1000€-total Decathlon/Carrefour electric bike.
I climb hills at 25km/h with zero effort (with a strong wind) on Ecoride Ambassador.
The whole European Union has that limit. Without it it's not an electric bicycle anymore, it's a moped or electric motorcycle, that sort of thing, and you have to register it, have a driving license and so on.
Switzerland lets 45km/h bicycles on bike lanes. The requirements are higher, but boy, do they dart through the city. They seem to make long commutes (or fast shorter ones) appealing to a lot of people.
Vienna bike-rider checking in.. we get those e-moped guys on our bike paths too, and they are becoming a real menace.
There is some sort of complacent attitude that results from, what is normally a road-only moped device, exploiting the privileges of the bike paths. I hope this law changes - I ride a 'normal' electric moped and motorbike also, so I guess I'm a bit biased, but I'd like to see those 45km/h limited e-mopeds classified for road only. It makes no sense to let them use the bicycle paths, in my opinion. They're road-ready, so let them stay on the roads.
do they enforce it? California has similar laws but they are not enforced. People ride 40mph (64kph) down bicycle trails and bicycle lanes. And, they still ride like most cyclists here, ignoring red lines, stop signs, and all other traffic laws.
Yes, it is enforced, at least in cities (except for no-go areas of course) They also are very rough on distributors.
Just a few quick examples, you can find more with your favourite AI/search engine
16500 bikes confiscated - https://www.ilent.nl/actueel/nieuws/2024/09/12/ilt-legt-besl... https://nos.nl/artikel/2483770-inspectie-waarschuwt-voor-ill... https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1ndpf3z/i_just_pai... https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/sep/04/britain...
The Romanian police is kind of lazy and does not enforce a lot of other things like cars or motorcycles using the bicycle lanes, cars parked on pedestrian crossings which hide pedestrians from drivers etc. Though sometimes they take action. They also organize prevention PR stunts where they check lots of people passing by.
In London (not EU sadly but…), yes. They have checkpoints on bridges.
In my experience the issue is one of torque, not of power. Most cheaper electric bicycles (including most Decathlon models) have a hub-mounted motor which cannot deliver power effectively at low speeds -> it stops assisting when you most need it. For hilly terrain you need a motor that's mounted on the crankshaft so that it can take advantage of the gears.
To compare: a tour de france runner outputs 400-500W on mountain climbs while keeping up to 20-25km/h. So a 500W motor (plus 100W power output from yourself) should be enough for smaller climbs!
I have a heap of ebikes, all 250w and 25km/h limited. A Bosch performance line motor on a MTB going up a steep hill is effortless compared to a budget shimano motor where it can barely make it up no matter how much effort you put in to pedalling. Torque makes a big difference.
I’ll add that none of these motors are actually “250 W” in any meaningful sense. That’s just the nominal figure, the average power over something like 30 minutes. That’s why there are such differences between the lines and makes of e-bike motors, even though they’re all legal and within the 250W limit.
Exactly, the Bosch Performance Line motor can reach up to +600W for a brief period of time
> a motor and a battery can't be so expensive
In my experience with electric motors, yeah I can absolutely believe it. Electric motors aren't cheap!
Not a single country in the EU limits a speed or power of the EV motorcycles. They do limit these vehicles to an appropriate places which are called "roads" and do require a proper vehicle license and registration. A person can ride their Suicide Killer 9000 Pro Max with any motor power and any speed in the whole EU area really, no problem. On. A. Damn. Road. Where. It. Belongs.
Any sources for the whole EU not having speed limits on roads, restricting ebikes to roads only or not having restrictions on power?
> but when you get climbing even slightly you get down to ~10km/h and have to provide more effort
I've ridden bikes with Bosch 65Nm motors and with a 80kg rider plus 20kg of cargo they're perfectly fine even up steep hills. As in 18kmph or more with only a moderate amount of effort from the rider. Your bike was really underpowered (50Nm?).
Mountain bikes one level down from professional tier start at 6-8k. If I could pay 2k and get a nice electric bike from my nice muscle bike it would be a bargain.
However bimotal is not that nice - adding a motor to rear triangle alters weight distribution and adds unsprung weight. Also unlike actual nice MTB e-bikes it cannot use chain/casssete for gearing, so gearing is fixed at the factory. If you’re used to nice bikes you will want your ebike to be dialed in just right.
One place where it makes sense is as an alternative to shuttling on forest roads / lifts for downhill-focused riding. F you’re going strictly downhill you can move the motor to the backpack after finishing the climb to reduce unsprung weight. This opens up a large number of trails where forest roads are blocked to car traffic. It also allows dh riding on trail where motor bikes are prohibited.
> Only seems worth it if you already have an extremely nice bike
How nice should one's bike be that you'd rather turn it into a mediocre ebike for the price of buying a good ebike?
Your existing bike hopefully fits you great rather than having to modify a low-mid grade ebike. Perhaps you don't have space for more bikes. Perhaps you want a bike made of good components that are easy to repair. It's a significant amount of money but there are absolutely reasons.
I have a ebike that cost ~1500 in 2018 and is probably comparable to what $2k would buy you these days. It's very heavy and while the drivetrain is repairable, there are important pieces of it that I would struggle to repair/replace if they died today.
I have a steel touring bike that's significantly lighter, has standard sized parts that can be repaired, replaced and upgraded (many of which I have already upgraded in the last 15 years) and fits me like a glove. If I didn't own an ebike and you asked me whether I'd rather spend $2k buying something like my ebike or adding a 750W motor to my Surly, I'd upgrade my touring bike.
It really depends on your standard for "good." Some people spend $5-10k+ on their mountain bike. If you're looking at getting an ebike of similar quality, then I could see this being an attractive alternative.
Extrordinarily nice! AAH! HA HA! HA HA! AAH! GERONIMO! HA HA!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg_1LOYLPsM
$2k makes sense only if the bike underneath it is valuable enough that you specifically want to keep riding that bike
If the bike underneath is valuable enough you dont want to strap a motor and battery to it.
You can get a nice ebike for that money if you're even slightly patient in waiting for a sale to hit.
Bimotal is removable after the installation: the motor and battery can both be taken off in under 30 seconds and you're left with just the cables and a specialized brake disc. I'd say that's its main differentiator. It is definitely more for premium bikes though and even then isn't for everyone.
As a mountain biker I don’t see the appeal of this. Yes, this rather expensive solution could transform my nice bike into a shitty e-bike, but the point of having a nice bike is to avoid a shitty experience.
A proper e-bike needs to be designed as an e-bike from the beginning.
Shuttling? Once you remove the motor and put it into a backpack downhill riding should be quite decent. Decent enough I think to make it worth it for the space and cash saved.
Oh I like this idea. Looks simple and lightweight.
Expensive as f though. Also the gear-thingy looks proprietary (=expensive).
About tire wear, I know a guy who did custom "Solex" type bike racing, with a small, friction drive petrol engine on the front wheel.
It was so bad that the rear wheel ended up getting bigger at the end of the race, as it picked up rubber deposited by the front wheel!
Keep it mind it was custom bikes though, the front tire just had to finish the race, they used a roller made of hard materials and knurled. I don't remember the reason, but it probably had to do with the fact their engines were quite a bit more powerful than traditional ones despite having the same displacement.
Had to look this up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmKoC57UWUI
Also:
* you cannot install them on bikes with a rear rack. Here most city bikes have them.
That made me question who this is for. Looks like it's only for racing bikes that have taken off the rear mudguard. And those bikes are typically used to exercise..
Which makes me wonder about the cleaning after it rained..
Nobody who rides a road bike would be seen dead with something like this. There are proper road ebikes for that.
and no one who rides a legit road bike would be seen dead on a "road ebike".
It depends what you use them for. I use one as my commuter. Most days I ride it with the motor set to just overcoming the added weight of the system plus my heavy backpack. That is uphill, against the wind both ways, of course. I only use more engine power when I have a bad day or am just done pushing hard. But I am on my bike, not in a car. Life is good.
On the flats, I get no benefit since the motor cuts off at my normal cruising speed of some 20 mph. It just feels like a solid bike in that mode, a bit heavy, of course.
I have taken it on a few regular non-commute rides as a test and must say it did not make me lazy or weak, or suffer less. Easy of riding is not me. In the end, it is the rider that makes the ride.
We get old boys in our cycling club that want to keep going out on the Saturday social ride.
I don't have a problem with them riding an eRoad bikes, I like that they can keep coming out with us, but like you say I wouldn't want to ride one myself.
Only commuter and bikepacking bikes have mudguards, almost nobody puts one on a mountain bike or a proper road bike, regardless of whether they’re electrified. This looks like it’s more for these “sporty” categories of bikes.
Why would you not want a mudguard? I personally prefer having one to getting a stripe of mud up my back. Is there a better way to avoid that?
> Only commuter and bikepacking bikes have mudguards, almost nobody puts one on a mountain bike or a proper road bike
I suspect this depends on the weather in your area - road cycling clubs near me often require mudguards for "winter club rides".
100% this.
If you see someone with mudguards on a road bike it's a sign they're a proper cyclist.
I don't think you're allowed to entry audax events without guards and you definitely won't be allowed on a club run without them. Getting a face full of oily road water for the guy in front is not exactly fun. Even small clip on "racing blades" will get you a sniffy look.
You must be from somewhere where winter means rain vs. large amounts of snow. I can see if you're doing a road ride with a group (where they often run tight) they'd ask for fenders. Here a road bike would be useless once winter hits.
That’s interesting. Our winters are often wet and annoying. You don’t see many roadies out there before at least February. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a proper road bike with mudguards in the wild.
I suspect people who are enthusiastic enough cyclists that they're doing 20mph+ club rides even in the winter have separate summer and winter bikes.
