interesting....if a trifle pricey....
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'E-Rockit' hits German fast lane
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'E-Rockit' hits German fast lane
It's basically a fast ebike (80 kph). Nothing particulary new about that except the bike comes with pedelec and no throttle. So you're forced to pedal in order to make it move. It's designed to keep people fit, despite the fact that bike is so powerful that pedaling doesn't appear to take any effort at all.Can't watch it...
Im at the end of the phone exchange and can only get 1/2 to 1 mb broadband at best,I can open and read that easily.If you cant there is some thing seriously wrong with your service provider and I would take it up with them or change to another.Can't watch it because a)I have no sound on my work computer.
b)My boredband connection at home is not up to snuff.
It bugs the hell out of me that the BBC website assumes everyone in the UK has a 12 trillion MBS download speed so it's fine to just bung video content up with no text story as an accompaniment.![]()
Intriguing idea but I have to say my first reaction is that it sounds like he is trying to emulate the effect of not having gears, which seems strange. Bikes have gears because it is comfortable to pedal within a certain cadence range regardless of speed, so why would anyone want to neutralise that benefit?As I said, the Cadence* controls the throttle, the faster it's pedaled, the faster the motor turns, and it's this I find innovative - don't you? I mean forget wether the overall concept is viable, that's in the lap of the gods/marketting/venture capital/consumer faddish interest etc., just because you may not like the package doesn't mean that all the parts of it are bad/illconceived.
No, I meant torque, but I was guessing at it being torque control on appearance only.* or is this what you mean when you use the term torque?
It's difficult to tell from the video, but I think the pedal drive might be internal to link to the motor drive, or it might alternatively be on the other side from where we could see. The Swizzbee and the Izip Dolphin both use dual drives, the motor belt drive one side and the bike chain on the other.Weirder than that, it didn't seem to me that the pedals contributed to the drive train at all (other than as throttle control). Hence I said that it was akin to an exercise bike on wheels.
Well, you could aways pedal a dynamo for the lights...If it is only an internal loading for the pedals and they don't drive the bike, it's even more crackpot!
.
This is what the Panasonic system has done for eight years now, except that it uses torque pedal pressure sensing to decide the basic amount of power and cadence to tune that to fine degrees for the purpose at hand. Yamaha have now copied that system with some small differences.I think that the core concept is to use the pedals instead of a hand throttle - which is what I found so fascinating in the first place.
The London courier territory is mostly quite flat so fairly suitable for fixed gear riding, which has advantages in traffic conditions. However, the heyday of fixed gear cycling was pre-WW2, and once it was realised with time and age the knee damage that could result from low cadences, it dropped almost completely out of fashion. Sad to think that in those earlier cycling days cyclists were proud of how much force they could exert at very low rotations and boasted of long extremely hilly trips in that fashion, ignorant of how much they would subsequently suffer for it.Interesting, when I lived in London, I saw cycle couriers riding fixed wheel bikes, so there must be a market for it, if only a small one, and surely the power/cadence curve could be tailored, even switchable for the comfort of the rider, so they wouldn't need to apply a large amount of torque at low cadence.
Hence my suggestion of having a throttle on the handlebars to run in parallel, this way one could set off from a standstill with relative ease (though this could easily be a button with its own preset power curve). Of course it may not be suited to areas with a lot of hills, but may do well in other places such as EA & Holland. All it really means is better/cleverer programming of the controller - and in the 21st century, I'm sure we can manage that!It would be difficult to restrict the pressure at low cadence by tailoring the motor response, since the rider would still be able to apply high pressure while the increased motor power accelerated to a higher cadence point.
The excellent Panasonic system does all of this though, and gives more cadence flexibility.The interesting bit about a cadence proportional power system to me, and what caught my imagination in the first place, is that it would place very little stress on the motor/battery, and eliminate any sence for the rider of having to play catch-up with the bike. It also so appeals on the basis of its simplicity, and dare I say it, elegance.