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Between the Copenhagen Wheel and the FlyKly Smart Wheel, Powered Bicycle Wheels are On the Way
We first looked at the Copenhagen Wheel, a powered bicycle wheel with a self-contained motor and batteries, when it won the James Dyson Award back in 2010. It was developed by a team of students at MIT's SENSEable City Lab, a sort of combination think-tank/skunkworks dedicated to solving urban issues.
A year later, in 2011, NYC-based entrepreneur Niko Klansek introduced a line of electric bicycles called FlyKly to the U.S. market. By 2013 he'd gathered a development team that produced a prototype of a self-powered bike wheel that appears very similar to the Copenhagen Wheel.
It's not clear if Klansek had been developing his idea with parallel timing to the Copenhagen Wheel, or if there was team overlap, or if something less pleasing was afoot; since we don't have the facts we must give him the benefit of the doubt. But what isn't in doubt is that self-powered bicycle wheels are coming. Just yesterday Superpedestrian, a Boston-based company founded by MIT SENSEable City Laboratory Associate Director Assaf Biderman (part of the original Copenhagen Wheel crew), announced they'd landed $2.1 million in funding to commercialize the Copenhagen Wheel. "We're now less than 60 days away from introducing the first-ever commercial model of the Copenhagen Wheel," Biderman reports.
Meanwhile, Klansek's FlyKly launched a Kickstarter campaign just last week for their FlyKly Smart Wheel. It was a resounding success, hitting their $100,000 target in a mere 48 hours; at press time it was currently up to 166 large, and there's still over a month left to pledge.Both products look and apparently perform nearly identically, both have smartphone connectivity, and both will be launching later this year. If anyone on either product's development team is reading this, and can speak to the similarities, please do sound off in the comments.
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Comments
When will this be available for wheelchairs?
Thanks,
Jackson from Kansas
see: NZZ of July 2012, nzz.ch/~/ein-fliegengewicht-von-einem-e-bike-1.17318558 (for English: translate.google.com). Perhaps some of you, guys, may pursuade him to get it to the market:-)
Copenhagen wheel is battery is more questionable to me IMO. Most big players are using the high quality cyclinder style samsung batteries, not those flat packs that it appears to have. However its motor is more 'tried and true' than the flykly is. Plus they seem to have much bigger financial backers. This seems to have put them price high. They are already offering $100 off 'just for holiday season', so they seem to have a much bigger profit margin than flykly.
Also neither of these is the first powered wheel. There is already a $999 front wheel on the market. It has a wireless sensor that you attach to your pedal crank which it uses to output power in proportion to your pedal speed. The only special thing about these new wheels is that they go on the back wheel, and incorporate torque censor.
Hopefully good competition will drive the prices down under $400 eventually. If these get cheap enough EVERY bike will have one. Especially flyfkly which is only supposidly 4kg. To get 250W power boost up hills with only 4kg weight and only a few hundred dollars.... it would change cycling forever.
What are the Smart Wheel's battery technical specifications?
Smart Wheel's battery is currently measured at 12 amp hours (Ah) but because we're still testing out different types of Lithium batteries to ensure the best performance and durability these specifications are still bound to change in the future.
I quote: 12 Ah capacity
clever marketing or ????
copenhagen wheel say they aim for 48v 5 Ah and
flykly has like 36v and 1.1 Ah
both very much less than other e-bikes, flykly more like a bad joke....
My take on these systems is that the app is secondary to the main feature, that of propelling you and your stuff with less effort. The non-removable battery pack issue is interesting, but there are two kinds of people: Those who like versatility, and those who like all-in-one.
I'm interested in using it for my Loud Bike, which has about 80 extra pounds of stuff on the back end. As I already put a solar panel on it, charging the batteries would just require the addition of a voltage converter to the 36V the wheels use.
All told, I am interested to see if this takes off enough for China to knock off one or both of these designs and get the price down to the $300 range.
Lol, that was bothering me too. I can't think of an excuse for having set up such a simple bike so poorly.
@Toby
Here in the Benelux (specially Holland and Belgium) there are a lot of bikes fitted with electric motors, and the better ones are those which replace the rear wheel. These offer better handling both for power and steering.
As for the batteries in wheels, I don't really see any perk but the aesthetic one. Separate batteries mean the wheel is lighter (which costs less power to get rolling), the fact that the batteries can be easy replaced when it wears out or just for a fas switch to a fresh one and the fact that the battery can be taken inside to charge (which is pretty important for a lot of my customers) or to prevent it from theft (the batteries are the most expensive part of the package). Also, using a mobile phone while riding your bicycle is just silly unless you have a specially designed holder which are usually not very nice to look at (especially the ones designed to hold every brand of phone), seems like a gimmicky option to me.
Can you send me links of such products which are similar to Copenhagen and Fly kly in china. I am unable to find one in China, even now !