this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Does this even work?
They do work, but are basically worse in every way.
Bearings are really impressive pieces of engineering that require really tight tolerances to reduce wear and friction. On a traditional bike you have a small bearing at the center that is a standard mass manufactured commodity part.
On these they’re turning the whole wheel in to a giant speciality bearing. It has to spin faster, has to deal with force being applied to a small section rather than the whole bearing, and has way more surface area where dirt could get in and grind against the surfaces.
So these are more expensive, way heavier, higher friction, less reliable, harder to repair, and faster to wear out.
But they look futuristic don’t they?
It feels like they were invented specifically for this meme
I honestly thought this was some kind of AI generated bike.
Corporate/marketing decision making is basically just a slow moving AI. It takes in a huge amount of data, process it through a black box of processing and decision making, and spits out a decision that is pure hallucination.
If it does it is incredibly overengeneered to do the same as a normal bike
It probably does, but I’m just not sure for how long. It’s a lot of force placed in very awkward places. You would need high tolerances so the slop won’t be magnified towards the other end and the leverage would also mean that any imperfection(easy to pick up since the mechanism in unshieldable and on the rim) would very quickly reduce those tolerances to a cheap joke.
Very cool idea and definitely worth trying for the lols but anyone who thinks this would be practical longterm probably doesn’t deserve the dispoable income required to purchase it.
Yep, they're called hubless bikes.
Reevo's ebikes do this and use the space in the middle for possible luggage.
Reevo - Reevo Bikes - https://www.reevobikes.com/reevo/
this looks cool on the surface but i wonder about so many issues. is it harder to fix a punctured tire? why not a conventional baggage holder in front or above the back wheel? what happens if the fingerprint scanner breaks? their claim that it is harder to steal makes me laugh. 99% of bike thefts don’t happen because the perpetrator is looking for a bike to use, they simply throw a bunch of locked bikes in a truck and scrap them for parts in another country.
Lmao, they use solid tires. Probably because of how hard it is to replace a punctured tube on a wheel like this. Solid tires have no bounce, so in turn with a rigid wheel you get a rigid tire. So no cushioning. You get every bump and bounce of the road right in to the frame.
Technically yes, but they're usually loud af.
God, I can smell the friction from those wheels