And yes, once your winter 'proper road bike' has mud guards, tyres with treads, and an all-weather-riding design people might start calling it an 'adventure bike' or 'gravel bike' instead.
That's not at all true. Lots of people ride downhill and enduro with a set of small guards.
If you google images of something like Redbull Hardline pretty much all the bikes you see will have at least one front guard.
That's because no one wants a face full of mud at the wrong moment.
bikepacking bikes rarely have mud guards; maybe something small on the front. dropbar touring bikes often have full fenders though.
That's a big blanket statement
What I've noticed in my area is that people just don't ride on rainy days. If I'm at work and it starts to rain, someone will offer me a ride. It doesn't occur to people that a bike can get wet.
Bikes are sold without mudguards, and the aftermarket ones are flimsy and don't fit very well. (The steel ones that came with my 1983 Schwinn frame being the exception).
"Who this is for" is the great un-answered question in American cycling. The reason is that our biggest untapped market is people who don't ride at all. The marketing looks like lifestyle marketing: Here's what's wrong with cycling and how we solve it. Here's what you will look like.
Removing a rear rack is a few minutes with a screwdriver. I have my stuff in a rucksack. Good to point out, but will not stop most users I imagine.
Absolutely.
A Skarper system [0] that drives through an adapted brake rotor sounds [1] like it is the way to go if really want [2] a well thought close to non-permanent conversion solution.
[0] https://skarper.com/
[1] https://road.cc/ebiketips/review_v2/skarper-ebike-drive-syst... .
[2] Compared to other conversion options they are currently expensive https://road.cc/ebiketips/content/advice/buyers-guide/best-e...
And, don't forget: easy to steal off even a well-secured bicycle.
That's not a problem in Asia.
Only because there are so many targets to steal from. And by Asia you mean China, where E bikes are rarely very fancy and often the size of a moped (except for the ride shares, which are still bricks and GPS tracked). And judging by the noise level at the hotel I stayed at in Chengdu a couple of weeks ago, they definitely come with theft alarms.
False. I recently saw a bike frame tied to a railing and there were not even wheels left. If it was not tied there would be no bike
They will even steal a helmet off a parked bike and that's way cheaper. Just look how many helmets are left on bikes in different parts of different towns (because there is literally no advantage to take your helmet anywhere other than for theft protection)
"A team of Vidyadhar Nagar police arrested a bicycle thief and recovered 19 high-end cycles stolen from various neighborhoods in Jaipur Monday. DCP (North) Karan Sharma said that the accused, Rahil Swami alias Kabbu, is a resident of Old Vidyadhar Nagar and admitted to stealing over 50 bicycles." (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/police-arres...)
Bike theft common in Japan
I'm curious what the implication of this blatantly false* statement is.
*At the very least, you have to worry about Jackie Chan "borrowing" your wheels for a wacky chase scene. Based on my knowledge of Hong Kong cinema, this must happen at least once per week. Dude is a menace and a fiend.
Yeah. I don’t see weather or theft addressed in this design.
I recall a wheel-mounted rotor system from a few years back that did address theft, tire-wear, and weather, but it suffered from far too little torque and very limited battery life.
It looks like their solution is to make it easy enough to install and remove you take it with you. My thought would be security bolts so the pool of thieves is at least limited to people with the right bolt head. Also it has a big battery built in so
Thieves will just take the whole bike.
That's a problem people already deal with in a lot of ways mostly by being better locked up than other more stealable bikes. Bikes being stealable isn't exactly a knock against this if you can take it off easily either...
My bike is $100... If I can take off the $2k electric bike conversion kit and lug it with me, I'd sleep a lot better
Tbh solving this is one of the actual use cases for things like flock cameras.
Simply bolting things down harder is still defeated by a battery powered grinder.
Theft is solved by making society better, not worse. Make people not want or reliant upon crime to survive.
No one relies on bike theft to "survive".
No one goes around stealing bikes just because they want to do bad things.
"Let's go get sushi and not pay." -- Repo Man, 1984.
That's into the absurdist territory, but it reflects the real pattern of behavior. People do go around committing petty crimes for various reasons.
And you presume that type of criminality would remain about the same regardless of how society is organized or what type of culture is reinforced?
I think there are many other and better things to try than the repeated failure of trying to catch and punish crimes even more harshly.
There is a large amount of people who go around stealing bikes for fun and some cash; and often "street cred" or something akin to that.
Then maybe society should be improved upon so that a few dollars or a few minutes of "fun" or "street cred" isn't seen as such a boon to their life that people risk jail time for it.
The US tried "tough on crime" approaches, what has it resulted in? 25% of the entire world's prison population and it still has higher crime rates than its peer nations.
Nobody goes to jail for stealing bikes. Here, the cops will take a report but that's it. It doesn't get investigated. There's a very good chance any homeless person with a bike is in posession of a stolen bike but they don't even fish in that barrel.
Good plan; instead of a decent bike lock, and asking for some (read: ANY) enforcement & punishment of bike theft I'll just "improve society".
nobody steals bikes to buy milk for their baby either.
My brother in Christ.
What are you basing that on?
That's right, people steal bikes because they are inherently evil and want to make baby Jesus cry.
I think it's ok to define "survive" as an addict who needs (<-also loosely defined) a fix.
You don't generally commit serious white collar crime, tax fraud or do crypto grifts to survive. For petty street crime, I don't really see any other motivation.
There are a lot of teenagers stealing bikes and other stuff for fun. It's common, and in many circles very "cool". Doesn't have to be inherent, really.
People will steal bike, go where they need to go and just abandon it lmfao
"reliant upon crime to survive"
Do we have any sources that people are stealing to survive? What definition of surviving are we using here?
> Theft is solved by making society better, not worse.
Phew, good to hear. Here I thought it would be a hard and complex problem, with lots of unknown unknowns, difficult political compromises, a generation-spanning efforts and many potential solutions with uncertain outcomes, partially contradicting each other.
Instead, we just have to make society better. So, what's step 1?
Step 1 could be not turning the world into a an Orwellian nightmare and outlawing mass surveillance, from both government and private corporations.
And if you are still worried about theft in the mean time, you could try looking at wage thefts which has a value greater than all other forms of theft combined.
> Step 1 could be not turning the world into a an Orwellian nightmare and outlawing mass surveillance, from both government and private corporations.
That would make society better, I agree, but I don't see how that would lead to a reduction in theft, or crime in general.
> And if you are still worried about theft in the mean time, you could try looking at wage thefts […]
I'm not worried about wage theft, no. I am worried about theft of my personal property, though. And I notice that you haven't proposed any credible path to reducing it, beyond an incredibly generic "make society better", whatever that means and however you want to achieve that.
Repeat after me "Criminals are not Alladin"
It's actually solved by putting thieves in prison (by the help of flock cameras).
Prisons are full. We have one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. No cops, prosecutors, or judges are interested in putting a bike thief in prison. We've just decided it's an acceptable cost in our society. It's another reason that cycling is not a useable mode of transport in many places: if you don't have a secure/indoor place to put your bike at work or while shopping, it will get stolen. So you either ride bikes that you can afford to lose, which sucks if you have to go any real distance, or you drive.
Is it though? Does prison work as a deterrence to others?
There's usually a fairly small number of criminals in the population and they have short careers. Otherwise, the whole enterprise of society wouldn't be viable.
So once you take them off the streets for a couple of years, or decades for the more hardened ones, it's fine. It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods.
Do you have any kind of education in this area? Because that doesn’t sound like the little that I’ve read about sociology and psychology.
It's pretty well established for violent crime, at least: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/
The recidivism rate for property crime is higher than violent crime, so it seems plausible that the same is true for theft: https://counciloncj.org/recidivism_report/
On one hand, you’re breaking existing networks; on the other hand you are establishing a social club for new ones.
That person is insanely naive - either very young, or very lacking in life experience and worldly knowledge.
"It has an added benefit of breaking criminal networks so the future adepts have no place to fence the stolen goods" is probably the most naive thing I've ever heard.
I also think you have no idea how much it costs per prisoner per year.
I also think you have no idea how much harder it is for someone to get a job, housing, a partner, etc after they have a conviction. Or how much whatever life they had falls apart, which includes partners, friends, family. And guess what happens when you strip away all of someone's social connections? They lose that safety net, and are now dependent upon whatever society as whole provides. And in the US we have people saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" non-ironically, not realizing the whole fucking point of that phrase is that recovering from poverty in the US is extremely difficult.
That money is better spent on helping people who are not able to afford basic necessities, because that is why a lot of people commit property crime.
I suggest you actually open up some studies on this subject because you clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Or just open up a chart reflecting the economy over the decades and compare it with property crime rates.
The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world by both headcount and percentage of the population. How's that working for us? We have one of the higher property and violent crime rates among developed nations. Far higher than nations where criminals are imprisoned for rehabilitation, not to punish. Things like giving them a cell that looks like a bedroom, not pen in an animal shelter.
>That money is better spent on helping people who are not able to afford basic necessities, because that is why a lot of people commit property crime.
Do you have anything to back this up? You think people are stealing because they lack basic necessities? How are you defining this?
The idea is that it lowers the number of thieves.
Where I live that’s a win win for thieves. Earn money stealing a bike, have a roof over your head and free food.
Police here don’t even care to help if your car is stolen and you have GPS on it. Cameras and jail do nothing to help protect your property if the police refuse to work.
"here"? We don't know where you are.
In the UK police will ask the value of the property stolen and use that to decide whether to do anything. Low-value is under a few £k.
Toronto or NYC same story
Aside from the fact that there's little to no actual evidence (not funded by flock cherry-picking, and doing a lot of extremely thin correlation/causation nonsense...
