Copenhagen Wheel

I wanted to begin with an optimistic environmental design: the Copenhagen Wheel of 2014. In this post you will find a detailed design evaluation for Copenhagen Wheel. 

Created by MIT's SENSEable Labs this product (the rear wheel with a red ellipsoid hub in the picture) is called the Copenhagen Wheel. It is on sale since two months by SuperPedestrian and its basic price (for single gear bikes) is 699 $ + shipping.

Unlike electrical bikes, Copenhagen Wheel is not designed as a replacement for human effort in cycling. It is rather -and strictly- an assistance or the way designers promote it: a boost. It assists the cyclist by putting additional power via its electrical motor whenever needed. The level of assistance can be pre-determined by the cyclist offering a boost for example when bike is uphill on a steep slope: It saves you energy and time. It is rechargeable and offers inherent environmental benefits.

I live in Finland, so winter is tough time for cycling but otherwise, I cycle quite often. Motive behind my love towards cycling is that I burn calories, let's be a bit healthier right? Therefore I am not very convinced with electrical bikes at all. But hey! I can also understand all those people who commute to work and back to home in large cities... There you really need a boost. It would also make me happier if I could spend half the energy on Monday mornings while going to work. I can also imagine if you were living in a  hilly city, where biking would be a bit on the extreme side when going to work.

This is one good design aspect Copenhagen Wheel offers: Even on a hill, the wheel assists you so that you only spend a fraction of the physical power as if the hill is not there at all.

Copenhagen Wheel is really easy to use. No additional parts are needed, you just replace the rear wheel of your bike. While cycling you can sync your urban cycling experience with a smartphone, but wheel will run and assist you without smartphone also. Your bike will not lose any simplicity, and cycling experience will stay intact. The wheel's red hub is powered by a series of batteries and includes a motor and sensors. In my opinion, besides of  ease of use there are two more quite strong design aspect for Copenhagen Wheel:

(1) Under average conditions, one battery cycle has a range of 50 km which is pretty good. And one battery can last its high capacity performance for 1 000 cycles. After 1 000 charges battery capacity drops to 70 % of the original. The battery life strictly depends on the level of assistance and the terrain's slope. If the cyclist prefers high assistance level within hilly city, battery life and range can be as low as one-third of the average figures. But even then, a 15 000 km range for one battery is a pretty good figure. It operates in all weather conditions, which can be considered as a long-life product with great durability.

(2) Motion battery-recharging is performed with two mechanisms. One is the classical method where you spent extra physical energy to pump the battery some life. This is up to the cyclist (a.k.a. exercise mode). The designers' motto is "no sweat", and they decided to leave this decision to the consumer. Other motion battery-recharge mechanism is innovative (a.k.a. regenerative breaking). Regenerative breaking uses the inertia and friction and recharges the batteries. So, when you hit the break, you recharge the batteries for a short time without spending any physical energy of your own. Very novel way to recharge a battery. Recharging works when you cycle/break downhill, so that batteries can recover at least some portion of what they spent assisting you uphill.

However, these strong design points are also restrictions for this novel product. Efficiency of regenerative breaking is debatable and quite conditional. For one example, logically you could have the highest regenerative power input when you break hard in a steep downhill. Depending on the level of assistance you picked you may end up recovering around 60-70% of what was spent in uphill in best case scenario. If you picked high level assistance during uphill then downhill recharging recovery may be only around 20-30% of what was spent.

Besides, regenerative breaking also restricts the product's global target audience. I have never been to Copenhagen, but I have lived in the Netherlands for two years. And I am very sure regenerative breaking will not work there as the designers originally intended. A country's biking culture is important as well as its topology. Netherlands is an absolutely flat country with great bike lanes and networks with millions of people commuting by bike everyday. And during rush-hour you never-ever hit the break in Netherlands. You avoid breaking as much as possible. If you cannot do that, then you are already in a bike jam, and your speed is not above 10 km/h where neither a boost nor regenerative recharging will help at all. So unavoidable question comes to mind:

"While designers gave the decision to sweat or not up to the cyclist, why not give the decision to pick a product with or without regenerative break property?"

A basic version without regenerative break would lead to a less expensive product, increasing the target audience and resulting wider bike usage as the designers intended.

There are other drawbacks, such as weight of the product, or the safety/theft concerns, or available size of the wheels and how it will perform for multiple gear bikes. Although these are easily solvable in near future within next product generations, currently they still have minor negative impact on the target audience, product life time and ease of use.

Overall Copenhagen Wheel is a great idea and a good design, and I support the designers who are involved. As a product, it requires fine tuning and an additional perspective from a more global window. Despite its needs for improvement, it still has a very high overall score because of its very low carbon-print (only one-tenth of a car during its 50 000 km life time with one battery) and high durability.

Product details can be found in the below links:

SENSEable Labs, MIT

SuperPedestrian 

I hope you enjoyed the post and have a better understanding of the Copenhagen Wheel. Either you are an interested cyclist or a tech-developer, please consider that scores are based on product facts advertised by the producer and they do not originate from real-time experience and tests.

If you have any questions regarding to evaluation and the product itself please feel free to comment. Also it could be great to hear a real-life experience from anyone who had the chance to use the Copenhagen Wheel.

Enjoy!