The end of an era?

Imagine designing a bicycle without triangles. Every joint needs to be overbuilt, because there's no structure from the geometry. But you make sure it still has a top tube, so its just as hard to mount and dismount as a normal bike. Incredible!
- Right? Who would be crazy enough to do that?
  Next you're going to tell me someone will make one without a top tube?
  
  Hey, look here buddy. You can't be your own comment thread and post all the plausible responses yourself like that. You're putting all the trolls out of work.
  
  doesn't that prove their point? they all look overbuilt, as the original commenter said.
  
  That top one is kinda sexy ngl
  
  The meme shows only bikes with flat handlebars, like commuter bikes intended for transportation.
  Every bike you posted are high performance racing bikes with specialized aerodynamic handlebars.
  Different priorities. Triangless bikes with a top bar is not a good idea for commuter bicicles like the ones in the meme.
- Yeah why not keep the seat tube and delete the top tube?
  
  Compliance but this is a very very extreme example - you'd hit a bump and the top tube would flex, kinda like a diving board, and smooth out the harshness. I'm not even sure this bike exists but that would be the practical purpose of such a design, but most manufacturers tend to go after the seat stays (Salsa Warbird, Bianchi with Counterveil, Moots Routt YBB) or decouple the seat tube from the top tube and allow it to flex due to seat tube angle (Trek Isospeed). Carbon's kinda fickle and engineers are constantly trying to figure out how to finesse it into feeling less jarring and rigid
- I'm picturing this being carbon fiber and the top tube snapping at the bend.
  
  At compressing part of bend. If I remember correctly, carbon fibers are good at handling tensile loads and terrible at compression loads.
- Nah, but that tube is a little lowered, enough to make a difference.
- This guy does not engineer.
- Tube is not a line.

I wonder how many revolutions the wheels will do before they bend into pretzels.
- Also the pedals driving the outside of the back wheel puts a pretty heavy limit on the gear ratio
  
  Yeah no part of that looks fun to pedal
- No springs or shocks means however many it takes, it will be the most painful ass-blasting ride until they do.
  
  I mean not necessarily. Road bikes pretty much never have any actual suspension, all the comfort comes from tire and frame flex. This bike has some fairly chunky tires on, and the way the seat post is just suspended off the back I’ll bet that frame flexes a ton.
  That being said, you’d still have to fine tune the design, and get the right amount of flex in the right ways. I kinda doubt anyone choosing to make a bike like this would have the competency to do that
- Id put my money on the wheel mount failing because the whole wheel turns into a lever trying to break it every time it hits a bump.
- Not revolutions; potholes.

- Yup, that went well for Van Moof owners in the Netherlands. Also hipster bikes, the latest model turned out to be of dubious quality and was built using all custom parts. They had fun times getting their ridiculously overpriced bikes repaired after the company went belly up.
- It's so shit. There is a kickstarter of an ebike like that and it's worse than you van ever imagine. It's LOUD as fuck and worse in every way than a normal bike.
  
  Yeah but looks cool! /s
  
  That's because it's not a bike. It's a sales pitch to silicon valley. Like most tech startups, they want some rich VC dipshit or big tech company to throw millions of dollars at them.
  
  Is it high-bitched electric buzz? If so, then it's probably BLDC controller. Normal people use PMSM - more efficient and quieter.

This is the first step to having magnetic wheels become a thing. We know canonically Jim Kirk's motorcycle uses these, so it's definitely mainstream by ~2250.
Honorable mention: the Bell Riots happen September this year, and it seems we're on track for those too
- The technology is getting there. I forget which company did it, but one has developed an insane magnetic suspension system for automobiles.
  Right now the limiting factor is the energy required, so battery tech is the bottleneck.
  It's a real shame shipstones haven't been figured out yet.
  
  It was Bose. Yes, the premium sound system producers. It never went anywhere, despite being practical magic, because it added around 2,000lbs and cost six figures.
  They also developed a semi-tractor seat using the same sort of voodoo, which is on the aftermarket for around $5k installed.
  
  For a heavily constrained system like a car's shock absorbers, couldn't permanent magnets be used instead of electromagnets?
- Would it be hard to translate brushless motors into bikes/vehicles? Don't those things use magnetism?
  
  Oh I'm sure it'd be quite hard. But that's a future engineer's problem lol

The designer said the bike really "spoke" to them.
- I prefer bespoke bikes.
  
  Eventually you’ll have to go custom for that

Company: how can we convince out of shape tech bros to spend $10k on a bicycle?
- 10k? You buying second hand? You can easily spend $15k on a top tier bike these days.
  
  Dude I haven't ridden a bike in almost 30 years.
- Only 10k for full suspension futuristic looking bike, that's a bargain tbh :D
  
  You mean 0 suspension?
- that is pretty much my impression about these bikes too. Bought for couple 10Ks, used twice.

Eh, I'm waiting until the seat is simply hovering in the air without any bars
- Why do we need a seat when we can just Crazy Frog it
  
  Can I at least keep my pants on or is the nudity required to make this work
  
  I'll never forget the day I found out crazy frog was created in my city, it's a weird mix of "god damn it" and "fuck yeah".
  
