Kickstarter: Vanhawks Valour, The Worlds First “Smart” Bike

Just plain dumb

Looks like whoever put that bike together has no idea how the lower bearing is supposed to sit in the frame. If the bike is designed to look hokey like that I’m sure it won’t sell.

What is it about bikes that make them such a target for sophomore industrial design students? Ones that pedal with the arches of their feet and look like they’ve never ridden a bike before?…oh hey look there’s one in the promo video! An urban bike at the very least needs fender mounts and a logical place to attach lights. Better still, rack mounts. It looks like these are missing. Also, I wouldn’t mind the convenience of, say, oh….brakes perhaps. Those come in handy occasionally.

@jimmy Read the kickstarter faq. They say it will allow you to mount rack and fenders, and brakes and integrated lights will be included.

I wonder if the sensors will ever be available as a standalone package
For my own bike build.

Future hipster dust collector for back of the shed. Don’t demonstrate a commuter bike without brakes.

@Gunnstein good luck fitting a fender into the 1mm gap afforded you adjacent to the seatstay. My point above is that an urban bike needs to be versatile. These ‘designers’ are concerned about integration and propriety – exactly the opposite of what someone needs to maintain a proper commuter. I applaud the effort but seriously – it looks like they thumbed through a magazine, saw a Pinarello Dogma and said ‘wouldn’t it be cool if…’. No, it’s not cool when I’m trying to fix a flat on my fixie and there’s no adjustable dropout and it’s raining and I have to get to work 15 minutes ago. When I have to plug my bike in just to get the lights to work, it sucks. Why the tight tolerances everywhere? I don’t get it.

Oh man, it’s always hilarious reading the complaining remarks of you old farts when faced with something new and different.

the designer is obviously not a cyclist, its a ‘hip’ commuter Wal-mart quality bike.

@jimmy “good luck fitting a fender into the 1mm gap afforded you adjacent to the seatstay” Dunno where you’re looking, but I see a 2-3 cm gap between the top of the tire and where the seat stays meet. The space on the side of the tire may be much much less but that’s hardly relevant. Does indeed look like at least racing/touring fenders will fit.

Since they say fenders and rack will be supported, I assume eyelets will be provided, even if they’re not in these pictures. (I would double check that if I were to buy this, of course.)

“When I have to plug my bike in just to get the lights to work” Again, reading the text tends to explain things. It has a hub dynamo, powering the gadgets and the lights. Perhaps the battery won’t last through a winter in the shed, but even on a flat battery you get lights as soon as you start rolling faster than walking speed, if their electronics are sensible. Nothing technical stops them from achieving that, anyway.

@Andrew
In the picture you linked, I’m not sure what you’re saying the issue with the spacers on the steerer is. Is it:

a) The excessive amount of spacers.
b) The apparent lack of a spacer between the top of the stem and the top cap (and the apparently bare steerer tube there – artistically reflecting the bare steerer tube just above the fork crown?)
c) The fact that (what appears to be) the cover/dustcap for the upper headset bearing being on an entirely different angle to the headset itself.
d) Oh God it’s all of the above please kill me.

As for the rear brake, I’m sure that having the pads grab the space between spokes provides far greater “bite”. Let’s just ignore the fact that it the mounting hardware itself seems to need 15 or so mm more thread before it actually does anything whatsoever.

And seeing as I’m feeling so generous, I’m going to assume that the seat tube design around the seat clamp is intentionally trying to teach people not to exceed the minimum extension recommendations of their seatposts.

@John couillard: La Machine has some nice points. I like the fat tires, the front rack being fixed to the frame, and the anti-theft solutions. OTOH the brakes should be disks or drums. Fenders curved around the tire are better than these flat ones. The tiny blinkie lights are useless in the dark, and there are no reflectors. Nobody’s perfect 🙂

I think I figured out the slammed seat in the above photos – it has no seat clamp. In the photo linked above you can see a piece of tube with a clamp on it – that is the seatclamp. Also, note the clearance around the BB. I hope the electronics rock because the bike part looks pretty atrotcious

@Andy novelty for the sake of novelty is pointless. What design students tend to lose sight of is that bicycles are very refined devices and tend to be built the way they are for sound engineering reasons. While this crew avoids such obvious faux pas as hubless wheels, single sided forks and frames made out plywood slabs they still miss a lot of functionality and basic bicycle mechanics while building a what is basically a hipster fixie with electronics.
Honestly you could get a better commuter by buying a Novara Gotham or its local equivalent and putting a Minoura smartphone mount on the handle bars.
I’m all for well thought out innovations like GPS bike computers, LED lights, good suspension, hydraulic brakes, tubeless tires and good cargo systems. My commuter has Flashiness and poor research and execution are just going to get slagged.

@Gunnstein – if you look closely at their video, you notice that it’s the same bike as the one shared via link here. The only difference is the lack of brakes and the lower steerer in the video version.

You can even see the seat clamp that someone commented about on both the pic and the video.

I do agree that tech advancements are good, but you have to question whether in fact they’re clueless because, besides the nifty tube shapes of the frame, the quality of the bike build is crap.

If you came to me asking for investment on a new bike and you can’t get the basics right, I would probably laugh and say no.

@Gunnstein: They are having success, which is a head scratcher for me, but you’re right on that.

My “gripe” is if they were selling the technology itself I would say “wow”, but they’re not. They’re selling a complete bike. Ok, I understand that the tech stuff was top priority since it’s what separates it from other bikes, but at the very least they should make sure the steerer/fork fits inside the head tube! It just screams laziness and lack of attention to details. You’re pitching a project that could make or break your company and you don’t even get a basic thing like that taken care of? Ok, you don’t know much about bike parts and such. Wouldn’t you at the very least run it by someone who does know about bicycles?

Maybe people are betting that the extra funding will fix these problems, but from what I’ve read and seen, it seems that this IS the frame.

Hopefully they’ve patented their tech stuff because I can see a big brand taking the idea and running with it. If that happens, good bye idea.

In the end, it’s just my opinion. Cheers.

@Gunnstein I’d be surprised if they’ve actually designed that frame. Looks like an open mould alibaba/ebay aero frame. They seem to have taken out the aero seat post and just jammed a regular seat post in there.

I dont think that is an off the rack frame – it´s too poorly designed. That BB height, tire clearance, and rear brake routing bear signs of being designed by a non-bike person.

So it’s a carbon bike with a fancy handlebar?

They made all their goals with a total backing of 820000 CAD… so those who were willing to risk it will get an all carbon frame, internal nuvi gearing, carbon belt drive and disk brakes on top of the electronics, and all this for 1249 CAD + shipping …