Asus Bike Booster

Did you mean hub gears or hub motors?

The Copenhagen had an ungeared hub motor. Comparing it to other hub motors, theirs was only IPX4-rated, which is basically splash-proof, not waterproof. Decent hub motors are IPX5 or 6.

On top of that, when your hub motor leaks and bearings seize up, fixing it is typically simple and cheap. Pop in a new bearing and new seals and you're done. Most bike shops can do it. With the Copenhagen Wheel, the manufacturer's advice was to throw it away.

The waterproofing rating seems to have been a design decision they made to simplify the design, keep costs down, etc. Since it all had to be custom, they couldn't benefit from the decades of experience, millions of units manufactured, and standardization that hub motor companies like Bafang or Bosch rely on.

See the page about it by the company that actually designed the wheel: https://www.mistywest.com/posts/project/copenhagen-wheel/ :

> "MistyWest had to work around the constraints posed by fitting a heat sensitive component next to a heat generation component in a closed system that allows for very little heat dissipation. The engineering team’s understanding of thermal physics enabled a stable battery system to be designed and adopted for the smart wheel. The inventors of the wheel were the first to ever fit a motor and a power source into a fitted bicycle wheel."

It was a challenging level of complexity. Even if they'd had more funding and stuck with the product, it's hard to see how they would have made it efficiently repairable.

It seems to me that the fundamental issue is that almost every other design is preferable from an engineering perspective. The only attraction of the Copenhagen Wheel was that it made for a quick and easy drop-in upgrade. But at the $1500 price it sold for, you can now buy a whole, much better ebike.

(As for hub gears, they're sealed and filled with oil, grease, or traction fluid, which helps keep water out.)

I think there are many other and better things to try than the repeated failure of trying to catch and punish crimes even more harshly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load

Have you ever ridden a bike with a geared derailleur, and forgotten to shift into low gear at an intersection, or had to suddenly stop before you had a chance to shift into low gear, so it's more difficult getting started again?

Did you notice how it's impossible to shift while you're stopped, and how tricky it is to get it from high back into low while you're starting, especially up hill, and how you can't shift while you're applying force, so you have to push yourself forward instead of pedaling to get it rolling enough to downshift while gently pedaling without accelerating?

A continuous hub fixes those problems, and an automatic transmission shifts you into low when you stop (even if you're not moving), and smoothly and continuously shifts back up while you're accelerating, and the continuous hub allows you to apply power while it's shifting (note I didn't say "changing gears" -- it's continuous, and doesn't have gears. It has planets and fluid instead. It can shift while it's stopped, and accelerate while it's shifting.

You have a lot more important things to worry about when you're accelerating from a stop at a busy intersection than pushing off and shifting without applying acceleration and only pedaling forcefully once you've finished shifting into low gear.

If you're riding a bakfiets (cargo bike) with your kids and a dog in the box, then you definitely have things you need to worry about more than shifting gears, and because of the mass and precious cargo, it's even more important to be able to accelerate from a stop without performing a derailleur dance in the middle of a busy intersection.

It's a trick you have to learn just like using the parking break when starting a manual transmission car facing up hill. Manual transmissions have a much higher cognitive load in both cars and bikes.

This kind of stuff should be intuitive if you've ever ridden a bike with more than one gear, or driven a stick shift car. Sure it gives you "more control", but more control = higher cognative load, and you're probably not a NASCAR race car driver who needs to optimize for control.

It's all explained here:

https://enviolo.com/products/

The Enviolo stepless CVP technology explained:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xY2S-9gjHI

Is enviolo the best internally geared hub for eBikes?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vob5Rb4IKsw

He talks about shifting when you're stopped at 2:32.