Can a student design change the world? Absolutely, and the Copenhagen Wheel — a hybrid-electric wheel you can bolt onto almost any bike — might soon prove how fast that can happen.
Design recently talked with Christine Outram, who, as a graduate student, led the effort to bring the Copenhagen Wheel from a mere drawing to a full-blown working product.
The project started at the SENSEable City Lab at MIT, which usually collaborates with cities and telecoms and other places with extra data lying around, with the goal of creating a vision for the city in 15 years. The city of Copenhagen saw something called the Real-Time Rome , which used cell-phones and GPS monitors on busses to look at how people and public transport are interacting. So we agreed to take a look at Copenhagen, to see how technology could improve on the city.
Initially there were five students involved, including myself. That figure had actually plateaued some time ago. It comes down to distance, topography, safety, and infrastructure. Pretty early on, the idea of putting an electric wheel on a bike came about, because it could help put people on bikes that live further out or live below big hills. This was focused on choosing the batteries and the motor, and making the design real.
And when you pedal, there are sensors in the wheel that detect torque. So once the torque sensor detects a certain amount of exertion, it knows to supplement your pedaling. You brake by pushing back on the pedals, and much like a Toyota Prius, the motor converts the friction created into electricity, which charges the battery.
So these sit near the axle, in a fixed position. The spinning part of the wheel actually rotates around them. Finally, you choose how much assist you want through the iPhone interface. It seems like the real insight was creating a wheel that can attach to any bike. How did that idea come about? You can also turn the assist off, which I did just as a test. Finally, you can toggle it to resistance mode, which pedals against you for a serious workout.
A team was then spun off as Superpedestrian, a startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It started taking preorders way back in , but struggled for a while to get production right. It finally managed to deliver units to all its early backers in March of this year, and in May, it began taking orders from the public with a promise of delivery in two to three weeks. Superpedestrian offers 18 different frames from five different brands.
It also gives you the option to use the wheel for long trips and an ordinary tire for your average commute. My review unit included the bike and wheel. But Verge art director William Joel swapped out the wheel on his beater for a Copenhagen. After a few days of riding, he did run into an issue where the wheel seemed to be fighting against him, emitting a strange high-pitched whine when he pedaled hard. One of the nuts holding it in place had come loose. Will figured that out and repaired it within 20 minutes.
Still, your experience with assembly and repair will probably depend on your comfort with building and maintaining a bike. In my testing, the battery took between three and four hours to fully charge. In Standard mode I got 20 miles of range on a single charge — more on Eco mode, less on Turbo. The Copenhagen Wheel weighs 17 pounds, as much as some similarly priced bikes weigh in total.
Some electric bikes, like the VanMoof and the Evolo, distribute their motors and battery more widely throughout the frame. With the Copenhagen Wheel, all the weight is concentrated in the rear, making it more difficult to carry, and impossible to hang on a wall rack.
Aside from the weight, who is this bike for? You still get most of the experience of an ordinary bike ride. In fact, the best part of the experience, in my opinion, was how quickly your forgot about the fancy tech powering it.
Unless you know about the company, it looks like an ordinary bike with a fancy hubcap — and a surprisingly powerful rider. In the meantime I found the Canadian product BionX , which seemed like a high end product, so I decided to quit my day job and go all-in on a Danish dealership. Harry Bullitt cargobike. In other words, no matter how well designed a product is, there will be faults once in a while, but despite of this fact there is usually no hassle for the customer to get the part in question replaced.
In the case of electric bicycles, we are of course mainly talking about the motor and the battery. However, if there is a design flaw of some sort that causes a failure to occur at a statistical high probability, then the monster comes out. Here is how it starts: A customer has a motor that grinds to a halt due to a magnet getting loose. The customer gets a new motor.
