Category: Electric bike
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NuVinci Harmony automatic shifting for e-bikes
Automatic transmissions for bicycles are not a new idea. One that many of you may remember is the Browning transmission, which was licensed by Suntour in the 80’s. More recently, Shimano’s Coasting group featured automatic 3-speed shifting, but like the Browning transmission, it was not really a commercial success. Those are just two of many…
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Le Tour bikes and other Friday links
Wow, that was an exciting day in the Tour! I won’t give anything away for any of you who didn’t watch it live, but I will say that watching the stage this morning put behind a bit on work that I need to get done today. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen, but…
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RPEV hybrid electric bike and more
Roy Prince designs and builds electric bikes (and other electric vehicles) in Oxnard, California. He chronicles the builds on his website, RPEV.org, where you can find pictures and blog entries for the various bikes. His latest project is the eCortina v2 e-bike, which you can read more about here. Roy points out that his “hybrid…
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City Electric Bicycle by Vojtěch Sojka
Industrial Design student Vojtěch Sojka recently designed this ‘city electric bicycle’ as his thesis project at the University of Technology in Brno (Czech Republic). The school project was developed as a concept for the Czech bike company Superior, who helped Sojka with the production of the prototype. Sojka’s goal with the design was to create…
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Wooden bikes from Audi (no foolin’)
I am off to China for work again tomorrow, so new posts will be infrequent for a few weeks. I’ll try to write a few quick ones when I can find some free time though, so keep checking in. Before I leave, I want to quickly just pass along a few links of interest. At…
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Torque e-bike by Emil Møller Pedersen
A month or so ago, I posted about a handcycle by Marius Hjelmervik, a design student at Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark. It turns out that Marius wasn’t the only one in his class to design a bike. For his final project, classmate Emil Møller Pedersen designed an electric bike called the Torque. Emil…
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Drymer: a Dutch electric assist trike
I have been busy this week and haven’t been able to think about the blog. I received an interesting message from an anonymous reader in Holland though, that I want to quickly pass along: ”In 2002, a collaboration between the Delft University of Technology, Gazelle, and Nike resulted in the ‘Mitka’. There is still a…
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Beixo GO, Retrovelo, and more
I mentioned the Beixo Share bike in a post late last year. Currently, Beixo is working on a new bike- a 16-inch wheel folding model called GO. Jos Ramselaar designed the GO while he was studying Industrial Design at TU Delft (and Beixo points out that he “graduated with a 9 on this project”). The…
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Rain Bike by Frederic Boonen
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will remember Torkel Dohmers’ “ThisWay” concept, the winning entry in the Bicycle Design “commuter bike for the masses” design competition a couple of years ago. You may also remember that the pick was not without controversy. People seemed to either love it or hate…
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2010 recap
2010 was a big year for Bicycle Design. In late February, I finally moved the blog from the old blogspot subdomain to the current location at BicycleDesign.net. The old URL had quite a few incoming links, so it took a while for traffic at the new location to ramp up. There are still thousands of…
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Urban concept bikes, a watch, and an e-velomobile
I am busy working in China this week, so I haven’t had the chance to post anything on the blog. I do want to quickly pass a long a couple of interesting things before I get started today though. Jukka Kalliomäki is an industrial design graduate student at Lund University in Sweden. His thesis project…
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Lots of unrelated links
“The Beast” by M55 Bikes is an aggressive looking pedelec with a claimed 40 mph max speed. I think this is one of those electric bikes that begs the question, how fast is too fast? Isn’t this really just a motorcycle with pedals? Also recently posted at Yanko Design, re:energy is a front wheel concept…
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The Smart ebike by Hussein Al-Attar
Last month, I briefly mentioned the pedal assist e-bike, designed by Hussein Al-Attar, that Smart unveiled at the Paris Auto Show. In particular I mentioned the iPhone/smartphone based control center on that concept bike, a feature I had read about in a Cyclelicious post. There is much more to this Smart ebike than that iphone…
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One of these trikes is not like the other
A reader, Tim, who owns a Baccura Airlite from the last batch made, describes it as “a beautiful lean steer trike that mimics the simplicity of a bicycle.” Baccura.com, an unofficial site that was “developed to showcase the lightest, fastest recumbent trike ever made” refers to it as the “only successful lean steer trike design…
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Eurobike Student Award Winners
I briefly mentioned the Eurobike Student Design Awards in my previous post about the show. After seeing the photos of the 12 winners though, I thought it was worth pointing them out in a separate post. Four of the twelve awarded entries were from the E-bike category, not all that surprising considering the huge presence…
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Friday links
It is Friday afternoon, but I’m still pretty busy trying to wrap up a few things before the workweek ends. While I have been focused on a couple of big projects this last couple weeks, the bike related links that I have wanted to share have been stacking up. I guess that means that it…
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Eurobike Awards 2010
Eurobike wrapped up on Saturday with a very well-attended public day. According to the show management, 22,300 members of the public attended on the last day in addition to the 1,100 exhibitors, and 1,732 journalists, and 41,482 trade visitors who were there throughout the show. That makes 2010 another record year for attendance in Friedrichshafen…a…
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Urban Arrow- an electric assist bakfiets design
You may remember the Cannondale Dutchess concept bike, which was designed by Wytze van Mansum a few years ago. That bike was a student project, but after his graduation Wytze was contacted by two entrepreneurs, Gerald van Weel and Jorrit Kreek, and asked to design an updated bakfiets. Wytze points out that what really interested…