Turn Your Bike into an Electric Hybrid with MIT’s “Copenhagen Wheel”

Bonaverde’s “Roast-Grind-Brew Cof­fee Machine” seemed like one of the cool­er inven­tions I’ve recent­ly stum­bled upon. But then I came across this: The Copen­hagen Wheel. Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed by researchers at MIT, the Copen­hagen Wheel “trans­forms ordi­nary bicy­cles quick­ly into hybrid e‑bikes.” It allows bike rid­ers to “cap­ture the ener­gy dis­si­pat­ed while cycling and brak­ing and save it for when you need a bit of a boost” — like climb­ing a hill in San Fran­cis­co. The wheel also feeds data to your iPhone, allow­ing you to mon­i­tor pol­lu­tion lev­els, traf­fic con­ges­tion, and road con­di­tions in real-time. After spend­ing sev­er­al years in devel­op­ment, the wheel can now be pre-ordered online and it will ship next spring. It retails for $699.

Get more back­ground infor­ma­tion on The Copen­hagen Wheel via this MIT web site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Design­ers of the Invis­i­ble Bike Hel­met Describe Their Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Prod­uct in Short Doc­u­men­tary

Sci­ence Behind the Bike: Four Videos from the Open Uni­ver­si­ty on the Eve of the Tour de France

Brus­sels Express: The Per­ils of Cycling in Europe’s Most Con­gest­ed City

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

The Physics of the Bike

 


by | Permalink | Comments (5) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (5)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Dellu says:

    putting motor into it?? that los­es the great­est virtues (points) of bikes…another project to fat­ten up Amer­i­cans

  • Lmos says:

    Andy Botwin’s idea! (Weeds)

  • andy says:

    Its a shame that in a city like Lon­don, the gov­ern­ment does­n’t do enough to pro­tect and sup­port city cycling as it should. There is way too much pol­i­tics involved in some­thing that should be main­stream by now. Look at Copen­hagen and Ams­ter­dam com­pared to Lon­don. They have been much more bike friend­ly for a lot longer. All these kind of tech­nolo­gies can only be allowed to flour­ish if motorised vehi­cles are pro­gres­sive­ly phased out in city cen­tres and cycling is allowed to take over. The head of the Met Police in Lon­don recent­ly said that he thought peo­ple only cycled because they could­n’t afford pub­lic trans­port- that is the kind of thing we deal with in Lon­don. And when cyclists die on the streets its the cyclist’s fault not the dri­vers, so they put more police on the streets to penalise the cyclists- its ridicu­lous.

  • Lorraine tickelton says:

    Hel­lo how much is the Copen­hagen wheel please
    And do you need the size of my present bike wheel?
    Thank you

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.