No, it's actually solved by providing social safety net programs and managing the economy to have entry level accessible jobs that pay a living wage. People steal because they run out of other options. The cost of flock contracts would be far better spent on food pantries, job counseling, emergency housing...
There is nearly zero correlation between the number of police and the amount of crime.
UK has ton of cameras, still plenty of thieving. You're solving wrong problem by solution that WILL be used against you the second govt takes wrong(er) turn
You don’t gotta be impossible to steal from, you just gotta be more annoying to steal from than the next guy.
I learned this. I had what I thought was a pretty good lock, but the chain was cut very clean. The cut was almost perfect flat, so I assume they used a power tool.
They will still steal your seat, lights, wheel, and any other bit they can get.
Sure you can use all number of locks, security bolts, and stripping the bike down yourself every time you leave it, but it’s sucks. You’d rather public spaces just be safe.
Just follow the old Eve online adage - don't fly what you can't afford to lose.
If there's lot of theft and you can't store bike at a secure place - have a cheap bike.
Yes that's the compromise we have had to live with. But some countries like Singapore and China are showing it is actually possible to just solve theft so you don't have to deal with your bike being stolen.
There are places in the US like this as well, but are general smaller / tight knit. I don't know of any high trust dense urban areas.
In Eve online they shoot intruders that come in your corp space to mess things up... and it does make space a lot safer.
not sure the game you want to go with examples
Well said by somebody who's very obviously never used a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation ;)
Cameras don't solve crimes, Flock or otherwise, unless the cops consider the crime serious. It is almost universal that cops don't consider bike theft serious. This is beginning to change in a few cities but not most.
From what I can tell, they are mostly fully occupied with dealing with emergency situations and domestic violence calls. There isn’t the resources allocated to searching for bikes. Especially when there often isn’t much to go off.
Making the search process easier makes locating stolen stuff becomes more of an office job that’s cheaper to do so the math works out better.
But Google's AI told me that Flock cameras are full of gold, so I steal those instead of bikes!
https://www.techspot.com/news/113381-google-ai-told-people-f...
AngryData> No one goes around stealing bikes just because they want to do bad things.
But people go around stealing Flock cameras because they want to do good things.
Can't use with mud guards
These sorts of seat mounted mud guards would work: https://ass-savers.com/ (yes, the URL is funny and seems a risky click)
And WTF is it about mud guards now?
When i was young all bicycles came with mud guard (then called "fenders") front and rear. Now they seem to be anathema.
Every bike I rode w/o fenders put a stripe of mud up my back!
I just got a new bike for my son (he's going to secondary school and needs a better bike), and was surprised to see how many kids' bikes came without fenders. What's up with that? Who wants a serious bike without fenders?
Of course most bikes still come with fenders, but that's also a major limitation for this device: you've got to remove your rear fender. Maybe this device acts somewhat as a fender, but the site says you can't use it in heavy rain, exactly when you need that fender the most.
Being cynical I would say it is yet another way to upsell.
Here in Germany if you want to get a cheaper bicycle, other than flea markets, usually they make you mount the pedals yourself, doesn't have fenders, lights might also be missing, depending on the offer.
Oddly in the UK pedals are a legally required to be included with any new bike sold. Well, technically it's pedal reflectors that are required, but they obviously need pedals to mount to.
Are you looking at performance road bikes? Fenders and lights are removed for weight savings, and for pedals there are multiple clip-in systems, you are supposed to install the pedals that match your chosen system.
If, however, they are doing that for commuter bikes...
Regular city bikes.
This is the approach if you go offers on regular supermarkets that also sell bicycles.
Personally I am never going to give more than 400 euros tops, for a new bicycle, it is either that or not much beyond 100 euros at a flea market.
Getting the bicycle stolen or worse, revenge damage when they fail to steal it, is not worth more than that.
I guess that’s the reason you don’t understand why bikes are sold without these things. €400 gets you a very, very, very low-end new bike, like just one step above “unsafe to ride”.
You often don’t get pedals on new bikes because you have your favorite pedals that work for you and anything that’s included with the bike goes straight to the bin, because it’s useless trash. You don’t get fenders, because you don’t usually use those on any kind of sporty bike. They’re heavy, they don’t usually work that well, they are often hard to use in bikes with suspension with longer travel or and they can rattle or simply break and fall off if you ride hard. You don’t get lights and reflective elements, because they’re heavy plastic crap that breaks and falls off. If you often ride at night, you probably own some kind of night gear, high powered LEDs, reflective stickers or spokes…
And obviously once that is the norm for “bikes” in general, then why not save a few cents on supermarket bikes.
> €400 gets you a very, very, very low-end new bike, like just one step above “unsafe to ride”
I don’t agree. After my last bike was stolen I decided to buy the cheapest Decathlon had to offer - 240 - for getting around town and there’s nothing unsafe about it. It’s heavy and has cheap components but everything works fine for light city cycling.
I don't need to be educated on the increasing lack of customer service for anything below 2000 euros, having got my first bicycle in 1984, upgraded to a cycling one in 1986, had plenty of others since then.
And from all places I lived in Europe, only around here this upselling seems to be a thing.
I think it’s just “cheap bikes”. Nobody wants to work on or with cheap bikes. And bikes are getting more and more expensive (quite fast). A solid bike built with brand name components is quickly approaching 2000€.
400 € might be a month salary for many people in the south after taxes when earning minimum wage, hardly cheap.
Not everyone needs Apple priced bicycles, that get as easily stolen as a 50 € from the flea market.
This. A quality city bike built to order by Azor or Achielle can easily cost 1300 to 2500 EUR. Non-electric.
I wonder how good the lock has to be, or the break cables and wire frames cutter resistant, for it to be worthy of leaving alone while shopping on the city centre.
Millions and millions of people live in places where theft isn't a concern.
I live in the city considered to be one of the best to live in Europe. Bike theft is absolutely an issue here. I'm afraid to imagine what happens in other countries.
Looks like you can't have a passenger anymore either. I like to have my kid on the backseat of my e-bike.
I'm not in the market for this, but I am in the market for making my cargo bike electric. Having to slow down at a traffic light and then start from zero absolutely sucks. It goes very slow, it is rough, and you won't have time. I'd use it just for that specific use-case.
Conversion kits that add a front hub motor are relatively affordable and easy to install. Should work with most cargo bikes if you can find one that's compatible with your wheel size. Something like: https://swytchbike.com/
Here's my cargo bike: (non-e variant): [1]. The company got bankrupt a couple of days ago.
It has three wheels. Two smaller ones at front, one back. As such, I'd prefer to install the motor on the back. We do have that speed limit of 26 km/hour (my current e-bike has it as well), but since more force is required, the kit would need to know this as well.
I got it second hand, same as my e-bike. Otherwise, these aren't affordable for me. 6k EUR for a cargo e-bike is just insane IMO.
[1] https://www.babboe.nl/media/akeneo_connector/media_files/b/a...
Also an owner of a non-electric Babboe. We looked at converting it to electric but very few companies would actually do it and the one that we finally got to give us a quote basically said it wasn't worth it. They would've had to replace the whole brake system due to the higher speed of an electric bike. We ended up just buying a different electric cargo bike.
I believe your story, the thing is... once my Babboe is driving, I can reach 20 km/hour. The problem is, it takes some time, and I'm fine with the 15 km/hour to 20 km/hour taking time or effort. I'm cool with staying at 15 km/hour as well. The problem is only after I am completely at 0 km/hour at a traffic light or stop sign, getting velocity. I wouldn't need better brakes there. Since I would never go higher than 20 km/hour electric, I wouldn't need better brakes. If they say I shouldn't go faster than 15 km/hour, I'll stick to that, no problem.
But for people who'd reach the max 26 km/hour, if they'd need better brakes, then if they reach such speed manually (going downwards, for example) would suggest my current brakes aren't adequate either. But I'm not interested in going from to 20 km/hour ASAP. I am interested in getting a little of help at 0 km/hour going forward. After that, the electric part can go off for all I care.
Also: I'd not recommend hub motors with cargo bikes. There is a reason all cargo bike makers switched away from hub motors. They're low-power and often not strong enough mechanically.
Swytch are great in marketing, not so much in engineering. Very proprietary system that keeps changing every year or so. We have one kit, but I'd not buy from them again.
If it’s for a chill cargo bike, just get a hub motor kit. It’s the proper solution, there are tons of them and they are cheap and durable.
Front mount or trailer for kid could work, but this seems inferior to your ebike.
Do they work with mountain bikes? As stupid as this sounds I like mountain biking but I don’t have stamina to climb up hills and then keep doing for a long time. I have an electric bike but designed for road
I'd be quite worried about breaking it in the not unlikely event of a crash, additionally it looks like it could quite significantly limit how low you could put your seat down on a mountain bike, so that would get in the way. Even if you got your seat down, it would add a significant amount of height above the tyre so you mighn't be able to move your arse far enough back to shift your weight property. It's also adding nearly 4kg weight relatively high up which probably isn't the end of the world but would be better if it wasn't so high up.
It says on the website it will fit hardtails but not full sus, and that it isn't recommended on knobby tyres due to performance which isn't ideal either.
I could be wrong on all of this but those are just the concerns coming to mind as another mountain biker.
When going downhill, any bumps which result in severe movement in the frame that bring the rear wheel closer to the saddle might be problematic, even without full suspension. Hard to say. I’m a road bike guy but I’ve definitely seen some forms of non-full suspension when working on mtbs which would result in that kind of movement.
I think the tyres would limit the power output most. Probably quite annoying to have no rear mudguard in anything but the driest conditions. You’d be spraying a lot of crap up at the motor (and probably your back).
Attaching and detaching it looks relatively simple, though - removing it for downhills doesn’t look arduous. You could probably 3d print a clip for the frame.
