Comparing any part of this bike to Taiwanese production line, badge-engineered, mass market bike is hilarious.

As for the wheels, I’d like to hope that some pretty substantial engineering work went into them, but I somehow doubt it. A hub brake wheel simply has to be burlier than a rim brake, and in particular it has to resist torsional forces. This is why you never see a radial spoked front wheel when disc or roller brakes are used, as opposing tangent spokes are needed to resist this force. What’s even weirder here is that if you look at the wheels on the site the front spokes all lead a little, while the rear ones all trail a little. The idea appears to be that the design is stronger under tension than compression (which is generally true of CF as Mavic learned the hard way). Pedal power to the rear hub puts tension on the spokes, while the same goes for braking on the front. This is probably why the rear rotor is smaller, though that might have also been done to keep the stays narrow. Whether the rear wheel could hold up to a panic stop where the rider accidentally grabbed the wrong brake is not something I’d want to be the crash test dummy for, though of course an exploding rear wheel is always better than an exploding front.

Returning to the issue of whether the wheel design is adequately reinforced for disc braking, let’s look under the hood. The weight claim for this bike is 16.3lbs, roughly 7400 grams. The known components are tallied below, along with some reasonable estimates for others.

2x Conti GP4000 tubular — 570 grams, call it 600 with glue and valve extenders
2x some really light disc brakes with rotors and a little extra weight in the STI lever for the cylinder — 700 grams (this is a very generous guess)
Di2 levers, FD, RD, control unit/battery (a bit hard to find actual numbers on, but shimano says 68 grams over regular DA7900 so let’s just use the mechanical number and spot them the 68g for lighter custom levers) — 600 grams
Carbon crank with power meter (I used the number from the SRAM model) — 750 grams
Chain — 250 grams
Cassette — 200 grams
Ultralight saddle with carbon post (yes this thing has an integrated mast but I’m going to compare it to a frame that doesn’t) — 200 grams
Headset (god only knows but there have to be some bearings in there somewhere) — 50 grams
Normal light carbon frame — 1250 grams
Normal light carbon fork (this fork is likely beefed up for disc purposes so this is a real lowball) — 350 grams
Handlebar/stem (shimano integrated, presumably similar to this) — 350 grams

This brings us to 5300 grams for everything but the wheels and the onboard computer. Let’s say the computer weighs about 100 grams like most of the Garmins, so we’re at 5400, and that’s with a lot of very generous estimates and nothing thrown in for bolts and the like.

Now let’s talk about these wheels. If the overall weight claim is true and my numbers above are about right, they weigh about 2000 grams for the set. They probably don’t have a power meter, since there is one at the crank, so let’s go with the Spinergy RevX as our comparison since it’s an 8 spoke wheel and pretty light compared to the other carbon spoke options. The RevX “Superstiff” set weighs 1900 grams in a tubular; the non superstiff set is about 100 grams less. You could argue for something like the Hed 3′s as the baseline since they’re a more advanced design than the Spinergy set, but they’re a race-only wheel with only 3 spokes. They may weigh 1500 grams for the set, but nobody would ever train on them, versus the RevX which had an MTB version and were marketed as tough, not as tri and track race divas that will never go over a hard bump like the Heds. I’m not even going to bother considering Aerospokes as they’re much heavier. At any rate, it’s pretty safe to say that the RevX, superstiff or not, would never hold up to hub braking — those wheels had a reputation for failure as is.

If the wheels on this bike are safe, they are much stronger than the RevX Superstiff without more than 50g additional weight per wheel, including what you need at the hub for the rotor mounts. Now, I’m willing to buy that there is some better design than a Spinergy going on here, but let’s keep in mind how hard hub braking is on a wheel. To give you an idea, Easton will happily sell you an 18 spoke radial front road wheel, while their lightest MTB race wheel is 24 spokes laced 3x, and nobody in their right mind would take that MTB wheel on a rough course without a front shock so the concern is less about big hits and more about braking forces. Let’s also keep in mind that while F1 designers probably know something about braking forces, they know nothing about building carbon wheels given that F1 regulations forbid them. Two decades of work by the best bicycle engineers out there have not produced a rim brake carbon spoke wheel at this weight that is durable enough to safely be used for training. Some people might be willing to believe that a bunch of race car engineers with no experience dealing with carbon drivetrain parts who did a not-so-hot job at designing the rest of the elements of a bike somehow nailed it on the first try and built in enough margin for hub brakes as well, but I’m not one of them. I could be wrong, but I’m guessing that if anyone ever bought one of these bikes and actually trained on it they would get a taste of pavement within 10k miles.

Excuse my ignorance. But why does it matter what side the disc caliper is on?

And Ted is right, how do you even manage to mount a disc brake on the wrong side?

This is the same thing we always see when people who know nothing about bikes try to design one — a laundry list feature set, limited usability, proprietary parts used for wear items, and colossal errors around the simplest elements.

The Factor ZERO ZERO ONE bike offers nothing new to the market outside of the geeky on board cyclometer – what good is that going to do you when you get dropped on a club ride?