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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.
Out of curiosity, what bikes have you tried with a middrive and mechanical Rohloff? I've put too much time into an 2018 R&M Supercharger with mechanical Rohloff that never felt great (likely due in part of R&M's asinine approach to cable routing on Powertube bikes) and we also installed a mechanical Rohloff on an E8000 Bullitt as an experiment a couple of years ago. The Bullitt definitely worked better than the R&M, but the delay in the drive unit cutting power was significantly longer than the expected pause in pedaling force we're accustomed to on a Rohloff which made it feel pretty shit to me.
That said, if I hadn't spent so much time with E14 at this point, I likely would not have such strong feelings about mechanical Rohloff on middrive bikes.
JVBulman-
Sorry, I didn’t mean to lecture you.
I was trying to respond to the fact you said the Rohloff shifts like shit with mid drive motor- but I couldn’t relate to that. Although my experience with pinion is non existent so maybe it is really a dream come true in comparison.
I’ve ridden a Rohloff / UA XL with Bosch mid-drive for approx two years almost daily, at times I was doing 50/60 miles a day. My only comparison was the same setup with Nuvinci. I’ve never used a Rohloff without the mid drive so I guess I have no expectation to how it should feel, I just know it feels 100x better than the Nuvinci in that same cargo bike / mid drive setup.
MCamb
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.