Given the likely reduced power, and that the spec seems to be saying ‘500w peak, but 250w is sensible’ - probably up to the user’s needs whether the hassle is worth the extra watts per kilo. For those without mobility issues or longterm injuries, it’s usually best to optimise the rider rather than the bike for that.
I feel like off-road climbing would necessitate really wide, sensitive speed variance that this motor is likely not great at supporting. It strikes me that you’d want more direct pedal feedback.
Really fun bike design problem.
The lack of mudguard wouldn't be an issue, almost no mountain bikers fit them to their bikes. There may well be enough space in the frame without a bottle cage to attach it given it's incompatible with full sus bikes anyway, so that may not actually be an issue, could always shove it in a backpack afterall.
The biggest issue to me is the inability to put the seat all the way down given that's quite important, and obviously this won't work at all with a dropper post (which are fairly common nowadays), honestly actual ebikes are quite popular in the mountain biking scene at the minute and they seem like a significantly better fit to me.
I wonder how much torque the motor could put out though without putting a lot of wear on your (probably fairly soft material on mtb) tyres or slipping on knobby, possibly dusty/muddy, tyres; that itself might kill it off for offroad climbing.
> severe movement in the frame that bring the rear wheel closer to the saddle might be problematic, even without full suspension
Sorry but what? The only alternative to a FS frame is a hardtail. Where “hard” means that the rear wheel doesn’t move relative to the saddle. Your road bike is a hardtail.
If the rear wheel moves relative to the saddle, it’s full suspension (full meaning front and back)
Maybe get an E-MTB instead?
Wet-weather performance in particular seems like the thing I'd want to see independently tested
Personally I also don't see the niche they serve. If I'm going far away I take a train or a car. I pretty much exclusively use my bike to ride to a nearby grocery store or do other close-by errands. If I'm doing short errands like this, I really prize being able to get on and off quickly and lock my bike up quickly. A device like this needs to be taken with you when you leave your bike to prevent theft. It's a whole nother step and a lot of extra weight
Plenty of people in cities commute less than 10 miles and can bring their bikes into their work to keep them safe.
Are you elderly, differently able, live in extremely hilly or hot terrain, or only willing to bike if it’s half the current effort?
That plus “already has a bike” is a massive market.
Pedal-assist electric rental bicycles are huge here in London.
It’s a relatively big city geographically, and it’s really nice to be able to do 5 - 10 miles in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and not arrive at a social event in a sweat. The tube is really hot (high 30s!) in the summer and generally quite unpleasant (fleas in the upholstery!). So cruising around in the sun is a really big urban niche for rentals. Those that do lots of miles per day seem more likely to own e-bikes - delivery guys who probably average 50+ miles/day will absolutely feel the difference in their legs, and need to control their tiredness for their safety.
When I read your comment before the article I thought it was some sort of complicated contraption in multiple parts. Instead it seems pretty compact and easy to disengage. I’m not sure what you’re missing in terms of a niche either. Anyone who just wants to ride with less effort but use their existing bike?
You mean ebikes in general? I use one to commute to work in good weather. It's 8km and I'd be quite sweaty and impresentable for my work day without electric assist. In the evening I'm happy to ride back home with minimal or zero assist as my shower's waiting for me once I arrive.
People who already invested in an expensive traditional bike and want to have the option to add electric support to make trips easier and faster without having to deal with selling their current bike and buying an even more expensive e-bike.
There’s also the fact that many people have bike racks that are fine for traditional bikes but not the additional requirements necessary for some (most?) e-bikes such as weight and strength.
—-
Just because it doesn’t work for you and your specific worldview doesn’t mean others wouldn’t see value in it.
I had a gas powered goped that worked that way years ago. Had all those problems but it was fun. The second you hit any water the drive shaft would just spin against the tire.
Are there any mechanically coupled solutions that can be field installed by the owner?
There's a bunch of motors installable instead of the bottom bracket. E.g. from Bafang. You just connect it to a battery and that's it. The controller's inbuilt.
Swytch Bike is one. Hub motor.
I remember back in the 90s some guys at my school fitted a whipper snipper motor to a 12” kiddy bike with a friction drive (I think it was a skateboard wheel fitted to the output shaft).
I made one in 1985 for my 10 speed bike, it was pretty fun for a while. I was in my early teens at the time.
Tires wear out super fast. It's hard to say there is a market for this other than the uninformed.
They could have made basically the same thing except with a sprocket to help drive the chain.
Chain moves side to side with gear changes, and adding extra chain tension with an extra drive sprocket could make the deraileur angry. Also, chain-tube geometry varies a lot. Not impossible, just more complicated than it might seem.
I ride an all-original 1970s steel-frame road bike, which seems like a prime candidate for this sort of product. I'm certain no sprocket-based design would fit it. I'd buy one of these if there was any way to lock it up.
It does not if you use hub gears.
Yes, but a tiny minority of bikes use those, and the product is meant to go on existing bikes. Also, even on hub-geared bikes (or single-speeds) you’d still need to switch to a longer chain or significantly move the rear wheel to be able to mount the powered sprocket in the right place, so that it wouldn’t skip.
Go ahead, sit down with a piece of paper and try to design it in a way that doesn’t prevent shifting, doesn’t skip under load, doesn’t require you to use a longer chain, works with rear suspension and doesn’t interfere with your legs.
It seems to me this is a product for almost no one. Inefficient delivery of power, bulky, "smart" detection in stead of reliable operation and most importantly, the only target market I could imagine cannot use it. Not sure about other places and climates, but over here, most bicycles have fenders.
Bicycles without fenders are typically used for specific recreational activities and those sure as heck do not want this clumsy thing attached.. If they want any form of electrical assistance they would want it a lot more sleek and efficient.
Other than that, it reminds me of the Spartamet, a Dutch piece of tech from 1985 which added a small combustion engine to an otherwise regular city bike.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartamet
> Bicycles without fenders are typically used for specific recreational activities
I'm guessing you are European? Bicycles in the US almost never have fenders except for old timey / retro style models. Fenders fell out of style in the 1980s and never really returned. People who do have them usually install them themselves as an upgrade.
Speaking as an American who owns a basic beach cruiser bicycle and
- puts less than 50 miles on it per year
- has zero desire nor space for a full electric bike
- would never use their bike in any kind of inclement weather
- would never use their bike for anything other than leisure
I think it might be aimed towards my demographic specifically?
Like this thing seems pretty neat, just strap it to my bike and go? Sign me up.
> Bicycles in the US almost never have fenders except for old timey / retro style models. Fenders fell out of style in the 1980s and never really returned.
Counterpoint: Portland OR, where I live — enormous bike city (in some rankings, the highest in the country) — and most have fenders due to the rainy climate much of the year.
If you use your bike for 50 miles a year, why do you even need that thing?
I don't. I don't need a bicycle at all.
The only reason most Americans outside NYC and Chicago ride a bike is leisure. Well, that or too many DUIs if we're being honest.
Ideally though if I had something like this it would encourage me to use my bicycle more.
I suspect you underestimate the number of utility cyclists. People on bikes take a lot less space than people on SUVs and pickup trucks, so it is easy to underestimate their numbers.
If you don't need it then why do you write that you are the target group?
Most products don't exist to fill a need but instead want
Do you live in New England? Because any adult I see on a BMX I automatically assume has lost their license. Just wondering if it’s regional.
If the road is even little bit wet like after rain or morning mist, the dirt from the road ends up in your backside without fenders unless you drive very slowly.
Find a bicycle without mudguards and ride very slowly, or just ride on clean roads on a sunny days.
When it's wet, the engine will have less traction too.
I can see one audience: someone with a bike they already like who only occasionally needs assistance and wants the whole thing removable
Once you try a (good!) electric bike, you don't really want to go back. Life is just so much better. For urban commuting, you no longer think about heat (getting sweaty), distance, inclines, wind, etc.
Obviously I'm talking about good electric bikes, with mid-mounted engines that detect pedaling strength. These feel great, unlike electric motors strapped to bikes, which feel like, well, electric motors strapped to bikes.
On the other hand, a motor you can strap can also be unstrapped, and then you can use the bike as a normal bike. When you have an electric bike, it is usually too heavy to work comfortable without battery (ime).
I am not sure if this is enough argument for having this instead of having a decent electric bike plus a normal bike, but it is an argument I guess.
There are cases one may not want to use an electric bike, eg when going out for a coffee, a drink etc and you may not want to carry the battery or risk theft, in contrast eg to biking for 40 minutes every day for work each way.
How do you get exercise without sweating. Or asked another way, of you don’t get your heart rate up while riding, what’s the point.
Or put a different way: I use electric Lime rental bikes all the time, it’s super fast and convenient. But I’m keenly aware they don’t give me any exercise, so I do want to go back to unpowered bikes as much as possible.
Biking does not have to equate to cardio! You can commute to work on an e-bike with your heart rate similar to walking quickly (what I do). And you can go exercise later.
Not sure how these two things got tied together in the common culture. Something I hear all the time is "but you have an electric bike, what's the point, it doesn't get you any exercise" and people saying that commute to work sitting in their cars.
> How do you get exercise without sweating.
Do you sweat a ton when you walk? Yet walking is exercise. The point being, of course, there’s a correlation between how hard the exercise is (plus other factors like clothing and weather) and the amount of sweating, but to claim that not sweating equals no exercise is incorrect.
you'd get more exercise walking to the bus stop than on ebike
Depends on the ebike and the setting. In Europe (at least; I'm not so clear on rules the US) in most cases the motors on ebikes respond to pedal input, so riding along purely by electrical power isn't usually possible. As such, you can choose from different levels of assistance, from lots to very little or nothing at all, which also correspond to different ranges.
