I wrote this on another site:
> They'll focus on the easy and wave away the hard like so many other startups. Shifting is easy (which is to say, attainable if you throw seven-figure development money at it). Transferring torque at competitive weight, cost, efficiency, durability, and compatibility will be impossible. A year from now, they'll have a heavy, enormously expensive prototype made mostly of carbon, with bespoke wheels and frame compatible with nothing, conventional gears that mate without rotating bearing sets, and efficiency comparisons to a dirty chain. And it'll still be limited to recreational power outputs and small riders. Then they'll either refinance and pivot some other direction, or die.
I'm posting it here because I'm fully willing to eat crow if it turns out they can build a bicycle to which physics and materials science don't apply.
May 12, 2021, 8:26 a.m. - Alex D
I wrote this on another site: > They'll focus on the easy and wave away the hard like so many other startups. Shifting is easy (which is to say, attainable if you throw seven-figure development money at it). Transferring torque at competitive weight, cost, efficiency, durability, and compatibility will be impossible. A year from now, they'll have a heavy, enormously expensive prototype made mostly of carbon, with bespoke wheels and frame compatible with nothing, conventional gears that mate without rotating bearing sets, and efficiency comparisons to a dirty chain. And it'll still be limited to recreational power outputs and small riders. Then they'll either refinance and pivot some other direction, or die. I'm posting it here because I'm fully willing to eat crow if it turns out they can build a bicycle to which physics and materials science don't apply.