Clever idea, but I wish they would put this much thought & problem-solving effort into their bikes themselves. Their bikes have an auto-shifting system with hub gearing that is very prone to breaking. On a normal bike to avoid putting unnecessary strain on the drivetrain you learn to not shift under heavy load, in the middle of a heavy pedal stroke. With a bike that just decides to shift on its own you have no control over that so it will inevitably sometimes shift at the worst time. I don't understand how that design even makes it past the whiteboard stage, much less into the production product that has been shipping for years.
I guess maybe it's a fine bike for riding the bike paths of Amsterdam which is very flat, if you're very careful to never pedal hard and always let the motor do all the work. But in a more chaotic environment riding on the roads in a place that has hills, it's unusable. I had to return my bike after the shifting broke twice within a couple of weeks, and the internet is full of many, many stories from people with the same issue.
Google is sponsoring employees to lease Vanmoof S3 and X3. Anecdotally I've seen a huge increase in the number of S3 owners in the south bay area. I'm leasing the X3 myself.
I also agree on the auto shifting. I'm an experienced cyclist and own a number of bikes and do regular weekend rides in the mountains. The auto shifting on vanmoof bikes is absolutely awful for me and caused horrible janky shifts while I was putting torque through the system. The gearing is also all wrong, since the cadence is way too low in most gears and at the top speed. Thankfully vanmoof added manual shifting into a fairly recent update.
But on the other hand, my non cyclist wife loves auto shifting. She rarely puts power into the pedals and likes the low cadence for easy cruising. She just uses the turbo button whenever she wants to accelerate. So it's clearly designed for flat roads and easy riding for non cyclists.
If the gearing range is universally too high for the kind of riding you do, you can get any bike shop to swap the rear cassette to a larger one, or the front chain ring(s) to smaller ones. The chain may need to be shortened.
If there's auto shifting there's a computer somewhere, and so you'd think a firmware update that made it so that it wouldn't auto-shift under heavy load could be applied (call it semi-auto mode or something); then you could leave it in auto but if you wanted it to shift when pushing hard just let off the pedals a bit and it'd do so.
Only if it has the sensors for it. There's a decent chance it just has a cheaper cadence sensor on the pedals, not a torque sensor or other way to tell if you are pushing hard.
I can’t speak for VanMoof but the Bosch ebike motors definitely have a torque sensor (+), and my old Douze had one, too. You can’t do proportional assist without a torque sensor. I would consider it probable that VanMoof has one, too.
Nope, Van Moof uses a cheaper cadence sensor not a torque sensor. Bosch ebike motors are amazing and a huge step up, but bikes that use them generally sell for $5000+ and the Van Moof S3/X3 are half that price.
Hmm I would have thought it had the equivalent of regenerative braking and could detect how much "power" you were creating, but ... it seems that's not how it's designed.
Regenerative braking on bikes is a bit harder than it is on cars - you can’t easily combine regenerative braking with a freewheel - if the rider stops pedaling that‘s not a sufficiently good signal to start regenerative braking. With cars, the signal is there - the driver stops depressing the accelerator.
Additionally, with middle motors (which most ebikes today have), you‘d need to have the chain run continuously to transfer the power from the wheel back to the motor, and you likely could not do that with a derailleur shifting setup.
That said, I‘ve seen (but not tested) one model that had regenerative braking, so that does (or at least used to) exist.
I can see the middle motor problem (though the company here claims to have solved it by using a front motor instead) - but there is a signal available to the bike; the brakes themselves.
I'm not sure that cars even begin regenerative braking until you actually hit the brakes as opposed to just letting off the accelerator.
The electric cars I have tried all started regenerative braking when you let go of the accelerator. As an additional problem for bikes: they are rear-wheel drive and the primary braking power comes from the front wheel for normal bikes (load distribution shift to the front when braking). Cargo bikes and tandems are a bit of an exception here. I’m not saying it’s impossible - as I wrote above I know it exists. It’s just a lot of effort for comparatively little gain, and so it’s pretty rare.
I think that's the main thing - the amount of energy lost by bringing a bike to a stop is nothing compared to that of bringing a car to a stop from 60 MPH.
And they're probably better off just adding a generator in-line with the pedals (in fact, I'm surprised these things have "direct drive" at all and aren't just a generator on the pedals with a wire to a motor on the front/rear hub).
> But in a more chaotic environment riding on the roads in a place that has hills, it's unusable
I ride my vanmoof in Seattle (very hilly and urban) and to say the auto-shift is "unusable" is a huge exaggeration IMO. It occasionally catches me out when I'm pedaling hard but for the most part it works OK.
The manual shifting is a big improvement at least, I didn't realize it was officially supported. Back when I had the bike almost 2 years ago there was the 3rd party Moofer app that supported it but Van Moof the company was very adamant that even installing this app would void your warranty. Which was another decision that makes me feel negatively towards the company overall.
I guess maybe it's a fine bike for riding the bike paths of Amsterdam which is very flat, if you're very careful to never pedal hard and always let the motor do all the work. But in a more chaotic environment riding on the roads in a place that has hills, it's unusable. I had to return my bike after the shifting broke twice within a couple of weeks, and the internet is full of many, many stories from people with the same issue.