Making bikes smart and sexy is one of the best ways to get people back in the saddle improving health and drastically reducing transport inefficiency. Many attempts have been made at ‘rethinking’ the bicycle by literally thousands of designers and visionaries, but most of these are at best examples of rendering skills; it’s tough to improve 10 kilos of steel on two wheels.

That’s why an impressive collaboration between MIT’s senseable cities lab, Ducati motorcycles, and the city of Copenhagen has focused on a ‘bolt-on’ solution that is aimed at easing the commute. Basically The Copenhagen Wheel is an electric hub able to supply a boost of power for erasing hills, or overtaking grannies.

A five second search on the web results in hundreds of examples of electric hubs (many very nice, quality products) supplying anything from 300 to 1000watts of electric propulsion and cutting edge lithium-iron polymer batteries for sustained motoring; The Copenhagen Wheel is envisioned as something a bit different than these.

MIT has basically accepted some sacrifices in power and battery capacity so that the whole system could be contained in a smart sealed rear hub. In place of trying to reduce biking exertion to zero by increasing power, The Copenhagen Wheel is attempting an appeal to smarter commuting by equipping their hub with a number of sensors (including GPS and Bluetooth) designed to generate data for uploading to a graphical interface on the i-phone. The i-phone becomes an integral part of the commute, mapping traffic or path-of-least-resistance in addition to the possibility for data sharing with friends or city planners to help improve traffic. The i-phone becomes a small portable computer with a number of possible applications including locking the hub and warning of theft.

	Prototype MIT copenhagenwheel On the streets of CPH

Powering this hub is a scaled-down Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) also known as regenerative breaking; no recharging batteries for 4-8 hours a night from the wall socket. In fact you never see the batteries and don’t have to deal with wiring or bulky battery packs needing special mounting, the idea is smarter biking, not an electric vehicle that happens to also have pedals.

The design of The Copenhagen Wheel hub is also quite smart, the hub looks like it can be put in any wheel (albeit with some fancy spoke work) or maybe it will be available as a built wheel that just gets dropped in to instantly transform any would be bike commuter into a cutting edge i-phone pilot.

	closeup MIT copenhagenwheel drive side

	guts MIT copenhagenwheel battery packs?

Right now Copenhagen commune is considering offering (suggesting) gov’t workers use the new wheels in an effort to meet the cities 2025 CO2-neutral ambitions. An interesting idea to come out of the GPS capabilities of the wheel are “green miles” or the distance biking as recorded by the wheel, could be ‘monetized’ in some way to help nudge fence-sitters onto their bikes. Unfortunately you’d probably have to commute 200 kilometers a day to offset the projected cost of the wheel (no official price yet, but the rumor is about the same as other electric bikes; so 2000 euro?). Seems a bit pricey for an electric “assist” bike, unless maybe it comes with an i-phone.

Let’s hope that when The Copenhagen Wheel hits the market latter in 2010 it has come down in price a bit, because it looks like something I’d like to test out.