I saw Berm Peak do a review on this thing and it looks like utter garbage.
At least it can do stunt, like ejecting battery and self disassembly.
I saw that video too. The worst part is that it seems like they genuinely tried, but were doomed to failure because of the immutable laws of physics (making the entire rim a huge bearing is always going to be terrible).
Hubless can be doable, but this most definitely was not it.
The thing with the modern bicycle wheel is that it is simultaneously wholly integrated with the function of the overall bike, while also still modular enough to allow swapping out parts against it. Whereas this bike failed to meet both those criteria.
If changing from standard hub bearings to this hubless design with a larger bearing structure was an isolated change, this might have been alright. But that also took away the tensile structure, swapping for a heavier compression structure to achieve the same rigidity. And then that complicated the brakes, the drivetrain, and frame.
Whereas a standard bicycle wheel works with both rim and disc brakes – heck, even spoon brakes if that’s your thing – and mostly doesn’t care about single- or double-sided forks, and can even be adapted for 2x2 drive on some ebikes. All of this is possible because the bicycle wheel is an objectively good design: the sum is greater than its components, and that makes it a high bar to beat.
Even with certain edge-case requirements – eg radial lacing to reduce weight, improve aero at the cost of hub torque resistance – there’s simply so much upside with the spoked, pneumatic bicycle wheel that it’ll still trounce other designs.
At some point, Beno must have recognized this and either ignored it early on out of hubris, or had too many dollar signs clouding their vision, until it was well too late in the project to stop this trainwreck.
I mean, yes, all that’s true, but they were also doomed from the get-go just because the huge bearing creates so much more unnecessary friction. Did you see how poorly it coasted? That negates one of the biggest advantages of cycling over walking all by itself!
Engineering-wise, large diameter bearings with low friction are entirely possible. This just happens to be one of the worst implementations of a large bearing, in an application where it really, really matters to be low resistance.
My point is that low-friction bearings still wouldn’t have saved this design from impracticality, so focusing on just the bearing issue would be giving a free-pass to the rest of the design pitfalls of this monstrosity.
Did it really take $6.7 million to develop, or was most of that money just a really nice payday for the guy behind the crowd funding campaign? To his credit he did at least end up with a product, however bad it might be, but without transparent finances I’ll just assume that he paid himself a handsome salary.
Every so often, somebody gets the hubless wheel bug. It’s like history repeating on a shorter timeline and a smaller scale than, say, geopolitics. Someone thinks they can radically improve on the spoked pneumatic bicycle wheel. And it’s always utter garbage, a horrible choice of form over function.
“But improvements in materials engineering will make hubless wheels a reality one day!” Maybe, and those same engineering improvements will also apply to spoked pneumatic wheels. Moreover, those improvements will get applied and tested there first.
“These folks are thinking outside the box and innovating!” No, they are failing at engineering 101: don’t reinvent the wheel, in this case literally. The key innovation here was duping others into paying for known, failed garbage like hubless wheels.
Please, for your own safety and your wallet’s sake, don’t ever fall for the hubless wheels. It’s the perpetual motion scam of the bicycle world.
They’ve been using them to some degree of success in some motorcycles, but I’m definitely not buying one even if it does kinda look cool.
some degree of success in some motorcycle
Just because it functions doesn’t translate to engineering success. This is form over function and sits only in the domain of niche/boutique motorcycle builders. If there were any advantages other than aesthetics, you’d see hubless wheels in competition motorcycles, e.g. MotoGP.
A hubless wheel will always be inferior to an equivalent hubbed wheel, especially in a use case such as motorcycles. In order to make the wheel strong enough for the task, the rim must be heavier than it would be for a wheel with spokes. This unnecessarily increases rotational mass in the worst possible place: at the outermost points of the wheel. This also means more unsprung mass. More energy is required for accelerating and braking the wheel. And because the hubless wheel will always be heavier, the suspension will be less responsive than if the wheel had a hub. The linkage from suspension to the wheel must also be more robust and more complex.
And this is ignoring the additional complexities of transferring power to and from the wheel, and angular/radial/lateral forces and shocks. How does one efficiently brake a hubless wheel while limiting brake fade?
These are only a few points to consider every single time you see someone trying to sell a hubless wheel.
I wouldn’t buy one, but for the sake of a counter-argument: Hubs have been around for a long time and have had many refinements over the years. Many of the flaws that the hubless design suffers from might very well be mitigated through further development over the next hundred years or so. Still, I prefer the repairability, practicality, and reliability of a wheel with spokes as well.
Many of the flaws that the hubless design suffers from might very well be mitigated through further development
Sure, additional refinement could make hubless wheels a reasonable reality. I’ll reiterate one of my original points: all engineering advancements that would make a better hubless wheel would also improve the already great hubbed wheel. Even if we could ignore the complexities of going hubless, the radially supported wheel will be stronger, lighter, simpler, less expensive, more aerodynamic, more repairable.
I might be getting a bit esoteric here, but the same conversations come up in software engineering. “Advances in computing will make Ruby more performant.” Sure, but those advances will be multiplicative in already-performant languages such as C, C++, and Go, whereas they will be fractional in Ruby.
