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A Smart Electric Bike: Taking the Copenhagen Wheel Out For a Spin
New submitter mlamonica writes Bikes are a great way to get around the city. But what if it's just too hilly or far to commute by bike? That's where Superpedestrian wants to come in. With a license from MIT's Senseable City Lab, they're commercializing the Copenhagen Wheel, a bike wheel replacement that gives riders electric assist, and through 12 embedded sensors, lots of information on a smart phone app. I took the bike for a ride at the Cambridge office and offer this review.
I don't see the point of all this electronics or intelligence in a bicycle. If anything, the location tracking means that bicycles now also are starting to invade my privacy.
For regular distances, a purely mechanical bike is simple, robust, and inexpensive. For longer distances, vehicles designed from the ground up for motor assist seem a better choice than this, and the additional design freedom from designing bike and assist together likely results in a better and cheaper bike.
I'm not sure the wheel is the best place for the battery! TFA says the wheel weighs 13 lbs, which is a ton, and it's rotating mass. I'd rather have a hub motor but have a small battery pack affixed elsewhere, maybe in a bottle cage, where it doesn't have to rotate.
Also the topping out at 20 MPH is a little low. It would surely be useful in conditions of headwinds or uphills, where you cannot ride very fast, so that's nice. But for normal cruising, 20 MPH can be sustained by a fit rider who isn't elderly. I can just do it on flat ground with no winds, and I'm 52. Younger riders have no problems at all. I understand it's a regulatory issue but it would be nice if the top speed could be upped just a little, maybe to 25 mph. It's far harder to ride 25 mph on a bike - I cannot do it for more than a minute unless assisted by hills or wind. Power demand is not linear with speed. It would be nice to have that power difference made up by a motor.
here in Boston, where I live
Narrow twisty roads, and when the snowbank gets high, narrower roads
non highway routes are often circuitous
Dark at 5PM much of the year (and add in the snowy, narrow twisty roads...)
Potholes
Did I mention potholes ?
Rain snow sleet
weather down to teens to single digits many days of the year
lack of decent bike racks (some day, some smart person will write a n y times op ed about how bad bike racks are)
no showers, or cruddy showers
not so good when you have to go pick up your kid at school, or dance recital, or...
maybe inside Cambridge or Boston itself, a bike might work
For much of MA, no so good
the problem is NOT that we need easier to use bikes
the problem is that we have a car suburban orientation; change tax laws and zoning so people are packed into citys, and bikes will take care of themselves
First, don't think of the copenhagen wheel as an electric bike. Think of it as a wheel - that can be used to retrofit nearly any compatible bike. It's wireless capabilities means that you don't even need a controller on the bike wired to it.
As for the weight, it's at least around the axle, not the rim, so that reduces the effects. One can certainly argue about the max speed, but keep in mind that the non-linear power increases would also rapidly increase the cost and weight of the batteries and motor.
I don't read AC A human right
There is a limit on how many CC a gasoline powered bicycle's engine can be just because of random laws in the USA. If you look to China, a great deal of people get around cheaply on a bicycle with gasoline powered engines. But we can't, because we have laws. Now if you turn your bicycle electric, it will be heavier, more inefficient, but there are no ways of measuring how many CC an electric motor has ^^. Voila, sneak around the laws, and maybe you have a market for this.
God spoke to me
The problem with bikes is weather.
We are getting into (the northern hemisphere) winter. Snow and ice on the roads make cycling too dangerous, and then theres the wind chill...
I've been there and indeed you do see bikes everywhere. I did not see a single electric bike though. When I asked around, I've heard that bikes get stolen all the time so it is not worth putting too much money into them.
TFA says the wheel weighs 13 lbs, which is a ton,
wrong. I hope this is a massive typo, considering that my car weights just over 1 ton.
*sigh* I guess figurative speech is going the way of the dodo...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
In many jurisdictions it is ILLEGAL for a power-assisted bicycles to exceed 30km/h. If something goes faster and is power-assisted, it is no longer considered a bicycle (or power assisted bicycle), but a motorcycle (or scooter or whatever), and different laws and licensing requirements govern said vehicle.
Exactly. In the United States, the speed limit is 20mph. What you buy is often capable of more than that as a top speed (to deal with steep hills,etc) but the speed is artificially limited
There is also different sub-categories which can vary considerably depending on state
e.g.
"Electric-assist" bicycle (where the user still needs to pedal to some extent keep accelerating)
"Motorized bicycle" where it can be self-propelled (controlled by throttle) after a the user used the pedals from a stop
"Motor-Driven cycle" can be self-propelled from a start, and often allows a higher top-speed but must be smaller than a motorcycle. Per State, may or may not require a full motorcycle license and/or follow motorcycle safety regulations.
See Wikipedia for more
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
*nods... "I took the bike for a ride at the Cambridge office and offer this review."
That's factually untrue. This is nothing more than a promo, there is one line that it took longer for a ten minute trip (but not how much longer) or why.
Where's the review? Where's the experience? Comparisons? Where's anything that gives any idea of what it's like other than how much it weighs? (Simply declaring it'll feel different because they are tweaking it doesn't count.)
Were this "review" on Amazon I'd answer, "no, this purported review was not helpful at all".
A lot of them have been done before. However they are all front wheel, with no pedal assist, and have external batteries. Its interesting that there is a lot of mocking of the wheel on slashdot. Both copenhagen wheel and flykly have pre-sold over $1 million dollars worth each, and copenhagen has at least another $4 million in funders who are expecting a large profit. E-bike sales are over 3 million per year, normal bike says are at 100 million per year. So 97% of people with bikes don't have e-bikes. One they start mass producing these wheels could come down to $299 or less. I think eventually they will be standard on most bikes.
Indeed. I wonder how much the Bill of Materials is. The innovation premium appears to be too high on this one.
Cars are quite reasonably priced in US. Why are motorcycles so expensive though? (lack of a mass market making them special interest products?) For the price of an $800 electric wheel, one can buy an entire motorcycle from a recognized brand in Asia (starting from $500), where cars cost about the same as in US.
Bicycle lanes/paths are cheap, and probably about 10-20% of the population bike pretty regularly. For kids and teenagers, it's one of the primary modes of transportation.
Given that government has a monopoly on local transportation, it is reasonable to demand that government cater to common needs like bicycling.
I'm pretty sure this is patented. Currie Tech came out with such a wheel, and then quickly discontinued all mention of it. Since the focus of Currie Tech seems to be Chinese imports, I suspect that their wheel is manufactured and sold in China, where such issues as IP ownership are less formidable than here.
That said, I'm not sure I'd want such a wheel, because I'd be concerned about loss of control. Every so often with my $450 currie tech bike, the pedal assist kicks in where it is unwanted, like at a light, waiting for cross traffic to end. I have a control on it: my hand brake cutout. However, I don't know that I'd have any limitation on misbehavior by a Copenhagen wheel.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's