Want to ride an e-bike? No batteries needed! • FRANCE 24 English

[Raboa]

 

[saneagle]

That's nothing new. You can't store enough charge in supercapacitors to be of any real use at the moment, so all you have is a heavier bike that's harder to pedal because of the weight and the drag from the direct drive motor. It's great in theory, but rubbish in practice. The capacitors would need about ten times the capacity and stay at the same weight before that idea becomes useful.

 

[matthewslack]

All the energy seen by the motor is coming from the rider, just not in real time. It time-shifts the demands on the rider to even out peaks and troughs.

It'll take the edge off the effort of going uphill, but rather inefficiently as deployed energy has gone through many energy conversion processes from leg effort via chain, gears in the motor, motor as generator, capacitor charging and reverse processes back to assistance effort.

Not the holy grail, which would be a sub-kg low power, high efficiency at climbing speed, zero drag when not assisting, uphill assistance only, motor and energy store.

 

[thelarkbox]

I seem to recall an old Tom Stanton Youtube with a supercap powered ebike that debunked the idea pretty convincingly.

 

[saneagle]

I seem to recall an old Tom Stanton Youtube with a supercap powered ebike that debunked the idea pretty convincingly.

Correct. His array was about the same size as that bike, and it got him about 100 meters of range.

 

[guerney]

Can't wait for unbiased reviews. This thing is useless for long hill climbs, and as such I prophesy the next version will feature a small rechargeable battery, with larger batteries as options, if not I reckon this company will sink without a trace in all countries not of near optical flatness. Hasn't the inventor ever visited a forum? Aren't all forums filled with people worried or complaining about how their ebikes won't or can't enable them to easily climb hills? Perhaps he was counting on some huge advancement in supercapacitor technology occurring.

 

[Bikes4two]

I think the vid has been published early and was meant for release on 1st April .

Somewhere in that vid the inventor says something about an ebike that 'you shouldn't have to recharge it'.

So even as a basic principle if you are getting power somewhere in the ride to assist then you must have put an equivalent amount of effort in at some other time/part of the ride, and given no enegy conversion system is 100% efficient then surely you'll be working harder overall and especially so when hauling a bank of supercaps around.

I'm all for recharging systems and coffee and cake works well for me and certainly assists my rides.

 

[saneagle]

Can't wait for unbiased reviews. This thing is useless for long hill climbs, and as such I prophesy the next version will feature a small rechargeable battery, with larger batteries as options, if not I reckon this company will sink without a trace in all countries not of near optical flatness. Hasn't the inventor ever visited a forum? Aren't all forums filled with people worried or complaining about how their ebikes won't or can't enable them to easily climb hills? Perhaps he was counting on some huge advancement in supercapacitor technology occurring.

Correct. They could have fitted a small lipo battery, which would have had 1/4 the weight, many times more range and a fraction of the cost. There have been many attempts at self-charging ebikes before. They all flopped because owners hated them. The concept is fundamentally flawed. People want to use external energy to make pedalling easier, not to pedal harder so that they can create external energy.