Imagine designing a bicycle without triangles. Every joint needs to be overbuilt, because there’s no structure from the geometry. But you make sure it still has a top tube, so its just as hard to mount and dismount as a normal bike. Incredible!
Right? Who would be crazy enough to do that?
Next you’re going to tell me someone will make one without a top tube?
Hey, look here buddy. You can’t be your own comment thread and post all the plausible responses yourself like that. You’re putting all the trolls out of work.
doesn’t that prove their point? they all look overbuilt, as the original commenter said.
Carbon fiber, aerodynamics…
Not that rare in old mountain bikes either, pretty sure my old Raleigh was similar
Carbon fiber has very limited lifetimes when used for something with a lot of hard impacts, so if you’re not sticking to smooth surfaces the bike can literally split apart with little warning
Eh…
Modern mountain bikes? Hell, they make car and motorcycle wheels out of it…
I Googled “motorcycle carbon fiber wheel” and autocomplete immediately suggested adding “failure” and doing that search has endless relevant results
And if I do a research for “Toyota Tercel engine failure” I find tons of results as well even though it’s one of the most reliable car ever built.
Crazy how search engines show you results for what you’re looking for, right?
That top one is kinda sexy ngl
The meme shows only bikes with flat handlebars, like commuter bikes intended for transportation.
Every bike you posted are high performance racing bikes with specialized aerodynamic handlebars.
Different priorities. Triangless bikes with a top bar is not a good idea for commuter bicicles like the ones in the meme.
Yeah why not keep the seat tube and delete the top tube?
Compliance but this is a very very extreme example - you’d hit a bump and the top tube would flex, kinda like a diving board, and smooth out the harshness. I’m not even sure this bike exists but that would be the practical purpose of such a design, but most manufacturers tend to go after the seat stays (Salsa Warbird, Bianchi with Counterveil, Moots Routt YBB) or decouple the seat tube from the top tube and allow it to flex due to seat tube angle (Trek Isospeed). Carbon’s kinda fickle and engineers are constantly trying to figure out how to finesse it into feeling less jarring and rigid
Nah, but that tube is a little lowered, enough to make a difference.
Tube is not a line.
I wonder how many revolutions the wheels will do before they bend into pretzels.
Also the pedals driving the outside of the back wheel puts a pretty heavy limit on the gear ratio
Yeah no part of that looks fun to pedal
No springs or shocks means however many it takes, it will be the most painful ass-blasting ride until they do.
I mean not necessarily. Road bikes pretty much never have any actual suspension, all the comfort comes from tire and frame flex. This bike has some fairly chunky tires on, and the way the seat post is just suspended off the back I’ll bet that frame flexes a ton.
That being said, you’d still have to fine tune the design, and get the right amount of flex in the right ways. I kinda doubt anyone choosing to make a bike like this would have the competency to do that
Bet the part that drives the backwheel will handle the suspension just fine…
Id put my money on the wheel mount failing because the whole wheel turns into a lever trying to break it every time it hits a bump.
This is the first step to having magnetic wheels become a thing. We know canonically Jim Kirk’s motorcycle uses these, so it’s definitely mainstream by ~2250.
Honorable mention: the Bell Riots happen September this year, and it seems we’re on track for those too
The technology is getting there. I forget which company did it, but one has developed an insane magnetic suspension system for automobiles.
Right now the limiting factor is the energy required, so battery tech is the bottleneck.
It’s a real shame shipstones haven’t been figured out yet.
For a heavily constrained system like a car’s shock absorbers, couldn’t permanent magnets be used instead of electromagnets?
It was Bose. Yes, the premium sound system producers. It never went anywhere, despite being practical magic, because it added around 2,000lbs and cost six figures.
They also developed a semi-tractor seat using the same sort of voodoo, which is on the aftermarket for around $5k installed.
Would it be hard to translate brushless motors into bikes/vehicles? Don’t those things use magnetism?
