Full-size foldable eBike to launch via Kickstarter

Hi Mariano

I'm happy to take the 'don't get personal' admonishment, fair enough - oh, and welcome to the sceptical English-humour crucible of Road.cc, check your sensitive hipster side at the door

I care passionately about urban utility cycling and am therefore very critical of anything that I see as a distraction from the end game: to get more people on bikes in towns and cities. Products that don't cut it should be actively derided, as they can only do the cause of utility cycling harm by wasting uninformed people's money and leaving them disappointed. The Hovding airbag helmet is a classic bit of £400 nonsense that I and others rail against at every opportunity - because it's a tool others use to distract from the real aim of making urban cycling safer through infrastructure design.

Seriously guys, I'd love to test your design - and see if my concerns are valid in the real world. I commute 70 miles each way by train and bike into central London each day, where I trek about the place on Barclays hire bikes visiting folks for meetings. I ride 6,000km a year recreationally. I own a Workcycles FR8 - considered by many to be the ultimate urban utility transport machine. My background is in electrical engineering. So I think I've got the cred to do an honest review of an urban e-bike. I am not anti-e-bike at all - I see them as a critical way of getting an increasingly older generation out of cars, particularly in hilly or distant locations. South-West England is a prime candidate for a foldable e-bike as it's hilly and the peak-time London trains carrying 1500 people cannot hold more than 8 normal bikes. If the Gi can work here, on our trains, it's going to get ***lots*** of customers.

Feel free to send me a prototype to try for a month or week or whatever. I'll give you a totally honest appraisal of it. If it's broken in some way, I'll tell you. And If I think it's broken you should listen, because others will think so too and you won't sell many or have a nightmare of returns once in production. If it works as a utility transport bike I'll say so and tell the world.

Game on.

Off centre seat tube... I kinda like my seat tubes to be centred, makes pedalling a bit easier...is this a 'clown bike'?

cue the 'Big Top' music....

They class a mudguard as 'an accessory'? OK, that's 95% of the utility cycling population out then. No provision for skirt/coatguards. Because people *like* having their work clothes shredded.

And then, only for the rear. Because people's faces, legs and shoes somehow magically clean and dry themselves.

So what we have is a bike that doesn't fold up small at all (certainly not small enough, as others have pointed out, to go in a luggage rack or boot of a taxi or on a bus).

Plus is too heavy/unwieldy to carry.

Plus by the look of it will be near-impossible to wheel 'folded'. And looks like there isn't even a QR stem to flip the bars around.

Plus uses custom parts for pretty much everything. Good luck with maintenance.

Sorry, but any 'bike' where the spiel is reliant on a mobile phone for coolness?

Let me guess...based in San Francisco, right? (actually DC - it's a 202 area code in their press kit) Designed by 20-something bearded males who wear skinny jeans (right leg rolled up even though said jeans are basically mantights) and only ride 1.7km to their loft studio from their loft apartment in 10-20-degrees overcast-to-sunny weather, not carrying anything.

From their blog:

"The project is the result of a group of youngsters filling their needs. It’s come up after we realized that for 200 years, since the invention of bicycles, they haven’t radically evolved. We could change that. We have the ideas. We have the motivation!"

Yes. Because us 'youngsters' can do better than the sum total of the entire world's cycling design evolution over the last two centuries.

"Practical and lightweight, were some of concepts we dreamed of"

Dreamed of. Then woke up and gestated this impractical, heavy horror into existence.

"We didn’t create new technology. We just smashed it together in the best way possible"

Words_Fail.

...honestly, why don't these people just come to me first? I could have taken them on an afternoon trip to central Amsterdam. Showed them all the beautiful people having such a hard, impractical time of it on a design unchanged since 1911.

One thing that seems consistent with this sort of nonsense is that it tends to come out of places where utility cycling is anathema. The people behind it will probably never have lived/worked in a place where normal bikes get used normally by normal people. Hence for all their 'design' nouse they are blind to what normal people want/need.

Lots of folders aren't really suitable for taking on trains, including quiet a few of the models I see on my daily commute. However if you just need to make it compact enough to fit in a cupboard, or the boot of a car, this would be enough.

What would be more useful is mudguards and a luggage rack. And lights, so it has real transport utility.

it also won't be small enough for pretty much any trains that are "folding bikes only"

It might be foldable but you aren't going to lug it too far at almost 40 pounds