  Thanks, now it's stuck in my head
  
  Golden. 😂

As far as I can tell, this product never panned out. It was backed by 132 people to cover 150k GBP in 2017. It was called the “Cyclotron Bike”.
- Neat (Piped)
  
  I'd only ride this bike if it formed a wall of coloured light behind me as I rode
  
  Wait, I'm confused. Does it have tires or is that just a big ring of plastic?
  
  What is this bullshit? Bike in post makes more semse than this.

The one in the drawing also doesn't have spokes though.
[edit] Don't reply I didn't notice the drawing was modified.
- Comments can be deleted.
  
  Sure they can but I always appreciate when someone owns up to their mistakes and leaves them. Pobody's nerfect and it's nice to see I'm not alone in making mistakes.
  
  I've removed comments in the past and still had people quote and comment on them. Maybe it's a thing between different instances.

i never realized until this moment that the meme showed them putting a stick in the wheels. i always thought they just happened to fall off.
- Pretty brave to admit that.
  
  There's power in anonymity.
- then what did you think the point of the meme was ?
  
  I don't know really
  
  One of today's 10000?
  https://xkcd.com/1053/
- You know there's a relavent XKCD.
  
  Then send it

Me on that bike: ah, muddy dirt road, my arc nemesis. And what's that? a random pile of dog poop, my day's ruiner.

Fancy bearings.

just curious how strong would the fork have to be to handle the forces...
- Fork aside, a bike wheel's structure is based on supporting the load on the hub by hanging from the spokes at the top of the wheel. In order for that machine's wheels to not fold in half the rim would have to be incredibly heavy and slow.
- Now that you mention it... This doesn't look like it would actually work once a human being is actually on it. All the weight is gonna be on the tires and the part holding (and presumably spinning) the tires. Also: What the hell are the pedals connected to?
  
  There could be an internal chain between the pedals and the rear wheel, but that's going to be a single speed and suuuuuck to ride.
  
  Idk, hahaha. I mean the torque applied to the axle would be huge so either that shit is Adamantium or it breaks
- Never mind how strong the thing itself is, that joint is basically impossible to engineer so that the wheel can't rotate side to side. That is, rotate on an axis it's not supposed to. Sure, you can prevent an (essentially) round thing from rotating with a pipe clamp, but now try to do that while allowing freedom lengthwise.
  That wheels are round and not pipes help a bit, there's some lever purchase you get from the radius but in general, nope. You're still sitting at the short end of the lever.
  Diamond frames with spoked wheels are literally the optimal solution to the problem the rest is compromise (e.g. having no top bar for comfort) or overengineering.

May as well be. Gotta dumb down all the other facets of society as it is
- Not exactly dumbing down, I guess removing components which are redundant after redesigns
  
  Highly depends on the use case. I doubt this type of construction would work with mountain bikes (or at all, honestly, since the design for this is very old by now and it clearly never went anywhere).

The wheels are apparently really really loud when they are mounted like this. You just can make good enough ball bearings of this size at any reasonable cost and weight

The coolest looking concept bike ever created.
Lemmings: hold my beer while I list every complaint I can think of about this design
- My first complaint is that it looks like it was designed by someone with zero knowledge of how to make a bike.

Yeah why do we need another bicycle?
Also how does peddling move the wheels...? Missing something.
- Peddling never moves the wheels.
  
  Peddle to the Metal
- I dont know anything specific about this particular model but these are concepts that have been recycled. The drivetrain is some flavor of a direct drive, looks similar to a differential on a car. The wheels are basically spinning around a slightly smaller inner wheel that acts like a huge hub - probably with a layer of ball bearings in between. Something like that, I didn't zoom in but thats generally how these things work (if at all).

You could also cover the spokes or use a spokeless single wall design. I do think a design like this would need to be cleaned a lot.

Is this an AI bicycle or a Dyson bicycle?
- I suppose either way it sucks.
  
  Dyson also makes hand dryers.
  They blow.
  
  And very very expensive.

Ok, maybe with a magnetic linear drive?

Is there any regime where this is more efficient than spokes? I'd imagine that at high speed there's an aerodynamic advantage (possibly similar to a track/TT disk wheel?), but I can't imagine the bearings being better than current bikes. But bearing loss might (???) just scale linear with speed, so probably a win from aero in the end. But this isn't counting weight, which I imagine is worse (but doesn't matter much at high speed on flat ground).
- Is looking cool important?
  
  In cycling? Super duper important.
  
  Broke: How many times will I need to repair this bike over a lifetime of ownership?
  Woke: How many people will stare at me as I'm biking?
  Bespoke: How many times will this bike get me laid?
  
  Yes. The answer to that is yes. Especially for a render

The complexity of this design cannot be outspoken.

Nah; you just have to jam the stick through the tire itself so it gets caught at the part that is spinning the wheel.

Needs blue or orange neon lights

I don't think this will work on the long run.
First, the hold on the rim must be very tight and precise or the wheel will wobble like mad.
Second, such a tight hold will be very sensitive to any kind of dirt, so it has to be sealed.
Any seal tight enough to keep extremely small dirt out will cause loads of friction.
Tight seals in general is not an option, they exist en masse with e.g. hydraulic cylinders. But for them, the friction is basically a non-issue in comparison to the overall power budget. But I cannot imagine an even halfway free wheeling wheel that will not break down after getting in contact with a bit of sand.

People who buy these things deserve poverty.
- I thought it looked neat.
  :-|
  
  They totally look neat, but functionally, they would suck as bicycles (at least with current technology)