For those times when your old pedal bike isn’t quite fast enough on its own, a new invention by MIT could help you get the juice you need simply by switching out the back wheel. The ‘GreenWheel’ can make any bicycle electric with an estimated range of 25 miles. Pedaling the bike doubles the range under electric power, as long as you don’t travel at the nearly top speed of 30mph.
From The Discovery Channel:
“Just take the wheel off, put a GreenWheel equipped wheel on in its place, plug it in and it should work just fine,” said Ryan Chin, one of the GreenWheel designers. “The whole thing has been designed so all the parts except the throttle are enclosed in the wheel.”
From the outside, the GreenWheel has the radius of a small dinner plate and is about 2 inches thick. Inside the aluminum frame sits the three major GreenWheel components: an electric generator, batteries and an electric motor.
A GreenWheel equipped bike is a smooth ride, as Discovery News found out during a recent afternoon test ride around MIT’s campus. Turning the handle mounted throttle, like any motorcycle, just a few small degrees produces a noticeable increase in power and a light electric hum. The handle-mounted throttle is connected wirelessly to the electric motor in the wheel.
It’s also long-lasting and durable. Michael Chia-Liang Lin, a master’s student at MIT developing the GreenWheel, says you’ll have to replace your bike before needing to replace the batteries. The team estimates the GreenWheel’s range at about 40,000 miles – which adds up to about 20 miles a day, every business day, for 8 years.
The GreenWheel, though still in development stage, is already attracting a lot of attention. Copenhagen and South Africa have expressed interest in adding GreenWheel-equipped bikes to their public transportation systems in advance of the 2010 World Cup.
An exact cost hasn’t been determined yet, but Ryan Chin expects a privately purchased GreenWheel to cost several hundred dollars. Compare that to the $1,200 price tag of many other electric bike converters, which also require running wires to and from the battery to the handlebars. Better yet, the GreenWheel is made using environmentally friendly processes.
Link [Discovery Channel]
