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It Took $6.7 Million to Build the World's Worst e-Bike: Hubless, Over-Engineered, Unsafe
(www.autoevolution.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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micromobility - Bikes, scooters, boards: Whatever floats your goat, this is micromobility
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Every so often, somebody gets the hubless wheel bug. It's like history repeating on a shorter timeline and a smaller scale than, say, geopolitics. Someone thinks they can radically improve on the spoked pneumatic bicycle wheel. And it's always utter garbage, a horrible choice of form over function.
"But improvements in materials engineering will make hubless wheels a reality one day!" Maybe, and those same engineering improvements will also apply to spoked pneumatic wheels. Moreover, those improvements will get applied and tested there first.
"These folks are thinking outside the box and innovating!" No, they are failing at engineering 101: don't reinvent the wheel, in this case literally. The key innovation here was duping others into paying for known, failed garbage like hubless wheels.
Please, for your own safety and your wallet's sake, don't ever fall for the hubless wheels. It's the perpetual motion scam of the bicycle world.
as a prototype warts and all this is awesome...
as a product its shit no wins just all garbage
They've been using them to some degree of success in some motorcycles, but I'm definitely not buying one even if it does kinda look cool.
Just because it functions doesn't translate to engineering success. This is form over function and sits only in the domain of niche/boutique motorcycle builders. If there were any advantages other than aesthetics, you'd see hubless wheels in competition motorcycles, e.g. MotoGP.
A hubless wheel will always be inferior to an equivalent hubbed wheel, especially in a use case such as motorcycles. In order to make the wheel strong enough for the task, the rim must be heavier than it would be for a wheel with spokes. This unnecessarily increases rotational mass in the worst possible place: at the outermost points of the wheel. This also means more unsprung mass. More energy is required for accelerating and braking the wheel. And because the hubless wheel will always be heavier, the suspension will be less responsive than if the wheel had a hub. The linkage from suspension to the wheel must also be more robust and more complex.
And this is ignoring the additional complexities of transferring power to and from the wheel, and angular/radial/lateral forces and shocks. How does one efficiently brake a hubless wheel while limiting brake fade?
These are only a few points to consider every single time you see someone trying to sell a hubless wheel.
I wouldn't buy one, but for the sake of a counter-argument: Hubs have been around for a long time and have had many refinements over the years. Many of the flaws that the hubless design suffers from might very well be mitigated through further development over the next hundred years or so. Still, I prefer the repairability, practicality, and reliability of a wheel with spokes as well.
Sure, additional refinement could make hubless wheels a reasonable reality. I'll reiterate one of my original points: all engineering advancements that would make a better hubless wheel would also improve the already great hubbed wheel. Even if we could ignore the complexities of going hubless, the radially supported wheel will be stronger, lighter, simpler, less expensive, more aerodynamic, more repairable.
I might be getting a bit esoteric here, but the same conversations come up in software engineering. "Advances in computing will make Ruby more performant." Sure, but those advances will be multiplicative in already-performant languages such as C, C++, and Go, whereas they will be fractional in Ruby.