This may be true for your average pizza-delivery rider, but it's not an automatic property of e-bikes. I recently crossed a mountain range on a regulation e-bike (i.e. a pedalec with capped motor and a limited battery) and I can confirm that it took some effort.
This is a typical comment I get from people who don't use E-bikes. Also from people from the US, who get sold POWERFUL E-bikes that are not pedal-assist type. You click a button and you ride, like on a scooter. That's not what I mean by E-bike.
A smartphone app to change motor speed, really? Not even talking about your motor getting hacked (with the S in IOT standing for security and all), getting out a fragile device that captures all your attention while biking is really dangerous for you and the device.
So they say there's a button on the thing itself which is not so much more practical. If they insist on wireless controls, the cost of a waterproof battery-powered button to stick on the handlebars sounds worth it.
What do you mean by changing motor speed? It has a cadence sensor so should work like normal ebikes. Pedal faster for more speed, stop pedaling for less speed.
The web page tells that the app can be used to switch between eco/normal mode but that seems to be the extent of it.
Power, not speed. Exactly because these kinds of kits don’t have a way to measure your power (effort), they need an external way to tell them how much you want them to be helping. So there are power levels (often 5) that change the power curve of the motor when it’s helping, usually helping more at lower speeds (likely uphill) and then fading out at higher speeds.
The strange part is that they already have wireless communication in the system, so adding a simple handlebar remote doesn't seem like a huge engineering leap
Throttled motors on ebikes are terribly unsafe, compared to pedal assist central motors. I just got rear-ended by an illegally hot-rodded fat bike with a throttle, when the asshole lost control of his bike after hitting my rear wheel trying to pass at illegally high speed without bothering to ring his bell, and he flipped over and spilled onto the bike path.
I was fine, but surprised he so carelessly and thoughtlessly sneaked up on me and tried to pass when I was already going fast downhill off of a bridge over a canal, on my legal eBike with 25 kph maximum assist.
Pedaling makes you pay attention and gives you direct control over the speed, and the assist drops out once you're going >25 kph. The asshole who hit me from behind probably didn't have time to find the throttle with his hand, and was never really in control of his bike or paying much attention up to when he freaked out and hit me.
What to do about fatbikes endangering our safety?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Netherlands/comments/1knza1c/what_t...
Fatbikes in the Netherlands 2026: What You Actually Need to Know
https://bikefair.org/blog/fatbikes-netherlands-guide-2026
Throttled motors on ebikes are terribly unsafe, compared to pedal assist central motors.
Feels like an overgeneralization. I have a perfectly slow Ride1Up Roadster V3. It's a PA bike with a throttle, but it's not a hot rod. Max speed with my weight is around 20MPH. I use the throttle to just get moving on inclines or at stops when I forgot to downshift.
That said, there are plenty of idiots around on bikes and cars.
https://ride1up.com/product/roadster-v3/
This drives me mad as well. Electric bikes should be limited to 25kph and non throttled in Europe, yet half the bikes I see are both, and drive recklessly.
I don't really get that logic. Cars can do way over 100 yet no one calls for limiting all cars all the time, because some drivers drive reckless.
And if we want to limit cars - you know, the number one thing that actually kills a lot of people directly - then I don't think it helps artificially limiting alternatives like E-Bikes.
The only difference is with enforcing the rules, but there are solutions for that. Police on E-Bikes doing patrolling, mandatory number plates, E-Bike driving licence, .. not that I want all those things, but I much rather have that and not crippled bikes so cars stay the norm.
You are being confused, vehicles by themselves are not limited, their category is.
You can have an electric vehicle that runs at 100kph if you want, but that is not a bike, that is a motorcycle.
The problem here is people having vehicles assimilated as ebikes, but with radically different specs.
I have no problem with these guys driving their vehicles on the car lane, like motorbikes do, but that's not what we're talking about here.
These vehicles are running on the bike lane, drivers are without helmets, they cross pavements, and enjoy all the slow vehicles perks, while being far more dangerous for their surroundings.
Ok, but I am talking about being able to drive in city traffic and keep up with cars and not be a blocker - and then go to the forest with my e-bike where I do mind the other people walking around there and drive adequate. Not possible with current legislation.
I can only drive my E-Bike with my car to the forest (like to many people do), or drive slowly there myself.
The other day I was passed by one which kept up with the cars on the main road, which has a speed limit of 80km/h. Most cars don't go full speed there, but will reach at least 60km/h . On it were two young boys without helmets. It's insane.
To be clear, when i said we need controls on the handlebars, i was talking about an "assist level setting" like you have on the app, not a throttle. I had this on all my electric bikes: a button and a small LCD to indicate assist level 0-3.
Although in my experience when your bike/cargo is heavily loaded, a throttle is nice to get running, especially when stopped at a red light going uphill. Borrowed one like this and it was really useful. But i agree with your sentiment i see many people with throttled bikes going really fast and careless.
Clive Sinclair designed one of these in the 90s. It actually sold reasonably well, but was limited by the available battery technology of the period.
https://rk.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/vehicles/zeta.htm
Yes my grandfather had one. It worked well on flat terrain. I think it used a motorcycle battery so batteries were easy to find and charge.
From the FAQ:
> ...rated IPX4 for water resistance ...suitable for use in light rain, but it should not be exposed to heavy rain or submerged in water.
A bike part you can't use in more than light rain seems like a pretty big drawback to me.
Good find. Most people can probably live with not using it in heavy rain, but the text implies it can break even if exposed to heavy rain when parked.
Also doesn't look compatible with a rear fender
I really think ebikes, and things like this, would have a much better reputation if they really only supported up to maybe 10 km/h or 6 mph. This is a normalish running/jogging pace. Basically, they helped up hills and when tired but were not "motorcycles-lite". At least around us, in an area with lots of kids, people want to have them but there are so many injuries and problems that sentiment is generally very negative. And I think all you need to "make biking easy" is low speed assist. You don't need support up to 20 mph for that.
In that case I would support promoting 20+ mph e-bikes as e-scooters, make them easy to get, cheap/free to license and call it a day.
"Bikes" with 20-30mph speed are awesome, much healthier than gas vespas, and much cheaper and more sustainable than cars.
Ouch, love to see a great product like this. However, hate to see that bike theft wasn’t discussed at all.
“Easy installation” with two screws seems like a benefit to customers except when they come back to their parked bike only to find their expensive mod also had a hidden feature: “easy uninstallation”.
That is the same for most bicycle parts that you can remove with a small multitool and optionally a cable cutter yet most thieves just grub the whole bike as it is more convenient and it provides the getaway vehicle.
Most bicycle parts don’t cost thousands of dollars though
On high end bikes some do.
You won't be able to remove the cassette and crankset with a multitool but a full campagolo super record EPS groupset MSRP is above $4000.
pitlock pit stoppers?
https://www.pitlock.de/en/set-sichert-2-innensechskantschrau...
You don't even need to unscrew the motor : simply pull one-handed the seat release lever, and leave with both the seat and the motor attached.
In addition to the theft concerns, it's also not a great product.
for the non bikers, to help us understand, whats wrong with it?
This is an inherently inefficient design, where that inefficiency means increased 1) battery use and 2) tire wear.
From a cyclist’s perspective, this is fundamentally a stopgap product for “curious” customers dipping their toes into e-bikes. I don’t say that necessarily to criticize it. There’s a place for a product that someone can put on any old bike and see if they want to buy a more expensive long-term solution. But that doesn’t make it a product I’d recommend.
The tire wear problem is significant enough that there are heat resistant tires specifically for this type of drum application (designed for old-style indoor trainers, not for use on the road), because use on a drum will cause premature wear for normal road tires.
it's also likely mildly more dangerous than a standard ebike, as ebikes typically overprovision their brakes. A customer putting this on a standard bike (especially a disc brake bike) might have less stopping power than they want on an ebike.
Why “especially a disc brake bike”? They’re the most reliable and resilient system so far, especially compared to rim brakes (V-brakes or cantilevers).
misspoke, meant rim brake bike
I wouldn't worry about it in this application, because the added weight and power is so minimal. Also: many of the cheap ebikes ($1000-1500 range) have absolutely terrible, underprovisioned brakes.
only real worry I'd have is a scenario like
1. someone has a cheap disc brake bike for pleasure rides (mostly in the sun)
2. they get something like this for commuting or whatever
3. now they're on their disc brake bike most days (including when it rains), going faster than they're used to
it's not the end of the world, but it also doesn't seem great
The requirement for better brakes is more a myth. Yes an e-bike is heavier but the rider + bike pair is not significantly heavier so e-bikes don't really need better brakes as most of them aren't going significantly faster than regular "muscular bikes", especially the legal ones that have an assistance speed limit. Rider weight makes a much bigger difference yet bike brands don't insist on speccing more powerful brakes on bigger riders.
I think this is basically correct, although ebikes shift the distribution rightward -- the average rider+bike system is marginally heavier, average speeds are marginally higher -- at the margin, someone is going to be unable to brake to prevent a collision they would otherwise be able to. But it's also true that heavier riders on manual bikes should often consider brake upgrades.
As an experienced mountain biker I’d love if the downvoters could engage with the comment. I agree with it. A proper legal e-bike, especially when clamped to 25 km/h or a similar limit, doesn’t really need that much stopping power than a comparable regular bike. Maybe the sum of all the factors (often less experienced riders, slightly more speed in some situations, slightly higher weight) warrants going to a bigger rotor diameter or a different brake pads compound, which is how it’s usually done. But it’s still nothing compared to speccing cargo bike brakes or tandem brakes, there you really have to account for the weight and go all the way to like 200mm rotors and four-pot calipers.
