Comment by cyberax
5 days ago
No physical address, no patents, no mentions of independent testing, the whole "drag&drop OS to build EVs".
Totally legit.
5 days ago
No physical address, no patents, no mentions of independent testing, the whole "drag&drop OS to build EVs".
Totally legit.
You can supposedly go see the bike at the Verge store at Westfield Valley Fair, 2855 Stevens Creek Blvd., Santa Clara, CA 95050-6709. That's a large mall near Apple HQ. Open until 9 PM. Someone in Silicon Valley should stop by on their way home today and take a picture.
You can't just pay $35,000 and ride it away, though. They're just taking pre-orders.
Still, at least you can go kick the tires and make sure it's not just a render on the web site. It's an overly clever design; the rear wheel is hubless.
A bit more info:
First, the bike is not new. It's been shipping since 2024, with a conventional battery pack.There are customers and reviews.[1] The "hubless" thing is less hubless than it looks. The rear wheel is the motor, with an outside moving rotor and an inside stator. The stator has a big hole in it. This gives you a large-diameter direct drive motor without dead weight in the center. It also opens up space in the frame to put the battery closer to the ground.
So this is really just an existing bike with a new battery. If they offered a test ride, you'd never know whether it was a solid state battery or not, since that's all about capacity and charging speed.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/first-ride-verge-ts-pro-electric...
Pretty sure we established several times over that hubless wheels are a solution in search of a problem - they don't make a bike better, they make it worse in almost every way except looks.
Yes, when I see hubless wheels, my immediate thought is, "why did they spend engineering time on this when their goal was completely unrelated to it?" It makes me think they needed a smokescreen.
More unsprung weight. Great!
Very attractive.
> take a picture.
I'd want to uninstall the battery, weigh it, and run a capacity test. I doubt that they will let me.
Any good way to visually establish whether the battery is solid state, however?
Probably not visually, you could poke a hole in it and see if there is liquid inside. X-ray imaging may be sufficient to differentiate from conventional cell designs.