One off concept vehicle for now, but you can pre-order one for 18.000€, which I can't tell if it's expensive for a bike, or like reasonable for an amphibious vehicle, or pretty good for a camper.

Here's a look at it by some youtuber

I cross the border on this and immediatly 3 different police jurisdictions get into a shootout over what kind of licenses I need to operate this thing. I am taunting them the whole way by riding in shallow water, further complicating the situation.

Man I want one.

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[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's kind of cool as a what if or engineering challenges but for any real world applications I'm sorry to say, it's just dumb. A belt- or chain driven bicycle sits at like 95% efficiency or so as per drivetrain, you're getting way less than that here. And it's not going to be lighter or actually more rugged, it's just all the parts are internal and you've replaced "maintaining chain and sprocket" with "toss out an electric motor eventually"

[+] Optimus_Subprime@hexbear.net 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

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[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 2 points 10 months ago

I wouldn't mind getting my hands on a DD bike to test it out for myself though.

I wouldn't but that would be entirely for the gizmo-factor

Hey if you are going by that digital drive bikes video, the video maker himself said he might have estimated the losses incorrectly due to regen braking and downhill grades which would recharge the battery a bit.

I'm not and it matters little - you're not beating 95% drivetrain efficiency except in the rare case where these things would be used nigh-exlusively like one of those coal elevators that run by themselves where you only have heavy people riding them downhill and lighter people riding them uphill.

However, the video maker also lists that battery plus digital drive brings the efficiency back up to be on par with chain/belt and gear systems.

You can slap a battery on a chain- or belt-driven bike and get even further

The uses for digital drive bikes he lists would likely be city commuter bikes,

Okay, you could pedal while standing still to charge it up - at least on a cargo bike (and there is one that does this, albeit the name escapes me atm) but then you're still just using effort to convert into energy with more losses. The physics just don't work out.

bike rental fleets,

Honestly if you're going for like rugged ass shit (and fuck the riding experience because it's only for short trips anyhow, i.e. rentals), I say RETVRN to prop shaft bicycles. Now those would be intensily hard to break. But I don't even think this is much of an actual problem, most bicycle rental companies have figured this out via a closed chain guard box and some farings and that's really not the part that usually gets dinged up or willfully destroyed

and especially cargo bikes

This comes closest to real world application imo, but that's more on the ground of loopholing regulations so you can still claim it's a bicycle instead of like an EV that would require licensing, taxes, registration or any such thing - which I'm not against- but then you still have decades of chain-driven recumbents and such to look at to figure out how to include one of those. It's not like "slightly longer bicycle chain and some pulleys" is really a hard engineering problem to solve