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Why would you use pinion and hub motor over bosch / shimano mid drive motor and Rohloff? Cheaper?
Two reasons in my experience:
1 - The rear-facing Bullitt dropouts for Rohloff fucking suck at keeping the hub in place.
2 - Mechanical Rohloff shifting feels like absolute garbage with a high-torque middrive motor and as of this posting E14 isn't compatible with STEPS
JVBulman-
Ime mid drive motor + mechanical Rohloff shifting doesn’t suck, you just need to back off on pedalling while shifting, doing so makes it very reliable. Maybe in comparison to Pinion it sucks tho.
I haven’t seen the brake setup on bullitts. Although I know IS adaptors and horizontal dropouts are fiddly with Rohloff / other hub gears, they tend to work ok when set up correctly.. In fact Rohloff have a better system than other hub gears I’ve used (ie Nuvinci 🤮)
One thing I’ve read about Pinion that puts me off is that they roll less efficiently than Rohloff. It might not be noticeable with a huge rear hub motor but using cargo bikes and mid drive motors you’d notice as soon as you stopped pedalling when using a draggy rear hub, I also thought it was more difficult to cycle past the 16mph assistance (but maybe it was in my head). I wonder if the pinion would have the same effect.
MCamb
Why would you use pinion and hub motor over bosch / shimano mid drive motor and Rohloff? Cheaper?