This Revolutionary Chainless Concept Could be the World’s Most Efficient Bike
Unchain yourself.
Anyone who’s put serious mileage on a bike has surely experienced gear skips, slips, and other blood-boiling mechanical problems that accompany a chain and derailleur drivetrain. This revolutionary chainless bicycle does away with all of them.
Bike parts manufacturer CeramicSpeed partnered with University of Colorado’s Mechanical Engineering Department to create Driven, an advanced new drive shaft they say is the “world’s most efficient.”
The design halves the amount of friction generated by the market-leading chain and derailleur setup by eliminating eight different points of contact. The pinion-style system also utilizes 21 low-friction CeramicSpeed bearings that transfer torque seamlessly from the front ring through the drivetrain and onto the 13-speed cog.
The resulting product delivers an unprecedented 99 percent efficiency—and looks totally awesome to boot.
Popular Mechanics has further details on how Driven stacks up to other bike tech:
According to CeramicSpeed’s testing, that best-case chain and derailleur drivetrain is Shimano’s Dura Ace enhanced with CeramicSpeed’s Oversized Pulley Wheel System (OSPW), and the company’s UFO chain which returned about 98-percent efficiency (averaged across all gear combinations). A stock Dura Ace drivetrain returned about 97-percent efficiency.
According to the information provided by CeramicSpeed, this means that Driven has 32-percent less friction than the CeramicSpeed enhanced drivetrain, and 49-percent less friction than the stock Dura Ace drivetrain.
Though Driven is still in the prototype phase, it’s already earned the prestigious Eurobike Award in a competition that included 365 other entrants.
Hopefully it’s just a matter of time before you can give a Driven-equipped cycle a spin. Learn more from CeramicSpeed’s website.
h/t: Designboom
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