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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…
For this one it’s used as suspension (not carbon fiber)
Not that rare in old mountain bikes either, pretty sure my old steel 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.
I still showed that it’s perfectly possible to build a bike without a seat tube, hell I’m sure we can find 90s examples that weren’t high performance bikes.
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
This bike does not exist. This is part of a series of theoretical renders from what must be 15 to 20 years ago. When carbon fiber was kind of a new material to the general consumer. The premise was they could not only reduce the weight of the material but because carbon fiber was this space age super material that could melt your tits off if you looked at it sideways, that they could also reduce the need for structural materials like spokes and triangles. Making a featherweight racing bike. Most of the designs had absolutely no way to steer them.
I was gonna say, the frame just looks a little too outlandish, totally ignoring the wheels and headset.
Once in a while a bike comes along trying to reinvent the triangle but none are particularly good, often worse than tried and true. Superstrata Classic is a perfect example. Making a 2 triangle frame and adding just a hair of compliance around less-critical spots seems to be the winning formula
Nah, but that tube is a little lowered, enough to make a difference.
I’m picturing this being carbon fiber and the top tube snapping at the bend.
At compressing part of bend. If I remember correctly, carbon fibers are good at handling tensile loads and terrible at compression loads.
This guy does not engineer.
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.
Not revolutions; potholes.
That looks like it would be extremely unreliable and needlessly expensive to maintain. Maybe even impossible for the average person to maintain it
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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
I mean it does look cool.
Next time I have a bunch of extra cash to throw at a decorative art piece I’ll consider it
That’s because it’s not a bike. It’s a sales pitch to silicon valley. Like most tech startups, they want some rich VC dipshit or big tech company to throw millions of dollars at them.
Is it high-bitched electric buzz? If so, then it’s probably BLDC controller. Normal people use PMSM - more efficient and quieter.
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.
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.
I’ve started seeing magnetic suspension offered as a luxury option in nicer cars, wonder if it’s derived from that Bose system. I remember watching the demo from the 90s, mind-blowing.
Not the same sort of thing. Bose’s “magic carpet” suspension used linear electromagnetic drivers and sensors to move the suspension to compensate for the road conditions detected. They took speaker drivers on steroids and did noise cancellation on bumps and dips in the road.
Magneride and similar use an electromagnetic coil to adjust dampening by acting on a ferrofluid, which changes how hard or soft the suspension is. You want a stiff “sport” suspension, fluid is high viscosity and harder to move. You want a soft “comfort” suspension, the fluid is lower viscosity and moves easily.
For a heavily constrained system like a car’s shock absorbers, couldn’t permanent magnets be used instead of electromagnets?
I think the main advantage to fixed stiffness springs was that it was controllable. So if it was a fixed strength magnet the advantages over springs is likely limited compared to the cost. Magnetic suspension is cool because it’s an active suspension system.
I’m picturing a car crash where some poor sod is perforated by a super strong magnet that went flying
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
The designer said the bike really “spoke” to them.
I prefer bespoke bikes.
Eventually you’ll have to go custom for that
Company: how 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.
I’m learning a lot about how much money can be wrung out of rich idiots for some shaped aluminum and two tires.
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.
that is pretty much my impression about these bikes too. Bought for couple 10Ks, used twice.
Eh, I’m waiting until the seat is simply hovering in the air without any bars
Why do we need a seat when we can just Crazy Frog it
Can I at least keep my pants on or is the nudity required to make this work
Nudity is required, gotta see that wang
I’ll never forget the day I found out crazy frog was created in my city, it’s a weird mix of “god damn it” and “fuck yeah”.
How much do you charge for the service of throwing eggs at a particular house local to you?
Thanks, now it’s stuck in my head
Golden. 😂
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”.
I’d only ride this bike if it formed a wall of coloured light behind me as I rode
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.
😞
What is this bullshit? Bike in post makes more semse than this.
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 ?
I don’t know really
okay :-)
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?
that would have to be a 1 in 10000 chance…
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.
Fancy bearings.
just curious how strong would the fork have to be to handle the forces…
Fork aside, a bike wheel’s structure is based on supporting the load on the hub by hanging from the spokes at the top of the wheel. In order for that machine’s wheels to not fold in half the rim would have to be incredibly heavy and slow.
Now that you mention it… This doesn’t look like it would actually work once a human being is actually on it. All the weight is gonna be on the tires and the part holding (and presumably spinning) the tires. Also: What the hell are the pedals connected to?
There could be an internal chain between the pedals and the rear wheel, but that’s going to be a single speed and suuuuuck to ride.
Idk, hahaha. I mean the torque applied to the axle would be huge so either that shit is Adamantium or it breaks
Never mind how strong the thing itself is, that joint is basically impossible to engineer so that the wheel can’t rotate side to side. That is, rotate on an axis it’s not supposed to. Sure, you can prevent an (essentially) round thing from rotating with a pipe clamp, but now try to do that while allowing freedom lengthwise.
That wheels are round and not pipes help a bit, there’s some lever purchase you get from the radius but in general, nope. You’re still sitting at the short end of the lever.
Diamond frames with spoked wheels are literally the optimal solution to the problem the rest is compromise (e.g. having no top bar for comfort) or overengineering.
May as well be. Gotta dumb down all the other facets of society as it is
Not exactly dumbing down, I guess removing components which are redundant after redesigns
Highly depends on the use case. I doubt this type of construction would work with mountain bikes (or at all, honestly, since the design for this is very old by now and it clearly never went anywhere).
Well yeah, different bikes require different designs
Unless they’re two different bikes with the same design
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!
I dont know anything specific about this particular model but these are concepts that have been recycled. The drivetrain is some flavor of a direct drive, looks similar to a differential on a car. The wheels are basically spinning around a slightly smaller inner wheel that acts like a huge hub - probably with a layer of ball bearings in between. Something like that, I didn’t zoom in but thats generally how these things work (if at all).
