Best innovative thinking behind a e-assist design I’ve seen thus far.

e-fixie

Shoot me now please

@josh 190220 wrote:

Shoot me now please

@phog 190221 wrote:

The weight is a problem; with it pushing 30 pounds, you may have better results riding an exquisite, lively, lightweight $3,000 non e-bike than this $4000+ bike.

Hmm. I have no problem pushing around a 45 pound commuter “analogue” bike on a daily basis. Sure, I am slower on my commuter than on my sub 20-pound gravel race bike, but the point of a commuter bike (IMO) is to be a work horse, not a race horse.

Rule #5. HTFU. Ride the heavy bike. It only makes you faster on the lighter bike.

@jrenaut 190228 wrote:

I love it. The ridiculous $5000 super-niche bikes of today inspire the more reasonable bikes of tomorrow. And really, unless you live in a flat world, riding a fixie is finding the middle ground between “my knees are going to explode” downhill and “I literally can not advance this bicycle any further” uphill. Having a bit of boost means you can ride a taller gear without dying on the uphills.

If advances in ebikes get more people riding fixed, it’s a net gain for humanity

My annoyance with it lies more in the pseudo-advertising-copy. I really have my doubts that it’s actually a fixed gear, although I was unable to confirm or reject this suspicion looking at the article (only hint is that the article isn’t included in the “Fixies” category). I get that language changes, but using “fixie” or “fixed gear” to describe the aesthetics of something when it’s functionally very different still annoys me. One of the other bikes linked to in this article is described as a “stunningly minimalistic e-fixie” that has “fixie style” handlebars, but “the charge is obtained through an energy recovery sytsem, when going downhill or freewheeling”.

@bikesnick 190242 wrote:

“The Nua Electrica is the stealthiest single-speed e-bike we’ve seen to date …”

That’s because the truly stealthiest one cannot be seen.

It won’t work as advertised though. Justin LeMire Elmore posted on the Endless Sphere forum about regen on a ride around hilly Vancouver and got about 11% efficiency on a 7km ride with 10 stops and 77m of elevation change on average generating just 6.5wh or less than 1 wh/km. The Zehus motor in this ebike is a 28v motor with a 20a controller and a 6.8ah/190wh battery. Justin’s motor simulator doesn’t have a 28v motor example but for comparison sake a 24v motor with a 20a controller requiring 480w of peak power when climbing hills consumes about 6wh per km, so run all the time this bikes battery would be drained in 31.6km but even with this regen system keeping the motor turned off and only using it say 25% of the time will discharge the battery eventually as the motor consumes considerably more energy than you might get back using regen. If you like mostly pedalling and don’t want pedal assist just a throttle boost to get up hills a much less expensive option that would give you more torque push up hills would be to use something like a Hill Topper Ranger kit which uses a standard Bafang brand 36v geared front hub motor wheel and costs <$700 with battery. The Zehus motor is an all-in-one hub motor with controller, battery, and motor packed around the hub as in other similar designs like the Copenhagen wheel. They’re not very popular because the heat generated by the motor can fry the controller electronics and because of the limited battery range for the price but have some niche uses, eg folding bikes because there’s no wires strung through to get in the way when folding the frame. Montague use the Copenhagen wheel on their folding bikes in the US and the Zehus on the same bikes when sold in the EU. The fanciest looking ebike I’ve seen using the Zehus motor is the Coco-Mat Penelope made of ash wood.