The new motor grinds to a halt due to a magnet getting loose. Now, if this happens a third time, there is a very good chance we are dealing with a bad design. The monster is out. The customer now might claim a full refund, which the dealer then claims from the manufacturer, which takes the loss. It goes without saying that if these situations cross the timeline of warranty things can get ugly, because then the loss shifts from the manufacturer where loss is bad because it threatens its very existence to the dealer the frustrated middleman putting in hours nobody is paying for and further down to the customer who is not happy at all having spent the money in the first place.
But I got very good at identifying whether a flaw in a product was just bad luck or a design flaw. I tried other brands, but never came around to find a product that really had the quality that was needed for all parties to be happy.
When things got tight economically due to the hours I put in trying to fix the problems my customers had and trying to get the manufacturer to take broken parts back for refund that where out of warranty, I realized that I had 2 options: Either quit, or become a multi-brand dealer of complete e-bikes instead of only doing retrofit systems. The retail electric bikes on the market had, and still have, the mass produced systems from Bosch and the like, and some well proven Chinese systems.
But alongside the security of dealing with hardware of mass produced systems, there is the ruthless competitions among an ever growing number of dealers.
When the Copenhagen Wheel finally made it to market in , it was presented here on CleanTechnica by Nicolas Zart, and I had the good fortune to try it out myself at the first Danish dealer in It was a very pleasant experience, and I only had high praise for the product on all accounts.
The Copenhagen Wheel really is a joy to ride. Since then I have not thought much about it, because I have been diving deep into the high risk adventure of another personal mobility startup that is making the almost impossible jump from low volume to mass market while trying very hard to design products that do not have inherent high probability flaws, which would otherwise kill the company in an a very short time.
But then just the other day I was approached by a Copenhagen Wheel customer who was quite unhappy with the product, and with the way the manufacturer had dealt with the issues. Again, I will not takes sides here, but I recognize the frustration from both sides, and all I can do is urge all parties to exchange as much detailed information as possible in order to find a solution to the problems at hand.
I agreed to do this follow-up and reproduce the parts of the information given to me that I found relevant, in order to get some perspective on the matter. On the one hand, I have tremendous respect for any startup to even try to bring anything to market with the notorious risks it involves, but I also urge anyone who manufactures any physical appliance that ends up in the hands of everyday users to address any high probability more than 2 malfunctions immediately and find a fix for it so fast that the number of hours spent on the flawed design are minimized.
On the other hand, I have sympathy for the customer who spent a higher than average amount of money on a premium product, and the best that can happen to a loyal customer is to be met by swift action to remedy the problem, either by replacement or refund, regardless of warranty. However, I also think the customer has a responsibility to get acquainted with a brand before investing their hard earned money in it. A low volume, premium quality, superior functionality product is at risk of encountering problems no one could have anticipated.
The risk of failure grows exponentially for every extra degree of complexity. The only way to move forward in my opinion is to maintain respect for all parties in the domain of low volume products below maybe 50, units per year? And with that in mind, I give you an example of an owner of a Copenhagen Wheel who had various issues, and the response I got from Superpedestrian when I asked about some of the specific issues, and its strategy around the Copenhagen Wheel in general.
Unfortunately, myself and others have found that the company, Superpedestrian, has a very poor level of support for the wheel.
Further, many internal components of the wheel cannot be serviced, and the official response from support has been to buy a new wheel. For context, I bought the bike second-hand from the first owner via craigslist, so I understand that the warranty would not apply to me though other e-bike manufacturers do offer warranty transfer.
The bike and wheel were in excellent condition when I bought it, but I experienced lower-than-expected range right from the start. This is much lower than the 31 mile range on their website and in many reviews. I used the bike for my daily commute, including riding in light and medium rain. Within a month, the wheel developed a grinding noise on every rotation.
I found this example online of another customer who had a similar problem with the bearings, and also was told to buy a new wheel.
Also, I called 3 local bike shops listed as partners on their website about the issue, including the one where the bike was purchased. One said that they stopped supporting the wheel because the company was so unresponsive and hard to work with.
A second said the shop can only handle repairs to the spoke and rims. But for the price of the wheel, the low durability and poor support are big concerns.
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