Destroys tires, very limited range/power due to poor power delivery from motor to tire. Parasitic drag when coasting or battery is dead.
Limited power delivery, horrible in the rain, prevents using fenders
Rain is an interesting thing, because the number of bikers in Tokyo goes down maybe by 60% or more the second it rains. I kinda avoid as well.
Nothing Tokyo specific about that, biking in the rain is dangerous and generally sucky. I have good all weather gear, but I still end up with wet shoes/socks and muddy spray up my back and legs (yes, I have a mudguard, but it's not 100% effective).
Would you need a fender with it there?
Yes, without a fender my rear wheel throws mud all over my back. This is not the right shape to serve as a mud shield
It’s directly above the wheel. I just use an ass saver and while that’s way inferior to your setup, it reduces the volume thrown up a lot.
They aren’t reliable or efficient.
in addition, it also has not a great name... the word Oxis in Greek means "sharp", not agile. you can look for "οξύς"
They could ship it with a pair of those bolts where the heads break off during installation
This product is for people who live in safe neighborhoods and bike a lot, aka not the average American.
Where do you live where people bike a lot and yet bike theft isn't common?
I remember these, from when I was young: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNtHBEdZDYs
Funny little gadget but I feel like ASUS is about 5 years too late. With so many alternatives for the same money a friction drive just looks like a solution to problems that don't really exist anymore I can see who might actually buy this: some guy with an old Specialized that he can't bear to throw away, but who doesn't want to show up at work all sweaty. Strap it on, ride in. Take it off, toss it in a backpack. There's something cool about that. But 3.7 kg in a backpack... yeah, no thanks. I'd probably just get a proper city e-bike instead of messing around with this contraption
I'm some guy with a Specialized E bike, you can imagine my attachment is profound.
I can't even look at this device without cheering myself on for buying the complete package, rather than messing around with gizmos.
ASUS manager: "now memory is scarce, does it even make sense to produce more motherboards"?
ASUS employee: "maybe not, but I hear that electric bikes are hot"
Funny, a modern version of WWII era technology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9loSoleX
Somehow when I was a kid, the local Schwinn dealer got a bunch of Solex bikes. I remember their primary use was trying to get the motor started.
Solex got used much longer than post WWII, the engine is very easy to service. I had one when I was 15, and most of my friends did as well. Everyone in the village had either a "solex" or an old "mobilette".
If I ever convert my bike to electric, I'll probably go with this https://www.swytchbike.com/
I actually bought one of these and love it. My road bike is indistinguishable from any other normal road bike with the exception of it being much easier to get around now.
From experience I can say that it seems like a lot more common sense to simply replace the front wheel of your bike with a wheel containing an electric motor, rather than attaching whatever Asus is selling to your bike.
Do you feel the power is sufficient? It says it's only a 250 W motor. What is the battery range?
Note that this is the most common and cheap approach: a hub motor, battery, controller, Hall-effect cadence sensor. There are renowned Chinese companies that sell those and you can find great deals if you shop around.
So, this won't work on any regular bike that has a fender, which is most 'regular' bikes people would use for city-driving/daily commutes. (At least in area's that get rain occasionally.
You could replace your regular fender/mudguard with an "ass-saver" type that sticks out parallel to the ground.
But in any case wet tyres would have a negative impact on the ability of this device to efficiently drive the tyre.
It is decoupled from drivetrain. So, without torque sensor, how does it know when the rider wants to speed up vs. slow down?
It says it has a wireless cadence sensor. With that said, torque sensors were an improvement over cadence sensors.
To elaborate a bit, friends of mine have had bikes with both cadence and torque sensors. And I've tried their bikes out. Agreeing with one friend, the bike with the cadence sensor seems to decide how fast it wants to go.
The bike with the torque sensor behaves a lot more like what you're used to from riding a conventional bike. After all, the control input to a conventional bike is torque.
> The bike with the torque sensor behaves a lot more like what you're used to from riding a conventional bike
I agree, but would like to point out that sometimes this might not be what you want. I had a bike with a front motor and a cadence sensor that I used for my commute for a few years, and was very happy with the motor just pulling me along while I lazily pushed the pedals with ~zero torque, barely enough to let the bike know I'm there. Basically like pressing a throttle. If all you want is to get from A to B comfortably, I've found this to be superior to a torque sensor, and it was also dirt cheap.
With a torque sensor you can just raise the assist level and drop your gear to get the same effect, no? Seems like a torque sensor would be the best of both worlds.
> the bike with the cadence sensor seems to decide how fast it wants to go
Well yes, because there’s no other input. It’s an on/off switch, the bike just knows that you’re pedaling. Usually there are multiple power levels you can switch between with a button, and those decide roughly how much of a push you get from the motor, but the power curves are all “hardcoded”. It doesn’t feel great for active riding, but it’s adequate for commuter bikes. Torque sensors are actually kind of expensive on their own.
Seems like a “ohh ebike is becoming big” management decision to somehow do a quick and dirty thinking it would be useful.
Unfortunately ASUS brand is not getting better with these actions.
I have to say, this looks really well designed and easy to use, I want one! But why Asus? I really want to know how they landed on this.
> I really want to know how they landed on this.
RAM prices.
ASUS does make power banks, and the vast majority of the cost of any ebike is in the battery.
"The noise is higher than a conventional e-bike motor and is high-pitched, similar to an RC car, although quieter than some other conversion kits they had tested."
https://www.frandroid.com/marques/asus/3158393_meme-asus-se-...
If some of you ever have the occasion to go to the Toyota commemorative Museum, in Nagoya (Aichi), you will find this:
https://www.tcmit.org/english/research/car/car01
This is the last century version of the item that Asus is presenting here... but with a Gasoline engine.
The Engine is fixed on its own wheel and attached on the side of the bicycle.
This was apparently was a thing. It was used to motorize Japan at its industrialization debut.
On century later, electrification is now a thing and the same device is back with a battery. The loop is done.
PS: I do recommend the museum for anybody interested in industries and industrial processes.
That might be the easiest ebike retrofit/conversion I've ever seen. I have concerns about the grip in wet conditions but this looks like a great way to get that ebike I've wanted and not put my perfectly good frame to waste.
Similar friction drives have existed for a while. The battery is very small compared to a regular ebike (typically they start at about 300wh.) Also, IIRC the friction drive is not very efficient.
Like when wet. Or icy or both.
I think the number of people who want to use something like this when it's icy out is pretty small. You'd want studded tires, for instance... and it's generally those who are really committed who ride in those conditions. This looks more like 'dipping a toe in the eBike water'.
Looks more like a "hill assist device" to me.
This one is 158 Wh
I saw. Most entry-level ebikes have at least 10ah * 36v batteries; a few lightweight models have 7ah. So this has about half the battery capacity of the cheapest ebikes.
Given the size of it and the significantly less weight it adds to the bicycle, I'd say half capacity is pretty fantastic.
(Of course, "capacity" is misleading, as this will be less efficient than a real e-bike.)
Get a Bafang kit or a hub motor replacement rear wheel instead. At least those systems work well.
I mean I agree but those aren't zero-skill install like this.
Bafang isn't, sure, but a hub motor is relatively easy. I guess hub front motor is even easier than hub rear.
Have a look at Bafang or Tongsheng kits
incredible that this got green lighted, it's just an inferior version in every way to many other products on the market
If I'm carrying around a giant battery I ought to be able to charge my devices from it, but it is silent on that front.
The design doesn't work if you have a mud guard or pannier rack. Also unclear how easily it is detached. Do I have to take it off everytime to prevent casual thievery? How do I take it off to charge inside? Does it have anti-theft bricking?
I'm struggling to understand who the target market is.
"How do I take it off to charge inside?"
It has a removable battery so it seems the mechanism is designed to be left on the bike.
And if I go into a shop am I compelled to remove the battery, or is it locked? Is there a key or an app to release the battery?
A couple other people here mentioned that theft is an issue. That's yet another reason why folding bikes seemed like the best use case for this. Not as good as a folding bike that's made for being an E bike, but if you've already got a good folding bike and a bit more zip on your commute is what you need, this seems like a interesting product.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9loSoleX:
*“VéloSoleX is a moped, or motorised bicycle, usually just referred to as 'Solex', […] originally created during World War II and mass-produced between 1946 and 1988, came in various iterations, while keeping the same concept of a motor with a roller resting on the front wheel of a bicycle”*
This powers the back wheel, though. I think that’s better for propulsion but it seems you’re giving up carrying stuff or a child on the back of the bicycle. Can’t even have a rack there with this contraption.
It’s interesting in terms of the economics of development.
This product takes advantage of advancements in lithium-ion battery technology driven by phones and cars, benefiting from improvements in both performance and cost at scale without requiring extensive additional research. Looking forward to trying it.
I kind of like this. Not because it's necessarily the best way to electrify a bike, but because it's removable enough that your bike can still just be... a bike
It looks like you have to remove your rear fender thought. I would rather just use the rye bread engine a little more, than not being able to bike on wet roads (or being sprayed with mud).
As a cyclist, I thought this was a joke. Cycling is very efficient mode of transport, if anyone needs this kind of assistance (like those people on the stock photos), they are insanely out of shape.
« This kind of assistance » allow one, even in shape, to go to work by bike in many places where your employer has no shower, or you don’t want to be drenched in sweat twice per day. Not all the word is flat. My work place was 540m elevation lower than my house, and before good electric bikes it was quite hard do that by bike.
Wait until you hear how many people drive a car every day.
But less facetiously: there are large demographics that might ride bicycles more if it was slightly easier for them, including older people and people with mobility issues. I don’t have opinions particular to this product, but expanding the feasibility of cycling seems like a generally good thing to me.
Do you live where it’s mostly flat?
