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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

> Regarding efficiency

Air resistance is the main factor only if you’re not actively stopping/restarting/braking as needed. In urban or semi-urban courses adjusting speed and stopping at red lights is par for the course.

Also efficiency is really about effort. 95% is low for a bike, but even taking a 10% difference compared to the chainless one: for the effort you’d put to ride 10km with a chain, you’ll only be around 9km chainless.

As you say it might not matter if you’re only going for groceries at 1 or 2km of your home. That’s a different story if you use it to commute or plan on longer trips (now it could be seen as a handicap to get more exercise depending on the target customer)

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People merrily put up with inefficient bikes for all sorts of reasons. If the only objective was to get between two points with minimal energy expenditure, everyone would be riding road bikes. Clearly other factors come into play.

I have a track bike that's light as a feather, a cyclocross bike rigged with single rear derailed that's barely heavier, and a dutch style city bike that weighs like 4x the track bike. Guess which one gets ridden the most?

I don't know. Which do you put your toddler on when you need to go shopping?

I think that was the point

Why, the single gear of course :D

The current trend is to get away from mechanical simplicity to have electric engines cover for these inefficiencies.

So, yes, people do care and want solutions to these trade-offs, and the current landscape already has decent answers to these concerns. IMO this chainless one would need to prove itself to be a lot better on some other dimension than pure maintenance.

Belt drives are very appealing on a pure maintenance basis. They seem worse on almost other dimension except possibly lower risk of a chainring tattoo (though perhaps I'm missing something).

Extra weight from the batteries and electronics could be a bigger efficiency issue.

Durability would be my bigger concern.

Perhaps this would be a good fit for something like an electrified velomobile.

I think it could in theory be more reliable and require less maintenance than a traditional drivetrain, but it's definitely going to be 7-10% less efficient than a good chain system.

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