The $46,000 push bike

[steve]

Electronic gears, sleek carbon-fibre body and optional carbon-fibre brakes. I'm sure Harrods will have a boom in bicycle sales with this thing!

View attachment 11707

Electronic gears, sleek carbon-fibre body, optional carbon-fibre brakes: they sound like car features but in fact they describe a very special bicycle.

British retailer Harrods is expected to soon stock the Factor 001, a super high-tech bike made by motorsport engineering company BERU f1systems.

For the equivalent of about $46,000, you get a bike that takes six engineers a week to build. There's hydraulic brakes integrated into the frame and a Shimano Di2 electronic gear shift.

The frame is also packed with load sensors, wiring, batteries and control cables that help the bike to collect up to 100 separate bits of ergonometric data—from skin temperature to respiration rate and humidity to individual leg power output.

The rider can later download these for analysis.

 

[Akadat]

Looks like the automobile computer chip has finally been transferred to the bicycle.

It will soon be commonplace and affordable instead of exotic.

 

[alienator]

Caron fiber makes for crappy brakes. Maybe they meant carbon-carbon brakes, which be what F1, MotoGP, and others have used. They provide stonking braking as long as they're kept hot. Cool or cold, they suck. So on a road bike, they'd suck.

Ergonometric? So, they're recording data on how the bike fits the rider? Collecting the physiological and performance data is cool.

 

[wheelerw]

I think it looks kind of ugly...