All these sites have hype about AI features like AI Chat. however I use the chat, and it wastes about 3-10 seconds just to load, then I ask for the price, and it fails to understand even the page we were on (edit: "I don't understand what product you're referring to, please tell me the product"). Then I literally paste the page's product from the page into the chat, and it finally wastes my time more and sends a whole essay blob about why it can't tell me the price.
Is this what investors sell to the board about how they are using AI for greater efficiency? Just to waste consumers time even more?
I asked for the price too, it told me "you seem to be asking about repair prices, you should go to <other website> instead".
I gave the answer a thumbs up, of course.
It's fashionable and it takes strong leadership to avoid fashionable things even when they make absolutely no sense
Everyone is hating but this is a hack and you love to see it.
I remember those from 50 years ago. Back then it was a small petrol engine typically mounted on the front tyre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9loSoleX
Seems like an odd pivot, have Asus made any other (successful) non-computing products before?
The friction-drive approach is interesting, especially at 3.7 kg. I’d be curious how the drive wheel affects tire wear and performance in wet conditions over time.
Reminds me of the best mechanic class in high school we were just five guys and the teacher let us rebuild two old velo solexes.
It looks very stealable, which is amusing given "boost" is slang for "steal".
I just bought a Boost conversion kit from the UK and am excited to install it in a couple weeks. If anyone has installed this kit would appreciate a comment on the experience.
(I'm in the US and have been unimpressed with the kits available here. The Boost one looks compact and well designed).
Hah, my dad made something like this for me when I was a kid using a weed eater engine, with a makeshift lever as a clutch to engage/disengage it. This looks about as makeshift, I wouldn't trust it for serious use.
Their slogan should be “Reinventing the wheel” and then apply the device to all kinds of stuff
Excellent unless you have a mudflap in your back wheel in countries where it rains.
This would be great to add to my 9 year old's bike. We couldn't do long bike tours anymore because he would stop biking after 100m, telling is he is completely exhausted and must go home. I was looking for something like this!
A follow-me tandem (which couples a kids bike to your bike) is a much better solution than giving a 9yo a poorly controlled motor.
I’m pretty sure I’d have preferred a poorly controlled motor over staring at my dad’s ass at 9 years old. Luckily we didn’t have either, we used a dog leash for towing.
Yes, we already have this (Follow-Me - the swiss company). However, my 9yo and his bike is too heavy for that. I was able to carry/drag his bike from about 3y till about 6yo.
No it's not, it teaches the child dependence on the adult instead of giving the child agency.
But a 9 year old is dependant on their parents ...?
...yes? The child bicycling their own bike, vs being attached to the parents bike is a tiny bit of independence to grant a child at that age.
There used to be a few products like this in the early 2000s. Not a new idea at all.
> Oxiis is a universal, friction-drive motor system that transforms any conventional bicycle into a smart e-bike. Its name fuses the Greek Oxis (agility) and Axis (pivot)—perfectly reflecting how its high-performance drive core delivers ultimate acceleration and instant, nimble responsiveness right to your ride.
This sounds like LLM-generated to me, but I find it difficult to point out why.
Maybe the em dash and the fact that it says "its name" instead of "it's name"..? :-D
Seems like normal text to me, I don't think we need to scrutinize every sentence, now. Who cares if they used AI?
Since no one can afford ram, they had to find other markets?
Been burned, can confirm every word
Would it make a seat tube a load bearing here? I imagined setting it up on a carbon bike
Similar things are on amazon today 300-500. Not worth it imho. If you are going to keep it on, convert your bike with middrive or hub motor once.
People really owe it to themselves to try an ebike from an recognised road bike brand. They've been at it for a decade or so now, and even early 20's efforts are a different class in terms of riding experience, refinement and practicality.
Summers ending, watch your bike dealers for deep discounts!
The web page doesn't seem to load correctly in the Safari browser for macOS 26. Seems like something they might want to fix.
It feels like a great product but targeted at a surprisingly transient customer base.
The cycling guys won't buy it, they want the watts from their legs.
The commuters will just get an ebike eventually.
The getting started crowd will eventually become one of these 2 or stop riding a bike altogether. Since I didn't see how much this cost, if it cost as much as a commuter bike, I really don't know who would buy something like this.
No price. This is just sensing the market, i doubt the have anything other than a dirty PoC
Where is the buy now button in that page ?
Gonna be stolen from any parked bike in the UK…
Haha, I like all these adapter designs though my favourite was the Copenhagen Wheel[0]. I saw someone ride one near Mission and S Van Ness and loved it. Sleek device. This particular one in the OP is definitely built for safe societies, right? Definitely not for the North American market, haha!
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_Wheel
Basically, the Copenhagen Wheel moved all the complexity of setting up a hub motor drive system - motor, battery, controller, sensors, computer - into the hub shell itself.
Which made it seem neat and clean, but meant it had serious reliability issues, couldn't handle wet conditions[], wasn't really repairable, and was expensive compared to more reliable alternatives with better battery life, etc.
[] The manufacturer apparently stated that "[...bad bearings] can occur when the Wheel is repeatedly exposed to wet conditions. Due to the nature of the problem, this cannot be repaired": https://forums.electricbikereview.com/threads/known-issues-p...
Psst, you can escape an asterisk [*] with a backslash.
Hub gears work quite well though don't they? In particular respect of being sealed and protected from the weather. Unclear why there's an opposite effect for this wheel.
Thanks - I'd have to have noticed that I used an unescaped asterisk first... too late now.
Did you mean hub gears or hub motors?
The Copenhagen had an ungeared hub motor. Comparing it to other hub motors, theirs was only IPX4-rated, which is basically splash-proof, not waterproof. Decent hub motors are IPX5 or 6.
On top of that, when your hub motor leaks and bearings seize up, fixing it is typically simple and cheap. Pop in a new bearing and new seals and you're done. Most bike shops can do it. With the Copenhagen Wheel, the manufacturer's advice was to throw it away.
The waterproofing rating seems to have been a design decision they made to simplify the design, keep costs down, etc. Since it all had to be custom, they couldn't benefit from the decades of experience, millions of units manufactured, and standardization that hub motor companies like Bafang or Bosch rely on.
See the page about it by the company that actually designed the wheel: https://www.mistywest.com/posts/project/copenhagen-wheel/ :
> "MistyWest had to work around the constraints posed by fitting a heat sensitive component next to a heat generation component in a closed system that allows for very little heat dissipation. The engineering team’s understanding of thermal physics enabled a stable battery system to be designed and adopted for the smart wheel. The inventors of the wheel were the first to ever fit a motor and a power source into a fitted bicycle wheel."
It was a challenging level of complexity. Even if they'd had more funding and stuck with the product, it's hard to see how they would have made it efficiently repairable.
It seems to me that the fundamental issue is that almost every other design is preferable from an engineering perspective. The only attraction of the Copenhagen Wheel was that it made for a quick and easy drop-in upgrade. But at the $1500 price it sold for, you can now buy a whole, much better ebike.
(As for hub gears, they're sealed and filled with oil, grease, or traction fluid, which helps keep water out.)
It went on sale in the US before the EU. Did you even skim the wiki page you linked?
I see. The way I spoke made it seem like I was talking about the Copenhagen wheel with the phrase “this particular one”. I was talking about the OP device. Obviously since Mission and SVN is in the US I would have assumed it was not the CW but I can see that I was unclear so I have clarified. The Copenhagen wheel is pretty integrated. This one is a thumb screw and off you run with a valuable battery. I wouldn’t buy it here and I bike every day in the city.
People who don’t bicycle in North America won’t quite get it. It’s not exactly Taiwan. Theft is rampant and it’s societally sanctioned in most major cities.
10 km Sports and 50 km Eco range is a no go. Plus they explicitly deny carbon fiber bikes, bikes with suspension, and tire choice is rather limited. You could've invested in a decent trekking bike with a standard motor instead, at least you get that hind wheel storage space free.
Is it compatible with the AMD mountain bike?
No price. No order form. No delivery date. Vaporware.
Come on, ASUS. You're a real company, not some kickstarter scam.
Their AI bot is just as grim
Me: when's the bike booster available to purchase?
ASUS AI: For the most accurate and up-to-date product release information, we recommend following our Facebook and Instagram channels. We share all our launch announcements there first, along with exciting product previews.
Hilarious advice given both Meta products are notorious for not showing everything from the accounts you follow.
would be better if there is an option for manual wired buttons to engage/disengage the booster positioned on the handlebars
I love bicycle tech. Almost everything was invented in the 1890s, and every couple of decades someone tries another old idea.
https://onlinebicyclemuseum.co.uk/tour/cyclemotors-motorcycl...
> Almost everything was invented in the 1890s, and every couple of decades someone tries another old idea.
What about wireless shifting systems like Di2?
> wireless shifting systems like Di2
Is it really wireless?
The SRAM one is.
SRAM Automatix. ;-)
> Motor Power 250W (Rated) / 500W (Peak)
A 4090's TDP!
So ah, can we buy it? What's the price? Not seeing unless ad blockers are hiding something.
According to articles like this one[0], they haven't shared pricing yet - so I guess it can't be bought quite yet.
[0]: https://www.digitaltrends.com/outdoors/asus-made-an-e-bike-c...
Am I missing something or that thing can be trivially stolen?
Bicycles in general can be trivially stolen.
FUD. Cars in general can be trivially stolen if you don't lock them. Lock your bike and it can't be trivially stolen.
The problem here is this device can be easily removed even from a locked bike, and it itself cannot be easily locked to the bike.
Why model names for consumer electronics are so stupid? E250G1. Wtf. or have you seen what bosch siemens morons come up with, like ki96nvfd0?
Fenders, anyone
what about my mud-guards?
I totally thought this was about bike theft.
