Concept Bikes & Bike Innovation - for better or worse

Are you not mixing up calories of cooked rice by weight with price of dry rice by weight?

Always nice to see somebody paying attention. Yes, you're right, so you only need to buy 400g of dry rice costing 8p (when bought by the Quintal of crappy Government Quality) to get the 124kJ net (generator output less cooking input, assuming you use best practice for cooking), which is about 0.7p worth of electricity at UK domestic prices.

Basically, food is very expensive in terms of energy content compared with oil or gas, and as much as we love the efficiency of a man on bicycle, he turns out to be pretty crap as an electricity generator compared with a good combined cycle gas power station which can exceed 50%

Sure, it's not as good as a cheap, reliable energy supply from a national grid but it might be an option for those off-grid... like rural rice farmers and testers during northern european winters ;-)

Others doubt the appeal of off-grid solutions. “The poor...want grid-based power like urban households that can run TV sets at the flick of a switch,” says Lydia Powell, senior fellow and energy expert at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation.

It probably could use bluetooth, zwift and power metering.

He would have better put that sort of money into nuclear fusion research.

He's only planning to spend $1M

he plans to distribute 10,000 of his Free Electric battery-equipped bikes
It’s so simple that we think we can make it for $100

For that money, you can't do anything useful, apart from maybe just hand out the cash to poor people

it might be an option for those off-grid... like rural rice farmers

If you have enough sunshine to grow rice, you have enough to generate your 250Wh per day with Solar PV for well under the $100 target price of his bicycle, and you don't have to waste a couple of hours when you could otherwise be working to get it.

Yes but... but what would our rice growing, rural, off-grid timetrialist then do with his evenings?

You clearly haven't thought this through ;-)

Yeah, but won't someone think of sexeh calf muscles.

cool concept!

https://hackaday.io/project/7077-rfid-air-pressure-sensor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwFPg7R_vpw

Dot Com's Concept

3 Attachments

OMG THE FUTURE HAS ARRIVED etc

Design for a Cracking good time...

But THE DISC BRAKES WILL BE DIRECTLY ATTACHED TO THE SPOKES OF THE WHEEL

Also loving the way the saddle is directly above the cranks. Yes.

Cheating ebike using tt people.

An interesting approach to solving the seat tube problem. :)

THE DISC BRAKES which transmit torque to the rim WILL BE DIRECTLY ATTACHED TO THE radial SPOKES OF THE WHEEL

Nothing could possibly go wrong there.

They should just attach them directly to the rim, would look mean as well.

They should just attach them directly to the rim

Why not get even more radical and make the brake rotor and the wheel rim one part?

Nonsense, how would that even work? You'd hit the wheel every time you try to brake.

As if that will ever catch on

http://www.gizmag.com/pumptube-self-inflating-inner-tube/40902/

Canyon looks rad. The designer is a stylist, not an engineer; there's no more point in berating the mechanics of the thing than there is berating the innards of your freehub for not being beautiful enough.

Companies employ stylists to make things look good.

Just came across this Scott Robertson vid, explaining how to design around given hard points. He uses bicycles to explain his experiences so plenty of neat bicycle sketches appear throughout the vid.

Mostly Kestrel bicycles and concept art for movies, so probably not everyone's cuppa.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylPB1jabe6A

Mostly Kestrel bicycles and concept art for movies, so probably not everyone's cuppa.

I get that he isn't trying to reinvent the bicycle frame, but it still strikes me as ironic he chose that as an example given how pretty much unchanged the modern diamond bicycle frame (geometry) has been for so many years. I wonder if it will ever change.