Futurebike

jeremyrundle · February 2011

This is what I want

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/others ... eiled.html

Or perhaps one of THESE

http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/09/24/1 ... -of-seoul/

The Rookie · February 2011

Nope, and no14 in that second link is farcicle as it has no steering at all - clearly just a 'paintshop'.

Simon

phillipjohnson · February 2011

Stick with a Brompton for a folder I think :-)

walkingbootweather · February 2011

Call me old fashioned but I think I'd rather stick to my old Raleigh Randonneur.

snailracer · February 2011

The Beginner wrote:

Nope, and no14 in that second link is farcicle as it has no steering at all - clearly just a 'paintshop'.

Simon

No 14 is supposed to steer by pivoting near the bottom bracket (which is also how it folds).

shouldbeinbed · February 2011

Mr Boardman: Fingerprint lock technology, so you can't let anyone else borrow it and lock it themselves, you need a computer plug in to sell it to someone else and if it fails you're buggered - have you tried it after being sat all day on Market Street in the pouring rain and -2C? And what's to stop someone plugging a. Smartphone/computer etc in to either unlock & steal it or to sabotage it and reset/lock you out of it

oh and you can sound like an ice cream man and draw attention to yourself with the piped music. What a cacophony that'll be at rush hour traffic lights.

Not what its for granted but: What's it like on trails and lumpy bits and in wet and on ice? Are the lights good enough for pitch dark country roads, mudguards & panniers?

Does it meet legal requirements for reflectors etc

jimmypippa · February 2011

I do wonder how much commuting bicycle technology would have moved on if the UCI were a little less dinosaur-like?

Would recumbents have become popular for time trials? (I guess that they might have issues up hills, but on the flat against the wind, I'd have thought they'd win).

Maybe disc brakes would be more available.

jimmypippa · February 2011

From the Telegraph article:

A battery-assisted motor, run by solar panels, takes over the pedalling after a long day and music accompanies the ride.

The bike could be created were a company willing to produce it, insists Mr Boardman, as "everything in it already exists".

According to Wiki

Ignoring clouds, the average insolation for the Earth is approximately 250 watts per square meter (6 (kW·h/m2)/day), taking into account the lower radiation intensity in early morning and evening, and its near-absence at night.

.

Now I reckon that a bike might, if its frame was filled in, have about 1 square metre of area that could be used to collect solar energy. This would weigh quite a lot, and would only collect power if the bike were parked facing in the right direction.

The trek electric bike uses a 350W motor according to google) so every minute cycling at that level of boost requires 7-minutes of charging with the bike in the optimal orientation. This would rarely happen, so you could might easily end up with only 20% of that average charging.

The sums probably don't make such an idea worthwhile.

I somehow doubt if the numbers would make sense.

At (a slightly optimistic) 20% efficiency, this equates to about 50W.

walkingbootweather · February 2011

Aren't all new bikes supposed to have reflectors (front, rear and pedals) and a bell?

The Rookie · February 2011

And wheel side reflectors ..... yes....

As for no14 having steering at the BB pivot point, can't belive that will be rideable, the change in centre of balance as the front wheel moves sideways leaving the CofG offset from the two contact points and the rider on the floor soon after!

Simon

snailracer · February 2011

The Beginner wrote:

...
As for no14 having steering at the BB pivot point, can't belive that will be rideable, the change in centre of balance as the front wheel moves sideways leaving the CofG offset from the two contact points and the rider on the floor soon after!

Simon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_an ... e_dynamics

"Between the extremes of bicycles with classical front-wheel steering and those with strictly rear-wheel steering is a class of bikes with a pivot point somewhere between the two referred to as center-steering, similar to articulated steering. An early implementation of the concept was the Phantom bicycle in the early 1870s promoted as a safer alternative to the penny-farthing. This design allows for simple front-wheel drive and current implementations appear to be quite stable, even ridable no-hands, as many photographs illustrate.

These designs, such as the Python Lowracer, usually have very lax head angles (40° to 65°) and positive or even negative trail. The builder of a bike with negative trail states that steering the bike from straight ahead forces the seat (and thus the rider) to rise slightly and this offsets the destabilizing effect of the negative trail."

nation · February 2011

Why are the people that come up with "design concepts" for bikes obsessed with the idea of wheels with no hubs?

Seriously. Every time I see one of these things they always have hubless wheels.

ndru · February 2011

The good thing about bicycle is that it needs no improvement to be very useful. You can tinker all you want at the edges, but the thing is - no one needs it really. It works.

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