Oh I’m sure it’d be quite hard. But that’s a future engineer’s problem lol
That looks like it would be extremely unreliable and needlessly expensive to maintain. Maybe even impossible for the average person to maintain it
But it looks cool and that’s totally worth buying into a proprietary ecosystem and getting something incompatible with 99% of bike parts.
Yup, that went well for Van Moof owners in the Netherlands. Also hipster bikes, the latest model turned out to be of dubious quality and was built using all custom parts. They had fun times getting their ridiculously overpriced bikes repaired after the company went belly up.
The whole van moof thing was absolutely hilarious tbh (if you didn’t buy one, I mean).
I hope Netherlands will litigate good Right to Repair into existance. Netherlands is part of EU, so I belive in you.
It’s so shit. There is a kickstarter of an ebike like that and it’s worse than you van ever imagine. It’s LOUD as fuck and worse in every way than a normal bike.
Yeah but looks cool! /s
As far as I can tell, this product never panned out. It was backed by 132 people to cover 150k GBP in 2017. It was called the “Cyclotron Bike”.
Wait, I’m confused. Does it have tires or is that just a big ring of plastic?
From the video it looks like the plastic rings are casings and the wheels are inside them, and the wheels poke out at the bottom. Seems dumb to me.
You can kind of see it here but it looks like they’re intentionally hiding a good view of it with angles/lighting:
What happens when you ride through mud?
You ride into the mud. Not so much out of the mud.
Company: his can we convince out of shape tech bros to spend $10k on a bicycle?
Only 10k for full suspension futuristic looking bike, that’s a bargain tbh :D
You mean 0 suspension?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is good, I’m just saying that bike industry is so insane that 10k for a bike wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
that is pretty much my impression about these bikes too. Bought for couple 10Ks, used twice.
10k? You buying second hand? You can easily spend $15k on a top tier bike these days.
Dude I haven’t ridden a bike in almost 30 years.
The wheels are apparently really really loud when they are mounted like this. You just can make good enough ball bearings of this size at any reasonable cost and weight
Yeah why do we need another bicycle?
Also how does peddling move the wheels…? Missing something.
Peddling never moves the wheels.
Peddle to the Metal
*Meddle
Meddl Loide!
*The coolest looking concept bike ever created.
Lemmings: hold my beer while I list every complaint I can think of about this design
My first complaint is that it looks like it was designed by someone with zero knowledge of how to make a bike.
The designer said the bike really “spoke” to them.
Is this an AI bicycle or a Dyson bicycle?
I suppose either way it sucks.
Dyson also makes hand dryers.
They blow.
And very very expensive.
Is there any regime where this is more efficient than spokes? I’d imagine that at high speed there’s an aerodynamic advantage (possibly similar to a track/TT disk wheel?), but I can’t imagine the bearings being better than current bikes. But bearing loss might (???) just scale linear with speed, so probably a win from aero in the end. But this isn’t counting weight, which I imagine is worse (but doesn’t matter much at high speed on flat ground).
Is looking cool important?
Broke: How many times will I need to repair this bike over a lifetime of ownership?
Woke: How many people will stare at me as I’m biking?
Bespoke: How many times will this bike get me laid?
For the last one it’s more competitive than you think. I’ve gotten laid thanks to a bike people didn’t even see. Gets you an ass that does wondets
Needs blue or orange neon lights
i never realized until this moment that the meme showed them putting a stick in the wheels. i always thought they just happened to fall off.
Pretty brave to admit that.
There’s power in anonymity.
then what did you think the point of the meme was ?
One of today’s 10000?
I wonder how many times someone has learned something new and then the first reply they read was a link to that comic and they discovered that, too?
I don’t know really
You know there’s a relavent XKCD.
Then send it
I haven’t clicked it. One of the 10 thousand?
Yep
Me on that bike: ah, muddy dirt road, my arc nemesis. And what’s that? a random pile of dog poop, my day’s ruiner.