I absolutely would not give up my double panniers and rack. I put a small Tom Bihn Bag "Daylight Backpack" with my laptop in one, and the bike charger and food and other junk in the other, empty my pockets into the zipper bag, and then I'm totally unencumbered for riding and have unlimited distance since I can plug in and charge the battery if it gets low. Riding with a backpack on my back or even stuff in my pockets is a drag. The panniers are also great for grocery and other shopping.
https://www.tombihn.com/products/daylight-backpack
For a second I thought it must be April Fool’s Day.
How do these things work legally? Wouldn't the bolt on process count as manufacturing or modifying a motorcycle, depending on where you are?
In the USA, there are more than 52 jurisdictions not including towns and cities and counties, but most (not all) states think of ebikes as being slightly restricted bicycles rather than motorcycles, as long as:
- they have functional pedals (otherwise it's a motorcycle of some kind)
- they require pedal assist at all times and have some kind of power or speed limitation (anyone can use this, or at least it is least restricted)
- they have pedal assist available and have a different, higher power or speed limitation (usually reserved for 16+ or something similar)
- they have a power or speed limitation that makes them suitable for adults only but doesn't require a driver's license or inspection
There are efforts to regularize these, and also efforts to make things more chaotic. For example, New Jersey decided that all ebikes require a new ebike license and vehicle registration. Across the river in New York, no ebikes require a license or registration, and may be operated on any street which has a 30mph speed limit or less... but cities are allowed to make their own rules.
California's laws are mostly regarded by bicyclists as being sensible, at least in every discussion I've seen that didn't feature a twelve year old trying to convince his parents to buy him a 70mph electric motorcycle. See https://thecyclistchoice.com/resources/california-ebike-laws...
They should require insurance at least. An ebike can cause serious injury to a pedestrian.
So can a regular bike. Human powered bikes regularly blow past me when I'm doing the 15mph speed limits on the bike paths.
That’s the same as a pushbike right?
So can a non-ebike. A couple of hundred pounds hitting you at 15-20mph is gonna suck no matter how it's powered.
Poor people commute on e-bikes. Think twice before making laws that raise the cost and give cops a reason to hassle people.
In most jurisdictions it's only a motorcycle if it can exceed a certain speed or has a motor over a certain power in kilowatts. Or some combination of both.
recent news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c89nyk4pz74o
There's no restriction on manufacturing e-bikes anywhere that I know of, as long as they obey the speed/power limits. (That's why it says 500W "peak" power - the continuous power limit in the UK at least is 250W but manufacturers just make the "peak" last for a very long time.)
They should turn it into a phone lan gaming platform with dedicated games. That would make it instantly awesome.
easy on, easy off, easy to fence.
making a regular bike an e-bike is not too hard as long as caliper brakes and not disc
just replace the front wheel
I did that 20 years ago with a brushed motor and wow that thing had torque, could go up the steepest hills at speed no matter what I was carrying
I see winter version of this. You need custom roller with holes for a particular stud pattern. So there is no slipping and no tire wear. And maybe the roller is made of metal so the snow does not stick to it.
If I bought this I might want a brake upgrade. Even though it probably provides only about 150W (I always assume ebike power ratings are inflated), the extra weight alone warrants disc brakes IMHO.
When I see obvious out of shape ebikers passing me uphill while barely moving their legs, I’m assuming that the power rating of their ebike is about right and the torque curve might be weird to stay legal.
I agree that rim brakes on an e-bike is extra bad.
They aint new. I had one that was driven by a honda gx35 4 stroke
there was another company named "bee" something that did these (gas as well 2 stroke)
and many early scooters, conversions, that all followed the friction style
some bike vendor told me that the biggest problem with regular to ebike conversion was that regular bike frames were not strong enough to support the additional forces that the electric bike imposed. And it was why the ebikes were much heavier than regular bikes.
Does anyone know if that’s true and if that applies to conversions like this one?
It's less of an issue for this device. The reason is that the motor is further from the axle than a hub motor would be. Thus, there's less force on the frame for a given amount of torque.
A lot of extra force when slowing down from faster speeds though, no matter where the motor is added.
Brakes handle this already. Rim brakes are attached to the frame above the wheel.
Not a lot of extra force.
About 5% more weight you need to slow down (80kg rider + 10kg bike + 4kg motor + battery)
Depends on the bike and motor combo. Something like a mountain bike from the last 20 years would be fine, but I wouldn’t try and put one on like a road bike from the 70s or something. Basically anything that’s well built sturdy steel is going to be ok with the common sub kilowatt motors, but there are like crazy ones that will output considerably more power than that.
Also that’s going to be more applicable with a mid drive or a hub motor than something like this.
Interesting point. That might be the only thing this thing has going for it self. The angle of force is perfect even for the most fragile frame.
Weight
3.7 kg (including battery)
Cycling product announcement as we enter the last two weeks of summer, LOL.
i have a folding cycle and a fat bike. my only two devices still analog and keep me reasonably fit. i dont wanna e-bike them. but if i wanna long distance, this could be nice.
It only gives a boost for 50km.
then charge how many hours?
This might be the dumbest thing I've seen this.. well.. week tbh. Don't you guys have mud guards?
disappointed to see no tire brand listed as a partner or sponsor
not really interested in this weird thing, but does anyone know what kind of bike is in the top picture? steel frame, machined brake calipers, really looks very attractive and light for a commuter.
lol. A friction drive in current year?
These suck, just buy an e-bike they are awesome.
These would be great for many places that have storage restrictions on e-bikes, but not normal bikes. So you can easily detach and bring with you before storing it.
The idea of being able to quickly switch a bike back and forth between a regular one and an e-bike seems cool. They lost me at the "smart" though...
any particular one you recommend in usa
my costco has magnum melody
Specialized Vado SL 5 would be my entry level. But anything with a Bosch/Shimano Steps/Giant (same mfr as Specialized) mid-drive. Smooth as butter, and these brands still ride like a normal bike.
wow that looks so good. i do want a regular looking bike because i want to mostly bike like i do but also want to go farther.
Pretty nice bike. I bought a Evelo with a belt drive and a automatic CVT transmission that is really nice to ride.
Anything for the world to actually avoid the health benefits of riding a bike. What is wrong with a standard human powered bike? I expect a global obesity epidemic in 10 years as people begin buying/building WALL-E-style beds.
People with knee problems, areas with hills. An ebike is still active movement; sure you're not getting any cardio, but it's immeasurably better than driving. If this (or any ebike) is a thing that gets someone on a bike that otherwise wouldn't be on a bike, it is a good thing. For some it might be a stepping stone, for others it allows them to ride where they can't/won't ride at all.
I also noticed that some people who used to pedal switched to e-bikes due to laziness.
That would include me, except for the fact I'm e-cycling a lot more than I would have pedaled previously (and driving a lot less)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019821...
"Physical activity gains from active travel are similar in e-bikers and cyclists."
E-bikes make people who aren't fit enough to ride muscle powered bikes to start doing moderate exercise on local trips they would used cars for before.
How can they be the same? One requires much more physical effort. That sounds like junk science. Perhaps they are similar type of gain but the difference in actual result must be a canyon wide.
Following a heart attack, I got a pedal assist, I got hundreds of hours of exercise and outdoors. You always are exercising, just lightly, and you can adjust your input level upwards at will. Brake fluid issues got me back onto my push bike this week. It's different - there's definitely more effective strength training going on in accelerating and climbing hills. Otherwise, it's not THAT much of a difference. I just go slower. 10 mph rather than ~15.
Found the person who lives in Kansas. Sometimes I just want to ride to work without having to deal with that 2km hill on the way. And my bike is still human-powered, with electric assist. Do you not know how e-bikes work, perhaps?
Signed, former Cat 2 road racer
I have ridden a pedal assist ebike and the amount of push I apply to a pedal is 100x less effort than I would to a standard bike. There is no way the physical benefits are remotely the same. Good for you for avoiding exercise though. Also I live in Brooklyn with plenty of long hills. I also have plenty of friends with ebikes here who swear by them like you do. They struggle with health issues related to physical activity. Obviously having some sort of engine, pedal-assist or not is convenient but do you really understand the cost. You might as well drive and move the non-gas pedal foot up and down for the same benefit.
Good for you for avoiding exercise though.
I realize that you really, really want to think that we are talking about electric motorcycles, but you obviously have no idea how e-bikes work, so I see little benefit in discussing it further. My HR monitor says I get plenty of exercise on an e-bike.
The majority of ebikes people are riding are going to be pedal assist bikes like Citibike ebikes. It is very clear to me that you do not want to acknowledge the substantial decline in health benefits with ebikes compared to standard bikes and do not fully understand that while convenient for longer distances they are slightly less healthy than walking. But okay continue to claim that I’m ignorant of the magic of ebikes. Typical “you just don’t get it” response when pointing out obvious falsehoods. I’m glad you found something that gets you around and isnt a car and does give you a bit of healthy benefits as well (heavy emphasis on ‘a bit’). Maybe I’m a bit aggressive but I’m hardly wrong or lacking understanding.
> Do you not know how e-bikes work, perhaps?
I suspect not. Even though ebikes are common now, I often hear this comment. Ebikes assist your pedaling; they don't pedal for you. (Well some can pedal for you but you learn quickly that if you let the motor do all the work you'll run the battery down and then you will have to do all the work pedaling a 65-lb bicycle home.)
Lots of people seem to think if a motor is present, then the motor is doing all the work. Ebikes are not motorcycles. What the motor actually does is make the hills less steep and less long. It's a lowpass filter for terrain.
Not only does it remove the steepness and length, it removes practically any physical benefit you get from using a bike. As is stated in my original point.
Indeed not all of the work, only most of it.