This wild chainless two-wheel drive eMTB goes from 0 to 25km/h in 9 seconds and climbs slopes of up to 25%
This wild chainless two-wheel drive eMTB goes from 0 to 25km/h in 9 seconds and climbs slopes of up to 25% | BikeRadar
The CIXI Heritage Chainless Altitude uses novel energy recovery unit to power a pair of hub motors
Without a chain I wouldn't call this a bicycle or eMTB anymore. It's a moped and a pretty slow one.
9 s for 0-25 km/h on an 8% incline? That's pitifully weak. My muscles are better than that and I'm not a sport freak.
It says it uses the pedals to do energy recovery but I wonder what that means when the battery is dead. Can the pedals provide enough electricity to move the bike without the battery?
Aside from that, there's no way that pedaling to generate electricity that drives an electric motor comes even close to the energy output of pedaling to directly generate physical force.
Converting human physical energy into electricity seems like it would only be beneficial for times when that electricity was being stored for later use, or put into a device that is not immediately using that electricity to generate physical force as an output, like a light or a phone.
Can the petals provide enough electricity to move the bike without the battery?
To me, this is the most important distinction between a true e-bike, and a dirtbike/motorcycle/moped pretending to be an e-bike to skirt regulations.
FWIW, this bike in single motor configuration is nearly 70lbs. LOL
With a peak power of 1,125W and 50Nm of torque, CIXI says the two-wheel drive offers improved acceleration and traction versus a traditional electric bike, accelerating from 0 to 25km/h in 9 seconds on an 8 per cent incline in its two-wheel drive configuration. This compares with 23.6 seconds with a single motor.
compared to 40Nm and 900W with one motor.
The 23.6 second figure is irking me, because it doesn't jive with the single motor supposedly peaking at 900 W and 40 Nm. Ostensibly the single motor is at the rear, so the suggestion is that the 17 second difference on an 8% grade is made up by tractive power on the front.
But this doesn't make sense to me, since taking their numbers at face value, the front motor adds 225 W and 10 Nm peak. Supposing that the dual motor config has identically sized motors -- and that's a big if since even 4WD automobiles don't necessarily use a 50/50 split for front and rear -- it must be that either the single motor test bike was skidding badly up the grade, or somehow 225 W can carry 17 seconds of performance.
Neither seems plausible to me. And I'm more likely to believe that they've nerfed the single motor model to make the dual motor model compare more favorably.
I guess they only took the front motor